Harnessing Growth Poles for Poverty Reduction and Climate Resilience in Zambia

Zambia is increasingly exposed to climate-related shocks, particularly droughts and floods, which continue to undermine agricultural productivity, household welfare, and long-term development. In response, geographically concentrated investments – referred to as growth poles – have been promoted as engines of pro-poor growth and resilience. However, evidence of their effectiveness is limited. This study examines whether and how growth poles contribute to poverty reduction and climate resilience using a mixed-methods approach that combines nationally representative spatial data from Living Conditions Monitoring Surveys, panel data on poverty trajectories from the Rural and Agricultural Livelihood Survey, and qualitative evidence from focus group discussions, life histories, and key informant interviews conducted across selected growth pole districts, including including farm blocks, mining areas, national parks, and sugar estates.

The findings show that growth poles can stimulate economic activity and generate new livelihood opportunities, but their impacts are uneven and context-specific. Agro-industrial growth poles, particularly sugar estates, exhibit the strongest poverty outcomes due to deeper integration with local production systems and labour markets. Mining areas generate significant economic dynamism and employment opportunities, but benefits are uneven, often accruing to individuals with higher skills, capital, or social connections, including migrants. In contrast, farm blocks and national parks show persistently high poverty levels, reflecting limited infrastructure, restricted access to productive resources, and the seasonal or unstable nature of available opportunities.

Proximity to growth poles does not automatically translate into improved welfare. Only a small share of households live close to these investments, and poverty remains high even among nearby communities. In some cases, households located in intermediate zones (21–60km from growth poles) exhibit better poverty outcomes than those closest to growth poles, suggesting that spillover benefits – such as improved market access – extend beyond core investment areas while avoiding congestion and rising living costs. Growth poles contribute to livelihood diversification, which is a key pathway to resilience. Households engaged in non-farm employment, enterprise activities, and diversified income portfolios are better able to cope with climatic shocks. However, the resilience benefits of diversification depend on the quality and stability of these opportunities. In many cases, growth pole-linked employment is informal, low paid, and seasonal, limiting its ability to provide sustained protection against shocks.

A central finding is that growth poles generate selective rather than broad-based welfare gains. Households with greater amounts of assets, more education, and more developed social networks are better positioned to benefit from employment, contracts, and supply opportunities. As a result, growth poles contribute to localised economic transformation while reinforcing socioeconomic differentiation. Importantly, households that do not benefit are not necessarily worse off than before, but experience more limited gains relative to others, reflecting uneven inclusion rather than absolute decline. The study also finds that growth poles do not automatically enhance climate resilience. In some contexts, particularly mining aeras and farm blocks, resilience has declined over time due to unstable livelihoods, continued reliance on climate-sensitive agriculture, and structural constraints such as limited land access and weak market integration.

Policy implications emphasise the need for complementary interventions. Strengthening household asset bases is critical for enabling participation in growth pole economies and enhancing resilience. Improving access to appropriately structured finance – particularly for productive investment – can support livelihood upgrading, though grant-based support remains necessary for poorer households. Promoting diversification must be accompanied by efforts to improve the quality and stability of non-farm employment. Strengthening local participation in supply chains is essential to ensure that growth pole demand benefits surrounding communities. Finally, extending investments beyond core growth pole areas can enhance spillover benefits and support more inclusive regional development.

Overall, growth poles have the potential to contribute to poverty reduction and climate resilience, but only when they are supported by policies that expand access to opportunities and address underlying structural inequalities. Without such measures, their benefits are likely to remain localised and uneven.

Authors: Mary Lubungu, Benny Kabwela, Brian Mulenga, Richard Bwalya, Arthur Moonga

System Strengthening for Climate Resilience

Zambia experienced a severe drought characterised by a record-breaking dry spell from January to March 2024 (Zambia Society Trust 2024; WFP 2024a). The drought affected eight out of Zambia’s ten provinces, with the greatest impact in Southern, Central, Eastern, North-Western, Western, and Lusaka Provinces (Figure 1). Reports suggest that the drought during the 2023/24 agricultural season was the worst in 40 years (DMMU 2024 OCHA 2024; WFP 2024; Mwape et al. 2025), placing millions of households at heightened risk of hunger and destitution. The drought’s ripple effects (WFP 2024b; ACAPS 2025) included: crop and livestock losses; food shortages; reduced water supply; outbreaks of cholera and diarrhoea tied to diminished access to clean water; and widespread and frequent load shedding and energy shortages lasting well into 2025. Furthermore, the drought had macro-economic effects (including inflation, and reduced growth, revenues, and debt repayment capacity), and potentially political effects in the sense that the upcoming election in August 2026 may be influenced by perceptions on how the government handled the drought response.

Authors: Jeremy Allouche, Bridget Bwalya, Richard Bwalya, Vidya Diwakar, Felix Kalaba, Lukonga Luwabelwa, Arthur Moonga, Kate Pruce, Andrew Shepherd, and Marja Hinfelaar

Poverty in Polycrisis

We are living in a period of global volatility in which intersecting crises are combining with devastating impacts for people already living in and near poverty. This book carefully examines the dynamics of these crises and challenges us to find new ways forward for policies and programming that more effectively meet the needs of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The book highlights lived experiences of those who are impacted most by poverty amidst intersecting crises—namely climate-related disasters, violent conflict and economic instability— drawing on the author’s 15 years of experience in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. It examines chronic poverty amidst intersecting crises, highlighting how new impoverishment may emerge, and even surprisingly how some people manage to escape or remain out of poverty in these contexts. It offers a multi-scalar, dynamic investigation of poverty and intersecting crises to identify ways forward for policies and programming.

It is an essential read for practitioners working on poverty and inequality reduction in low- and middle-income countries, as well as for researchers and students of global development, environmental and peace studies, and economics, public policy, and sociology more broadly.

Written by Vidya Diwakar, IDS Research Fellow and CPAN Deputy Director

Transforming Climate and Socioeconomic Resilience among Poor and Vulnerable Rural and Urban Households in Zambia

Front cover of policy brief

Zambia faces a dual challenge of persistent poverty and escalating climate risks, particularly droughts and floods, which increasingly disrupt livelihoods, infrastructure, and macroeconomic stability. This policy brief synthesises findings from a comprehensive policy and programme analysis examining how national frameworks address climate adaptation, disaster risk management, and social protection. The analysis indicates that Zambia has developed a robust policy architecture anchored in Vision 2030, the Eighth National Development Plan, and the National Adaptation Plan. However, systemic gapsremain in financing, coordination, data integration, and implementation effectiveness.

Resilience (defined here as the capacity of households to recover from shocks) is typically achieved by households at high levels of welfare. The key question is how policies and public action can help households at lower levels of welfare to achieve higher degrees of resilience.

While notable progress has been achieved through institutional reforms, early warning systems, climate-smart agriculture initiatives, and digital social registries, resilience investments are fragmented and predominantly donor driven. The transition from reactive crisis response towards anticipatory, risk-informed governance is underway but incomplete. Rural populations remain highly exposed due to reliance on rain-fed agriculture and natural resources, while urban vulnerabilities are rising, with rapid informal settlement growth and infrastructure deficits.

This brief proposes consolidating existing frameworks into a national resilience strategy, supported by predictable financing, integrated data systems, greater capacity at local level, and strengthened accountability mechanisms. Embedding resilience within fiscal policy, incentivising private sector engagement, and enhancing subnational and, especially, community-level (first responder) implementation capacity are central to achieving sustainable outcomes.

Authors: Bridget Bwalya, Richard Bwalya, Vidya Diwakar, Felix Kalaba, Lukonga Luwabelwa, Arthur Moonga, Kate Pruce, Andrew Shepherd, and Marja Hinfelaar. Reviewed by Herrick Mwewa, Ministry of Green Economy, Republic of Zambia.

What is the Evidence on System Strengthening for Building Climate Resilience in Eastern and Southern Africa?

This literature review summarises evidence on system strengthening for climate resilience, focusing on evidence and lessons learned for eastern and southern Africa. It synthesises key findings from academic and grey literature published since 2015, highlighting what has worked to strengthen national policy, governance, coordination, and financing systems, and explored evidence on programming in key sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure, financial inclusion, social protection, and health. Mirroring the wide remit, this review has found a broad literature, but limited in-depth research overall looking from policy intent and programme design to system-strengthening outcomes for climate resilience in this region.

Two key priorities for strengthening systems that emerge from reading across the literature include integrating climate adaptation with disaster risk management for coherent policy, and promoting equity-focused approaches. The evidence on policy, governance, and coordination emphasises the pivotal role of ministries of finance and platforms to enable coordinated action across government, and resourced decentralisation. The literature also highlights that local civil society organisations, public–private partnerships, and regional cooperation all have roles in strengthening climate-resilient systems. Across the sectoral evidence, critical enablers include investing in participatory and locally led approaches; valuing indigenous knowledge; providing tailored support for marginalised farmers; and ensuring system-strengthening efforts incorporate a gender and social inclusion lens.

Author: Becky Carter, Researcher, IDS

Click here to read the literature review

National Report - Zambian Poverty Dynamics and Climate Resilience: A Growing Policy Agenda Through a Period of Crises

This report synthesises the key research findings of the Zambia Poverty Dynamics programme since the last national report in 2021, whose key findings and recommendations are summarised in Box 1.1. Many dimensions have remained the same; however, the main changes include: (1) a dramatic reversal in urban poverty reduction; (2) a very significant increase in new policy developments, especially in human development, although not yet in ‘growth from below’, but significant progress was achieved in fisheries with the return of fishing ban periods each year on major rivers and lakes to allow fish stocks to recover, laying the foundation for income growth in fishing.

This report starts by laying out which policy interventions have become significantly more visible and impactful since the last report, presenting the evidence from quantitative and qualitative research, and focusing on governance and implementation issues. Policy interventions are even more critical to poverty reduction and climate resilience in the Zambian context, it is argued, because of the ‘enclave’ nature of the dominant mining sector, which leads economic growth, at least when commodity prices are high (Pijuan Sala and Tudela Pye 2024), and which the current government wishes to grow rapidly. The majority of Zambians are employed or self-employed in comparatively low-productivity sectors, agriculture and services, which are generally disconnected from mining and other formal sectors such as tourism. Resulting high levels of inequality do not generate the market demand for micro- and small businesses’ outputs and services, leaving these with low investment and productivity. But they do generate the need and potential for redistribution through taxation, even if fiscal resources are for the moment heavily constrained by debt servicing.

As a result of these high inequalities, growth has not carried everyone with it. Therefore, only interventions will assist poor and vulnerable people to improve their life chances, until the pattern of growth changes and begins to make a contribution. So far the most successful interventions have been in human development. Their success has been extremely valuable but has not yet laid the foundations for more inclusive growth from below, which is necessary if poverty is to be sustainably reduced. Both of these – human development and growth from below – are required to enable sustained escapes from poverty or ‘graduations’, which are the objective of anti-poverty policy.

The report goes on to briefly assess the effects of the multiple crises that have assailed Zambia in the past five years, with an analysis of impacts on urban populations, and differentiating between extremely poor and moderately poor households, and men- and women-headed households. It also looks at policy responses to these crises, including disaster risk management, and raises the question of how to respond in the likely event that such crisis-prone times continue. This is followed by a closely related discussion on whether and how more widespread resilience to climate change might be achieved. The analysis is gendered throughout, and concludes with key policy and programming recommendations.

Authored by Andrew Shepherd, Richard Bwalya, Antony Chapoto, Lucia da Corta, Marta Eichsteller, Vidya Diwakar, Marja Hinfelaar, Mary Lubungu, Arthur Moonga, Brian Mulenga, Kate Pruce, Joseph Simbaya

Click here to read the full National Report