by Pamela Nakamba-Kabaso and Caesar Cheelo

The buzzword around Africa this month (September) is China!

Earlier in the month, Chinese President Xi Jinping made an impressive and generous offer of US$60 billion in financial support to African countries over the next three years. Since then the African continent cannot stop talking about China.

By Caesar Cheelo

In the aftermath of the 2017 Budget Speech that was read on 11th November 2016, ZIPAR observed that that budget was well-linked to "Zambia Plus", the medium-term economic recovery programme that was later termed the Economic Stabilisation and Growth Programme (ESGP).

Finance Minister Hon. Felix Mutati is tomorrow expected to deliver the Government’s Budget Speech for 2018. Being the second year of implementing the Economic Stabilisation and Growth Programme (ESGP), the measures in the 2018 Budget are likely to aim at consolidating the measures that were put in place in the 2017 Budget. Key among these is enhancing domestic resource mobilisation especially in the absence of an Extended Credit Facility deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Zambia needs radical education sector reforms. The quality of education and skills development will determine if the children who are aged 0-10 years old today will become globally competitive workers and captains of industry when they are 33-43 years old in 2050.

By Felix Mwenge

The 2015 Living Conditions Monitoring Survey report has revealed that the gap between the rich and the poor in Zambia is widening. Zambia’s Gini coefficient now stands at 0.69 up from 0.60 in 2010; much higher than the African average of approximately 0.43.

"This interview originally appeared on the On Think Tanks website, which can be found here: http://onthinktanks.org/

By Daniel Boyco

[Editor's note: This is an On Think Tanks interview with the Executive Director of the Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis and Research – ZIPAR, Pamela Kabaso, on why impact & influence requires more relevance and how to deal with one of the loneliest jobs in the world – being director of a think tank. It was conducted by Will Paxton, co-Director of Kivu International.]