This project involves the continuation of a long-term ethnographic study in Africa that is in its 39th year, having begun in 1956. The project will continue updating demographic, economic and social time-series data dealing with residents and the Diaspora from 4 rural villages drawn from a rural & urban population of about 100,000 in the middle Zambezi Valley, Zambia. The project began tracking the social and economic adjustments of 57,000 people displaced by a World Bank financed river basin development project based on a dam that backed up what was at the time the largest artificial reservoir in the world. The study has gone on to document how the study population reacted to adverse government policies that bankrupted the national economy and created one of the five poorest rural populations in the world; how 10 years of endemic warfare leading to national independence in 1980 affected the population, and how environmental degradation arising from resettlement and drought, and social disruption arising from cholera and AIDS have impacted the population. The project has so far produced results which have directly influenced the World Bank's policies on resettlement, by producing a theoretical framework for forecasting how communities respond to such relocation. Hypotheses to be tested during the 1995-97 research period involve how poor people cope with inflation and the relation between fertility, employment and education. The ongoing research of 3 young scholars who will continue the Gwembe study after the retirement of the two current PIs is also part of this project. This project is important because it advances our understanding of how local rural communities respond to global processes of change such as forced resettlement due to internationally-financed hydroelectric projects, rural economic hardships caused by internationally-imposed financial `structural adjustment` policies, and social disruption caused by AIDS and other infectious diseases Understanding of how traditional rural communities react over the long-term can help planners design policies which avoid slow-growing problems and which more effectively stimulate economic growth and social development.
