The World Bank (WB) recently released its Africa Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) report for 2024, which covers the period from January to December 2023.
The report evaluates the quality of African countries’ policy and institutional framework and assesses how conducive these are to fostering sustainable growth, poverty reduction, and effective use of development assistance.
This year’s CPIA Africa report focuses on reforms across policy areas covered by the CPIA that support private sector growth and identifies policy trends in Sub-Saharan Africa that made a difference in supporting private sector development in 2023.
The report attributes a CPIA score to countries and regions. This is a composite rating that evaluates the quality of a country’s policies and institutions, particularly in relation to fostering sustainable growth, poverty reduction, and effective use of development assistance. The score ranges from 1 to 6, with 1 indicating low performance and 6 indicating high performance.
In 2023, the average CPIA score for IDA-eligible countries in Sub-Saharan Africa remained broadly like its 2022 level, at 3.1. However, more countries saw improvements in their overall scores compared to those that received downgrades, and fewer countries’ scores declined compared to the previous year’s CPIA assessment. Yet, the narrowing gap between Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the IDA countries has been undermined by the region’s much slower improvement in the governance cluster (cluster D, public sector management and institutions).
The scores for the individual criteria show that the largest differences between Sub-Saharan Africa and the overall IDA averages fall into two general categories: constitutional strength and the rule of law (property rights and rule-based governance and transparency, accountability, and corruption in the public sector) and financial oversight (financial sector, quality of budgetary and financial management, and debt policy and management).
Zambia CIPA Score & Highlights
Zambia CIPA Score
Zambia received an overall CPIA score of 3.2 in 2023, unchanged from 2022. The East and Southern Africa region scored 3.0.
Zambia did very well in Structural Policies with a score of 3.8, including 4.0 for Trade and Business Regulatory Environment.
Zambia Highlights
- A new Bank of Zambia Law was enacted to safeguard the autonomy of the central bank. Reforms allowed the exchange rate to adjust more flexibly, and the monetary framework was adjusted to allow for a more explicit response to the external balance.
- A supervisory and performance monitoring framework was approved for state-owned enterprises, which led to the shutting down of a state-owned, loss-making oil refinery and reconfiguring a state-owned pipeline to improve efficiency.
- Efforts to streamline land administration and management continued, including a digitalized land registration system.
- The country made reforms to improve the legal environment for land rights—including a new titling regime. However, the land registration process is highly centralized, and inefficient, and leads to land disputes.
