[Zambia] ...urged to fight poverty

from News 24 South Africa

Poverty and Aids are a big challenge to Zambia's economic growth prospects, says the World Bank on Wednesday.

Briefing journalists in Lusaka, visiting bank executive director for Group 1 Africa, Mathias Sinamenye, urged the country to accelerate its growth in order to cut widespread poverty and HIV/Aids.

Sinamenye said that now that Zambia had stabilised its fragile economy, the country needed to boost investment and create a good climate for investment to achieve higher growth.

He said agriculture and tourism were key in driving the poor southern African economy to higher growth.

Intervention programmes

The executive director, whose portfolio comprised 21 African countries, said Aids remained the region's single largest development challenge and urged countries to take ownership of intervention programmes and initiatives to fight the killer disease.

He said: "The World Bank is ready and committed to help countries fight Aids, but it can only help, implementation is up to the governments."

Zambia, the recipient of a $42m Aids grant from the World Bank, had one of the largest HIV/Aids prevalence rates in sub- Saharan Africa at 16% of the adult population aged between 15 and 49 years.

The disease also accounted for more than three-quarters of the 1.2 million orphaned and vulnerable children on the streets and had cut adult mortality to 37 years.

Child-headed households

The pandemic had also affected critical areas of production and increased the number of child-headed households and general household poverty.

Zambia's government in an effort to scale up access to treatment offered free anti-retroviral drugs in all public health institutions in a plan to get an estimated 150 000 people on Aids drugs by the end of 2006.

Zambia was this July to join the selected group of countries to receive debt forgiveness under the Multilateral Donor Debt Initiative, a G8-sponsored initiative to provide debt relief to some of the world's poorest countries.

Channeling resources saved from servicing foreign debt towards improving health services and combating widespread disease like Aids and malaria was among the conditions set for this debt relief.