The Contribution of Dry Forests to Rural Poverty Reduction and to the National Economy: Zambia Technical Report Samuel Mulenga Bwalya Department of Economics, University of Zambia, Box 32379, Lusaka Tel# 260 1 290475,
[email protected] The Contribution of Dry Forests to Rural Poverty Reduction and to the National Economy: Zambia Draft summary We have shown that forests and woodland resources contribute, on average, 21% to total production and income of rural households. Aggregating forest production and income to a national levels based on sample information is challenging task and by no means likely to be very precise and accurate. But scaling up sample estimates to the national level facilitates inter-sectoral comparisons and would sharpen our insights about the importance of forests and woodland resources in rural development and poverty reduction. Sample estimates and national statistics on the number of rural households is used to scale up and estimate the contribution of forest and woodland resources to the national rural household sector. We multiply the proportion of households harvesting a particular forest product by the total number of rural households in Zambia. This gives us an estimate of the number of rural household across the country that harvest forest a given forest product both for consumption within the household and for sell to obtain cash income. This estimate is then multiplied by the average value of each forest product harvested to obtain the total contribution of the forests sector to rural household economy. Because we ignore value addition along the supply chain and other forms of income and services households derive from forests, this estimate should be seen to represent the minimum contribution of forest resources to rural household sector.