Previous: Gender ||Table Of Contents|| Next: Climate & Drought

POVERTY

Poverty covers a wide range of deprivations affecting people and involves lack of knowledge, denial of opportunities for a creative and productive life, social exclusion, lack of freedom and deprivation of income and health services. Within the basin states, income distribution is highly skewed with the richest 20 percent of the people in most countries owning a larger portion of the national income. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe have extreme income inequalities while Tanzania and Zambia have relatively less income inequality although poverty levels are high.

Poverty among the people of the basin states is due to rapid population growth, slow economic growth and a fragile natural resource base. Uneven distribution of resources is also one of the major causes of population pressure that ultimately causes poverty. Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe are implementing economic Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) that are resulting in massive job losses, increasing poverty levels and pressure on the environment.

Poverty and environmental degradation are linked in a vicious circle in which poor people cannot afford to take proper care of the environment since they have no alternative but to use environmental resources unsustainably for their basic survival. Forests are being decimated at unprecedented rates, faster than that of natural regeneration, resulting in environmental problems. People become more vulnerable, both socially and economically, because degraded environments are producing less resources.

Access to resources
Water resources

The majority of the people in the basin states have no access to safe water, sanitation and health services. For example, between 1990-96, only 27 percent of Zambia's population had access to safe water. In Malawi, only 16 percent of the population had access to sanitation in the same period.

Land

A common trend in the basin is that the majority of the people have less or no access to arable land. Often access to land is through inheritance, allocation and purchase that follow patriarchal lines. Land tenure is one of the major constraints to proper land-use and conservation in the basin in which three systems of land ownership are distinct: small-scale communal farms, small to large-scale commercial farms and state land.

Debt

Linked to poverty and environmental degradation is the issue of debt servicing for many of the countries in the Zambezi Basin. Foreign debt continues to rise, at least doubling in most countries in SADC between 1980-93. In some cases, the debt burden increased by three or even six times during that period. In 1995, Mozambique's total external debt was US$5.8 billion, representing 444 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP). Its debt service ratio was 35 percent.

Some countries in the basin have Asevere external indebtedness and extreme aid dependence. Poor external debt management and inadequate debt relief means that for some of the countries, indebtedness will continue to be a problem for macroeconomic stability".

Structural adjustment programmes, although widely touted as the answer to most problems of the region, have contributed to the increased vulnerability of both the urban and rural poor. Thousands of breadwinners who, in the past could afford to maintain both urban and rural homes, are now unemployed, increasing household vulnerability.

The World Bank, one of the institutions, which has prescribed economic structural adjustment programmes (ESAP) for many developing countries, including some basin states, recently acknowledged that such programmes exacerbate poverty. In Zimbabwe, for example, the standard of living has declined for many, particularly urban households, with the percentage of households classified as poor rising from 40 percent in 1991 to over 60 percent in 1995.

Top