Before we get started, I should admit something: I have no idea how a country goes from being poor to being rich.
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I know that my own country did this, sure, and that Western Europe and Australia and Japan and Korea and lots of other places did too. But I don't know anywhere that did it without totally unique circumstances, without an ugly century or two on the way.
In America, getting from poverty to here meant crowded factories, tenement housing, belching smokestacks, diseases caused by human shit in the drinking water. In other places development was born out of devastation, revolution, authoritarianism—nothing we would ask other countries to emulate.
Zambia is poor—that much is clear as soon as you arrive. To get to Kitwe, a city of 500,000 people in the Copper Belt Province, you land at Ndola airport an hour away. “Airport” is putting it grandiosely. It's a strip of runway next to a low building the size of an exurban Starbucks. You get off the plane, walk 100 feet across the tarmac, and wait under an awning until a tractor pulls up, towing a cart with your luggage. Everyone crowds in, grabbing their bags, and you do, too—it's all over in about 45 seconds. At no point are you indoors. As you leave, you hear a European in a suit remark, “I wish they did it like this everywhere.”
ZAMBIA IS NOT FAILED. IT IS SIMPLY VERY, VERY POOR. SIXTY-FOUR PERCENT OF THE POPULATION LIVES ON LESS THAN $1 PER DAY, 14 PERCENT HAVE HIV, 40 PERCENT DON'T HAVE ACCESS TO CLEAN DRINKING WATER.
Probably Zambia isn't a country you've thought about much. It's a landlocked patch of 14 million people smack-dab in the middle of Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of its immediate bordermates—Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola—you know from the lowest quintile of various corruption, failed state, and poverty indices.
But relative to its neighbors, Zambia is actually doing pretty well. The religious groups (mostly Christian, some Muslims) largely get along, as do the various ethnicities. There's no flamboyant dictator, no child soldiers, no celebrity adoptions, just downright boring elections. People do not disappear in the night, nor are they beaten or tortured for how they vote or who they spend time with. Crime waves, food riots, power outages—they're not unheard of here, but they're not everyday occurrences either.
So Zambia is not failed. It is simply very, very poor. Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don't have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.
That's actually why I'm here. I work for an international development NGO. Part of my job is traveling to developing countries to gather information on the conditions there, to meet people who are working to improve them.
Given what I just admitted, maybe it's a bit weird that helping countries go from poor to rich is part of what I do for a living. But the more I do this, the less I'm sure of. Like Tolstoy's unhappy family, every poor country is poor in its own way, and everyone I meet has a narrative, a creation myth, for how it got this way and why it remains so.
I will spend the next 10 days meeting NGO activists, government officials, and business representatives. They will tell me that Zambia is terrible, that Zambia is fine, and that Zambia is getting better, respectively.
I'm not here to determine which of those statements is true. I'm here for the numbers, the information I can't get back home. Somewhere between the handshakes, the spreadsheets, the PowerPoints, the annual reports, a story will emerge about Zambia, a story of a country watching its mineral wealth disappear, a country making everyone rich but itself.