Economic Development, Investment & Jobs

Mansa is the regional capital of the Luapula Province. One of the poorest provinces in Zambia, Mansa acts as a regional commercial hub, is home to a number of mines, and forms a small urban cluster with neighbouring border towns facilitating trade into DRC.

As the capital of Zambia, Lusaka is the country’s key political and economic centre.  With a population approaching two million, Lusaka is also Zambia’s largest city. Lusaka hosts a diverse range of commercial activities, and these businesses are well-connected to Zambia’s other cities through a developing road network.

Livingstone is the tourism capital of Zambia. The economy is relatively undiversified and the city needs improvements in urban infrastructure, services, sector skills and diversification to ensure growth and attractiveness to visitors. 

Kitwe is one of the fastest growing cities in Zambia, driven by the opening of Zambia’s largest, most productive mines. A wide variety of construction, trade and services businesses have clustered around the mines, and the town’s businesses have had significant success in ensuring value created by mine supply chains stays in the region.

Kasama, capital of Northern Province, is the economic hub for Northern and Muchinga provinces. The town has a cluster of agro-processing and retail businesses and is  experiencing diversification, but lack of skills and infrastructure hampers growth. 

Chipata is the 5th largest, and one of the fastest growing cities in Zambia with a current population of 455,783. Its economy is based around agricultural trade and value addition,  being strategically located adjacent to the Malawian border and a node on the Lusaka-Chipata agricultural corridor.

Using industry research along with professional experiences, ICED designed this toolkit to explore the application, benefits, use cases and foundational dependencies for the eight frontier technologies by sector. This tool looks at improving manufacturing.

This paper explores the four key opportunities that developing country governments and donors must consider if they wish to make their urban areas centres of inclusive and sustained economic growth.

Do ‘smart cities’ bear relevance in the burgeoning cities of the global south? Basic infrastructure and service provision shortfalls faced by many southern cities present a challenging context for ‘smart’ solutions; and certainly contrasting to those of many existing ‘smart cities.’

DFID has placed trade firmly on the economic development agenda, with the objective of harnessing the potential of new trade relationships to boost job creation and investment to the world’s poorest countries.