Zambia enjoyed strong economic growth between 2004 and 2014, which benefited small segments of the urban population. Because growth was accompanied by increased inequality, its effects on poverty reduction were limited. In 2015, 58 percent of zambians were below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day and three quarters of the poor lived in rural areas. To contain inequality, bring people out of poverty and improve the lives of the most vulnerable, the government of zambia committed to expand social protection expenditure in the 2019 budget by 18 percent from the previous year, following a series of consecutive expansions of this sector. Nevertheless, in 2019 zambia still spent only 0.7 percent of the country’s gdp on social protection, lagging behind the regional average.