Poverty big challenge to Zambia’s growth - social forum

Poverty big challenge to Zambia’s growth - social forum
By By Agness Changala and Mwala Kalaluka
Sun 30 Jan. 2011, 03:59 CAT

EXTREME poverty among the disadvantaged groups is one of the developmental challenges that Zambia is facing, says Zambia Social Forum chairperson Zindikilani Daka. Daka said other challenges being faced included displacement of poor people, absence of freedom of speech and expression and gender inequality.

He said the government could have addressed these challenges more effectively if they allowed a participatory and dialogical approach in governance. Daka said the current poverty situation in Zambia was also as a result of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and capital economic models.

“However, to offer an alternative, the world social forum proposes a space of mutual engagement where change and alternatives can be dialogued and not enforced as is the case at present,” he said.

World Social Forum (WSF) to be held in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, next week will bring together social movements, networks, non-governmental organisations (NGO’s) and other organisations opposed to neo-liberalism and a world dominated by capitalism or by any form of imperialism.

And the Zambia Social Forum (ZSF), in a press release ahead of the Dakar meeting, stated that the return to African soil of the World Social Forum is an expression of the international social movement’s powerful solidarity with the struggles and resistance of Africa’s oppressed people.

ZSF stated in the statement sent by Action Aid Zambia communication advisor Norma Martinez that for Africans, the forum would constitute an unprecedented opportunity for collective democratisation expression and an exit from the political, institutional and economic deadlock imposed on them by their ruling classes.

Other groups cited as being among those that had imposed an economic deadlock on Africans were the great powers and the international financial institutions.

“The World Social Forum is extremely important for African peoples,” the statement read in part. “The voices of Zambians will be heard in Senegal.”

The statement further read that those that were going to represent Zambia at the Dakar Social Forum were going there with a view to joining other social movements to demand social justice and promote alternative answers to world economic and social problems.

The ZSF indicated that in an effort to ensure the issues that the Zambian delegation would take to Dakar were really from the grassroots and concerned poor and excluded communities, they invited communities in Lusaka to give their voices.

“Those travelling to Dakar will be the messengers,” the statement read. “The Zambia Social forum consists of a sister-brotherhood of Zambian civil society organisations fighting for social justice every day. We are travelling to Dakar to join social movements from the entire globe and together represent the voice of poor and excluded people in the streets of the world.”

The World Social Forum is an opened space for non-governmental and non-partisan – individuals and organisations that stimulate the decentralised debate, reflection, experiences exchange and alliances among movements and organisations engaged in concrete actions towards a more democratic fair world.