The CDF money that goes to people, not projects — scholarships for learners, loans and grants for local enterprise.
Photo: CDF dormitories at Nyawa Secondary School — Kazungula Town CouncilScholarships
Two bursary streams run in every constituency: secondary-school boarding bursaries, and skills-development bursaries for learners at TEVET and other training institutions. They are the part of the CDF most families meet directly.
Cumulative beneficiaries since 2022. Skills bursaries — TEVET and trade training — now reach more Zambians than secondary boarding bursaries.
Government publishes bursary totals two ways, and they do not match — because they count different things. The cumulative figures above count all secondary and skills beneficiaries since 2022. MLGRD's September 2025 set counts the narrower boarding-only secondary stream:
The tracker shows both rather than silently picking one. Releases move in tranches: the first 2026 bursary tranche, in February 2026, sent K100 million out — K641,025 to every constituency.
Empowerment
The empowerment component splits between grants to women and youth groups and soft loans to local groups and small businesses. Loans are meant to revolve — repaid money funds the next borrower — which makes the recovery rate the number that decides whether the component survives.
Recovery is the share of loans due that borrowers actually repaid. The since-2021 line covers every loan issued since the fund's expansion.
Recovery improved from 10.6% in 2023 to 17% in 2024, but with only about 35% of all loans issued since 2021 recovered, the government suspended the 2026 loan component. Grants were not suspended — but how much has gone out in empowerment grants nationally is not published as a single figure. That absence is part of the record, and this page will show the figure when a source publishes it.
The next layer
National totals are nearly all that is published. Per-constituency bursary and loan counts appear only inside individual council lists — the same publishing pattern as project lists, and the tracker will add them constituency by constituency under the same rules: plainly published figures in, anything uncertain held for review. One line this tracker will not cross: councils sometimes publish beneficiaries' names; this site tracks counts and amounts, never people's names.