Same K40 million for every constituency — very different terrain. How delivery reads in rural Zambia against the towns, from the published record.
The rural lens
Rural provinces against urban ones, head to head: every province shows its rural share, its urban share, and the completed share of its tracked projects. The groups: rural means at least 70% rural, urban means at most 25% rural — North-Western (58%) sits in between. Same K40 million per constituency — very different terrain.
Read it carefully: the completed share measures the published record — where councils publish handovers and commissionings, completion shows; where they publish only approval lists, the trail stops at approval. Rurality: ZamStats, 2022 Census Preliminary Report, Figure 3.7 (the final census report puts the national rural share at 55.3%).
The honest pattern: it is not the expected one. Luapula (85% rural) and Western (81% rural) show the highest completion shares in the record, while the urban Copperbelt sits near the bottom. What separates provinces today is less geography than the kind of record their councils publish — the rural question closes only when every province publishes delivery, not just approvals.
What gets built where
In the rural provinces, three things dominate the tracked record — classrooms and desks, water points, clinics. That is the delivery a rural voter can see and touch. Urban delivery spreads wider, with far more spent on roads, drainage and police posts. Project types are read from the names in the published lists — a guide, not an audit.
The pattern to watch: rural delivery is concentrated in exactly the basics — education, water, health — that were scarce before CDF. Constituency-level election results belong on the record too — as plain baseline data, recorded the same way as the money, with no politics attached. A baseline like that is what lets a delivery record like this one be used by anyone: to understand a place, and to project outcomes in future. For now the tracker records the delivery.