Zambia’s demographic dividend dilemma, collective future or private privilege?
ZAMBIA stands at a demographic and developmental crossroads. Successive surveys show that our population is young. This youthful population is both an opportunity and a ticking time bomb. If well nurtured, it could power a demographic dividend that lifts growth. If neglected, it could deepen unemployment, exclusion, and instability. Yet our current trajectory is troubling. Continued emphasis on privatisation and widening inequality in access to health, education, and other social goods threaten to squander this potential. Realising inclusive prosperity requires deliberate, collective investment in essential public goods, including healthcare, education, water, and civic infrastructure. Below, I discuss the dynamics and implications of this critical moment for Zambia’s future.
Beyond the dividend
The demographic dividend rests on a shift in the age structure, where dependents decline and the working age population rises, creating a window of economic opportunity. That opportunity is not automatic. It depends on healthy, educated, and productively engaged youth, supported by policies that invest in their potential, and that do so equitably. The Zambian picture is disheartening.
According to the 2022 Census, the youth population has increased from 2010. There has also been increased migration of people aged 15 to 24 to Lusaka and the Copperbelt in search of economic opportunities. Lusaka, in particular, is attracting large numbers of young people. Unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 stood at 9.9 percent in 2024, slightly above the world average of 9.75 percent, and it reaches 25.2 percent among those aged 20 to 24. The burden falls disproportionately on young women, who face higher barriers to formal employment. At the same time, fertility remains persistently high. The 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey shows that fertility rises from 118 births per 1,000 women in the 15 to 19 age group to a peak of 175 per 1,000 among women aged 25 to 29, with higher rates in rural areas than in urban ones. About 28 percent of adolescent girls reported having had a pregnancy at the time of the survey. These statistics have serious implications for planning and development. High fertility constrains educational attainment and labour market participation, turning potential advantage into missed opportunities.
The infrastructure of citizenship under strain
The provision of basic social services has become a race for privilege, where the right to a dignified life is increasingly determined by one’s capacity to pay or one’s position in the labour market, a pattern social policy scholars call commodification. This logic of marketisation is most visible in access to water. National averages, often presented as progress, conceal a harsher truth, almost half of Zambia’s population still lacks adequate access to basic water services. We live with a geography of inequality, reliable clean and safe water for those in formal neighbourhoods, erratic or unsafe supply for those in inner city settlements or on the margins of urban areas. The ongoing energy crisis has, in some ways, made this divide more visible. Load shedding has brought exclusion to the doorsteps of the better off, yet years of public disinvestment and donor supported projects have, paradoxically, widened the gulf between the adequately served and the neglected.
The rural story remains one of neglect, visible during those occasional visits that romanticise the countryside and it’s ‘village chicken’ without addressing its deficits. Meanwhile, evidence from local authorities shows that urban centres are not performing as assumed. Urban Zambia is increasingly fragmented. Access to employment, housing, and municipal services follows the pattern of privilege. In the meantime, the urban poor, whose proportion has grown, are not a uniform group. They are diverse households bound by shared precarity. Informal settlements, now the default destination for many urban residents and new migrants, combine spatial exclusion with economic vulnerability. While policy rhetoric often frames these areas temporary deviations from the planned city, they are in fact, its structural underside, the byproduct of a development model that privileges infrastructure development over social care. We see roads, malls, and estates, but rarely a sustained conversation about social services. It is as though those who are planning our cities know the cost of everything but not the value of anything.
The roots of this crisis are not particularly difficult to discern. Rapid urbanisation, unmatched by inclusive planning, has inflated housing demand and pushed formal shelter out of reach for most newcomers. The expansion of the tertiary education sector, celebrated as progress, has fueled urban congestion without foresight for accommodation, sanitation, or transport. Universities have mushroomed, drawing thousands of young people into cities already straining under infrastructure and service deficits. No corresponding policy apparatus has emerged to manage their integration. In typical capitalist fashion, boarding houses have proliferated near campuses, but without any discussion or investment in the services that make urban life dignified.
As a result, informal settlements now house an estimated 70 percent of the urban population. These are not merely zones of poverty. They are spaces of systematic neglect, excluded from networks of social amenities. Without formal water and sewage connections, refuse management, or adequate health centres, these settlements are structurally predisposed to crisis. Public health emergencies, cholera outbreaks, and recurring waterborne diseases are not aberrations, they are the predictable outcomes of institutional failure.
Health makes the moral fracture within this architecture most visible. National indicators show improvements in maternal and child mortality, but such aggregates blur deep cleavages between those who can pay for quality care and those left to endure a collapsing public system. Health services are quietly bifurcating into two tiers, one resembling a private enclave of excellence, the other a skeletal network where shortages of drugs, staff, and equipment are routine. This is not mere administrative inefficiency, it is an erosion of the social contract, the state’s commitment to safeguard the welfare of its citizens and if I must point out the obvious, the enduring legacy of austerity. In the early days of privatisation, paying a large bill at a private hospital usually guaranteed treatment. FORTUNATELY, now, even after paying, a patient may be offloaded to UTH when complications arise. Unfortunately, it may not always be in time.
A research participant in Ndola captured this injustice. He was prescribed three essential medicines and could afford only two. The third, priced above ZMW 1,000, remained beyond reach. His frustration was not only with illness, but with the indignity of begging from friends and relatives for a cure that should have been guaranteed by the state. “In the end,” he said, “I could not raise enough, so I did not buy it.” His experience is emblematic of a nation where the ability to heal depends on one’s wallet, not one’s citizenship. This commodification of health departs from Zambia’s humanist foundations. It reflects a political economy that celebrates growth indices while neglecting the bodies that must sustain that growth. Health is not residual, it is productive capital, the primary resource upon which other forms of value depend. Yet our productivity frameworks remain detached from the wellbeing of the workforce. How can a nation in poor health compete economically. A state that treats health as a consumer good, rather than a collective entitlement, mortgages its future for the illusion of fiscal prudence.
A future at risk
The most visceral concern in any sober discussion of the demographic dividend is perhaps, the growing crisis of substance abuse among young people. The dividend assumes a healthy, skilled, and socially integrated cohort. Current evidence points to different outcomes. In the past three months, for example, I have encountered two cases in which children were assaulted by peers under the influence of intoxicating substances. One victim, an eight year old boy in Kabanana, required five stitches to his head. Of course we should be moved by his suffering, but we should also be troubled by the condition of his assailants, young people sliding into addiction and violence in full view of indifferent systems.
This is not a marginal problem. It reveals failures of child protection and youth policy at the centre of our national narrative. Chronic underfunding of statutory services has hollowed out early intervention, rehabilitation, and family support. Disinvestment in public recreation, including sports facilities, youth clubs, and arts spaces, has removed the everyday infrastructure that gives adolescents safe routines, mentors, and meaning. In the vacuum that followed, drugs circulate, disputes escalate, and children are harmed. A country that expects productivity gains while neglecting the health, safety, and socialisation of its children and youth is not preparing for a dividend, it is incubating preventable harm. Well, since we like to ask what the solutions are. Based on my analysis, it appears that the solution involves an abandonment of the marketisation of social services. We must direct funding to statutory child protection, rebuild community recreation and youth work at scale, and link these to school, health, and policing systems so that prevention, referral, and rehabilitation are real, coordinated pathways, not slogans.
Recent work of mine on mental health and learning among primary school children shows that the classroom is carrying more than lessons. Beyond shortages of teachers and the overcrowding that has followed free education, many pupils face significant psychosocial strain. Some act as deputy parents, they earn income to keep households afloat, and they often arrive at school without food. These burdens are not meant to be carried by children, yet they shape attention, behaviour, and attainment in ways teachers alone cannot remedy.
The implication is significant. We speak confidently about a digital future, yet the evidence points to a difficult horizon if we continue disinvesting in the very people who must build it. Internet connectivity and technological devices cannot compensate for hungry children, untreated anxiety, and the absence of basic family support. Unless we stabilise food security for learners in our schools, expand school linked psychosocial services, and restore child and social protection, we will later on wonder what we used our population for. A growing population is a blessing for the reasons I have set out here, yet it requires harnessing. Investing in human capital is the precondition for any credible productivity agenda. Zambia must pivot away from its obsessive privatization of social services and toward a shared future built on public investment, civic solidarity, and cooperative development. That is how a youthful population is transformed from potential into prosperity.
