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Dr. Pamela Nakamba currently serves as the Economic Advisor to the Zambian Republican President. She took office in November 2021 and became Zambia’s first female Economic Advisor to a sitting President. Previously, Pamela served as Executive Director of the Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (ZIPAR) for a decade. Prior to this assignment, she served as a Research Fellow for Public Finance at ZIPAR, a semi-autonomous socio-economic think tank providing evidence-based policy advice to the Government and other stakeholders.
Dr. Nakamba served as an advisor on OTT’s learning partnership on government engagement. The results of this project are documented in the Political Philanthropy series.
Racheal Makokha: Pamela, thank you for joining us and sharing your experience with us. Can you begin by telling us about your role as economic advisor?
Pamela Nakamba: I am an economic advisor to the Zambian President, or in other words, we are also called ‘Special Assistants’ to the President. I provide assistance in terms of economic affairs and, therefore, I support the President on all decision-making which has to do with economic issues, economic policy, and other related work in the Presidency. This is the highest level of decision-making in the country. When a decision cannot be made at lower levels, the issue is escalated to the Presidency to guide the decision-making process.
What role did evidence play in your role?
Evidence is very critical. You always have to have it. Evidence is being churned out all the time, through the government system, through the private sector. Sometimes it is not there, and you have to find it, or find someone who may already have evidence, or who can generate evidence immediately.
We utilise a lot of expertise, even short-term consultancies, and people with industry experience whom we can consult to guide us to decide. We use that all the time.
Within the government system, we have what we know, but we must bring in outside evidence as well and we do that very often. Our government is so open to external expertise, that we utilise a lot of evidence from outside the government system. Working with evidence is part of our day-to-day operations.
There are all these difficult decisions to be made. You can make a mistake, even at that high level. Therefore, when you are guided by the evidence, the risk of making a mistake in arriving at a decision is reduced. The evidence can turn out to be different, or wrong, but at least you had some information to support a decision.
Can you give an example of a key recent policy debate in your sector, something you were involved in? What role did evidence play in that debate? What type of evidence was used and who provided it?
We have been experiencing food insecurity threats in the region, initially brought in by the Russia-Ukraine war. We find that grain supply to the region, as well as fertiliser supply, are now limited, because most of our neighbours used to import a lot of grain from Ukraine and Russia. Due to the prolonged war, we have experienced an increase in grain prices which impacted Zambia, a net exporter of grain, due to our heavy demands within the region.
We had an issue. How to ensure that we provide food to our people, without also constraining the markets to export for those who could export? We needed to decide, because the prices were skyrocketing. How do we do it? How do we stabilise this grain price which is our staple food? What do we have in the region, what do we have within our country?
We had to bring in our local experts. They were not working in government, but they were working within the agriculture sector. They collected information from the sector – which they analysed to provide us with evidence on what was obtained on the ground, locally and in the region, and what we needed to do.
That study was able to tell us that we needed to get a number of commercial farmers to grow ‘early maize’, i.e., before the onset of the rainy season. This was one of the short to medium measures we took to fill the deficit in the supply of grain given the rising demand.
The experts also advised us on short-term price stabilisation measures, by looking at how to make available grain directly in the communities. This entails direct community sale of maize so that they could grind it at the community level, which would help to reduce the price of maize meal by cutting the intermediaries’ costs.
The maize which we have been harvesting now since April – even after being hit with El Niño, the worst drought in recent history – is the early maize arising from the above expert recommendation. Even when are facing the worst drought, at least, there is some maize available. We grew a lot of maize, but half of our crop has been damaged. We are now trying to import maize from neighbouring countries which were not affected by El Niño, so we can have more grain coming in.
What are the main challenges and opportunities you see for embedding evidence systematically into the policymaking process?
I used to work in a think tank. I worked around evidence, and I worked around people who can provide evidence. I have a big network of people; I know what type of evidence they are dealing with and who is best at what. From my experience, I can tell, who can provide us with a specific type of information. I worked with some of the experts as individuals or research institutions, including institutions abroad. I’m therefore able to know who can provide insight into specific areas.
Sometimes, the evidence does not come quickly enough. As I mentioned, in policy-making/decision-making, time is of the essence. A politician has a political cycle, say 5 years. In those 5 years, the politician needs to make decisions and deliver results. Sometimes, evidence is not quick enough. That’s where you find that decisions are made before the evidence is available.
Sometimes, (all) we need are quick insights; we need evidence quickly because we need to make decisions quickly, and there is no time to wait. We have to rely on people who have already generated that evidence or who can quickly put these different pieces of evidence together and give you a scenario or recommendations to look at. Therefore, we need to be connected to people who are continuously producing evidence.
The biggest challenge in policymaking is that policymaking is political. Sometimes the evidence is not very palatable politically. There is tension, sometimes, to shelve evidence, when the politics is very strong. Usually, that’s when you find that people who provide evidence feel like they are being ignored.
The people who provide evidence need to be very aware of the influence of politics on evidence use. I was on the other side before (at ZIPAR), and something we were always considering was the political economy around the issue we were looking at. To provide recommendations, we needed to give an objective view, but not devoid of the political circumstances. If you don’t do so, that is bad evidence and it has no chance at all of being adopted; not because it is not properly put together, but because it does not take into consideration the realities. You must look at those realities and recognise what you think is feasible.
Can you give us an example of this?
Yes. We have had a farmer input support programme (FISP) for a long time. The programme subsidises inputs to subsistence farmers. It is a very political tool. People have gone to campaign for (and won) elections by just increasing the number of farmers receiving these inputs. However, the productivity associated with the programme is very low and therefore largely a drain on the government’s resources. The programme has been running for more than 2 decades. There have been several recommendations to abolish the programme.
Due to the political sensitivity of FISP, it has been hard to stop it. Therefore, We have had to find a way to change or reform it to make it more efficient and therefore a better tool without necessarily increasing the number of beneficiaries. That is what we have managed to do. We are no longer just increasing the numbers, we are reforming it, making it more efficient. Closing the gaps, closing the leakages in the programming by transforming its distribution through an e-voucher. Alongside that, we introduced a new programme, cheap credit for farmers who want to grow more: an agriculture credit window.
What advice would you have for researchers hoping to see their work inform policy?
Sometimes, the government does not pay attention to evidence. I know that because I was on the other side (in a think tank) and I had seen instances in which we did a lot of work and it was never used. This government has embraced evidence. The opportunities are there, working together with researchers, with policy think tanks. We have provided a platform for experts to bring evidence and solutions.
We do a lot of engagements, and meetings, we do not just sit in our offices, making decisions. We are meeting people, discussing, and hearing them: which provides an opportunity to embed evidence into policy. We have public-private dialogues, where the government meets the private sector, and everyone brings their evidence in response to the decisions that need to be made.
The people who work on evidence, especially for governments, need to be working continuously and be proactive, to see what the future needs of policymakers are, to anticipate the issues. By the time the policymaker realises there is a decision to make, or an open question, these people are already filling in the gap. That is a relationship that really needs to be developed, with providers of evidence, so they are in the business of generating evidence, or they connect themselves to other evidence providers and can quickly get something for policymakers, even a 1 pager. Politicians do not have time to read a whole big report, but rather 3, 4, 5 pages, some graphs: where they need to be and how to get there.
Time is quite short. Policymaking is a fast business. There is a lot at stake. If you are not fast to provide that evidence, politicians are going to move on, making their own decisions.,
Realism is also very important. Sometimes politicians want nice graphs, nice models, and nice results. If the results do not respond to the context, you cannot influence policy. They need something correct, factual, and easy to adopt.