Reports
The report analyses policies and trends surrounding the perceived growing poverty problem in Zimbabwe. Different aspects of poverty are elaborated such as demographic factors, land ownership and economic reform.
The second ZHDR produced in 1998 focused on the Provision of Basic Social Services and showed that the provision, access and use of basic social services in Zambia was inadequate and that the state of the basic services such as education, health, water and sanitation had sharply deteriorated.
The Report brought out the highly deteriorated state of the social sectors and the inadequacy in the provision, access and use of basic social services. The impact of such inadequacy was particularly felt in the rural areas where 55% of the population is illiterate compared with 27% in the urban areas. Only 52% of households had access to health facilities within a 5-kilometer distance compared with 100% in urban areas and only 27% of households had access to safe water compared with 85% in urban areas.
Besides rural-urban inequality, the Report also highlighted other forms of inequality that exist, based on income, gender and geographic locations in terms of centrality. The Report supplemented the 1997 Human Development Index and Human Poverty Index calculations with calculations of the Gender Empowerment measure (GEM) and the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IAHDI). It was noted that while the HDI value had marginally improved between 1990 and 1996, the IAHDI had declined during the same period, clearly demonstrating the impact of inequality on human development in Zambia. The report also calculated a new Index of Participation (IoP) that measures the changes in the levels of peoples’ participation over time. This index is shown to have declined between 1990/91 and 1995/96.
The report focuses mainly on rural poverty eradication since poverty in Uganda is largely a rural phenomenon. The emphasis is on empowerment, in both the political and economic sense of the word.
The country’s first report focuses on the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on the new South Africa and its potential to reverse recent gains in human development. The main message is one of hope that the further spread of the epidemic can be contained if national leadership combined with the active participation of people living with HIV/AIDs and all other civil society and public service partners channel their resources to fight the scourge. The report highlights the fact that, with South Africa’s history of social mobilization against the apartheid system, it could equally address and overcome the threat of HIV and AIDS.
