MicroZAMOD work presented at a social protection conference

The Southern African Social Protection Experts Network (SASPEN) conference 'Social protection at a crossroads: Between COVID-19 and the SDGs - Southern African perspectives' is organized 9-12 May 2022. MicroZAMOD team member Miselo Bwalya presents SOUTHMOD research work at the conference on 10 May.

The title of Miselo Bwalya's presentation is Distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Zambia. The presentation is based on a Policy Brief which was published along with the WIDER Working Paper The mitigating role of tax and benefit rescue packages for poverty and inequality in Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Southern African Social Protection Experts Network, SASPEN, is a not-for-profit loose alliance of stakeholders, scholars and consultants who engage with social protection in the SADC region. SASPEN promotes social protection in SADC countries and beyond. The SASPEN conference brings together about 100 attendees, this year to Johannesburg.

MicroZAMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Zambia, allows the user to analyse and compare the effects of different benefit policy scenarios on poverty, inequality, and government revenues. With MicroZAMOD, users can simulate hypothetical reforms of the tax-and-benefit system. They can estimate, for example, the number of beneficiaries and analyse the characteristics of the prospective recipients of a hypothetical benefit.

MicroZAMOD is one of the models that are developed in the SOUTHMOD project. The project is part of UNU-WIDER's research and capacity development programme on domestic revenue mobilization (DRM), funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (Norad).