Energy, Industrialisation and Economic Growth

When the power outages of 2015 occurred, 81% of Zambian grid electricity was powered by assets financed by the World Bank—all of it hydropower. The World Bank’s investment in hydropower came at a time when 85% of Zambia’s electricity was consumed by Zambia’s copper mining industry, which was also its direct intended beneficiary in 1973. In general, thinking within the Bank held that allocating resources for ‘productive’ sectors of the economy was justified because those sectors would then pay the taxes required to pay for ‘social’ infrastructure. Human development indicators do not suggest an improvement in quality of life for Zambians following the power investments until decades later, and for that the causality cannot be convincingly attributed to power generation. By 2018, only a third of the population was connected to the grid, meaning that investment in power for the mining sector still has not trickled down in power for all. Mining’s growth did however spur manufacturing growth, but that was stymied by neoliberal economic restructuring by the Zambian government on the advice of the Bretton Woods organisations in the 1990s. Manufacturing shows greater potential and better value per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy than mining for generating employment and GDP growth.