Dear Zambia,

You were the first nation in Africa to default in the pandemic, and you have come back. In June 2024 your bondholders approved the restructuring of $3 billion of Eurobonds, clearing the way for you to service the new notes, and the International Monetary Fund augmented its programme with you to about $1.7 billion. Natural resource rents, most of them from copper, equalled 35.3 percent of your economy in 2021. Nine-tenths of the electricity you generate comes from renewable sources, most of it from the Zambezi and the Kafue.

The World Bank is financing growth opportunities paid on results, transport corridors, devolution, shock-responsive social protection, agribusiness and trade, girls’ education and women’s livelihoods, and the energy transition. These reach the guarantees where you fall short, and the social protection operations reach the households that are hungry.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. At the last count, in 2019, ninety-eight in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Only ten in every hundred of you cook with clean fuel. Eighty-one in every hundred of you lived below $4.20 a day at the last count, in 2022. Reading sets your Coverage today, at 1.5 out of 100, with clean energy and income close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

Copper prices rise and fall, and the restructuring showed the cost of borrowing against them without a plan. A share of every tonne can be pledged to the guarantees that hold your people back, food first, and protected from the cycle.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Zambia: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Zambian falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“You renegotiated your debts. Now negotiate a decent life into every tonne of copper.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Zambia Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Zambia will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.