City Of Lusaka Research Articles

Developmental assessment, cultural context, gender, and schooling in Zambia

Multiple perspectives on the assessment of children's development at the school-community interface in rural areas of Zambia are discussed in the light of several empirical studies conducted between 1974 and 2005. A longitudinal trace study of a cohort of 46 young people born into a rural, Chewa community in Katete District found that girls' scores in early childhood on a battery of ecoculturally grounded cognitive tests correlated less well than they did for boys with two educational outcomes: number of grades of schooling completed, and adult literacy scores. Conversely, ratings of the children on indigenous conceptions of intelligence by adults familiar with the children in the context of their home village lives predicted the same outcomes better for girls than for boys. A separate, linked experiment compared the performance of 76 Katete school children with that of 84 school children in the capital city of Lusaka on the US standardized Draw-a-Person Test (DPT) and the Panga Munthu Test (PMT), an expanded version of one of the tests developed for the Zambian trace study. Analysis of the correlations among scores on these two tests, age, and teacher ratings suggests that aptitudes evident in the home and school domains are less well integrated for rural girls than for urban boys, and that for a low-income, rural population, the PMT taps the domain of home cognition better than school cognition, while the converse is true of the DPT. Implications for educational assessment in Zambia are discussed, and supportive documentation is cited from two ongoing programs of test development. The authors conclude that if educational testing is to support the process of enhancing educational equity across gender, family socioeconomic status, and residential location, its focus should be broadened to include other dimensions of psychological development such as multilingual and personal-social competencies.

Local Economic Development in the City of Lusaka, Zambia

The aim in this article is to examine the example of LED planning in Zambia, a country which post-2000 has been experiencing a modest expansion of decentralization. More specifically, the paper draws from a range of primary sources of information to discuss the development of planning for LED in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city. It is argued that whilst there has occurred a growth of planning around LED in Lusaka, implementation has been limited due to a number of factors, including capacity constraints and finance.

Evidence and implications of groundwater mining in the Lusaka urban aquifers

The Lusaka Plateau hosts some of the most productive karstic carbonate aquifers, which are historically a dependable water supply source for the city of Lusaka. While it has been an important and cheap groundwater source for various users, the schist aquifer on the other hand compliments the supply. The present and future water demand pose the greatest challenge for the Lusaka city aquifers and is recognised to be the reason for high private prospecting for groundwater as a result of the ever increasing demand. Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company (LWSC), the water utility company responsible for water supply to the city, abstracts about 50% of its water requirements from aquifers in the Lusaka urban and adjacent areas. Current abstraction is estimated to be in the range of 50.265 × 10 6–65.385 × 10 6 m 3 year −1, which is already well over the annual recharge of 45.44 × 10 6 m 3 year −1 at 8% of the annual rainfall. However, groundwater resources availability in terms of quantity, quality, as well as annual recharge, and recharge mechanisms have been more difficult to establish largely due to inadequate hydrogeological data. Although the recharge values are on record, these vary widely from 8% to 35% of the annual rainfall. Recent monitoring of groundwater levels shows evidence of groundwater mining that is reflected by a steady decline of groundwater table during the dry months. Preliminary observations suggest that the main recharge area south of Lusaka city offers dilution effect to groundwater recharged from other parts of the city where anthropogenic influences are significant. Continued groundwater monitoring is recommended so that the resource is managed effectively and sustainably for the social and economic benefit of Zambia.

Transnational biographies and local meanings: used clothing practices in Lusaka

Drawing on preliminary field research in Zambia in 1992 and 1993 into the rapidly expanding trade in and consumption of used clothing imported from the West, this paper examines some methodological questions that arise from research‐in‐progress into the changing local appropriations of used clothing in Zambia. Because the processes that converge in this topic are not tied to any fixed locale, but call for contextualization in both politicoeconomic and local cultural terms, the shape of this research project is influenced by broader political changes in the region and beyond it as well as by paradigmatic shifts in accounts of local‐global relationships. Granting used clothing a history in which what becomes of it does not inhere in its commodity status as a western cast‐off, but is a result of what people have made with it and of it, investing and divesting it of meanings, this paper explores how used clothing assumes meanings as it becomes embedded in a variety of contexts, particularly in the capital city of Lusaka.