Second MicroZAMOD retreat

In collaboration with the national MicroZAMOD team, International Labour Organization (ILO) Zambia, Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis (ZIPAR) and the Southern Africa for Social Policy Research Insights (SASPRI), UNU-WIDER organizes a 5-day MicroZAMOD retreat on 21-25 August 2023.

This is the second MicroZAMOD retreat. The event serves as a capacity development initiative allowing participants to get acquainted with the MicroZAMOD tax-benefit model and to produce policy recommendations based on the model. The policy notes will serve to answer the questions that are most relevant for the work of the participants, and for Zambian tax-benefit policies.

The main goal of the retreat is to empower participants to use MicroZAMOD to answer their own policy questions using the model, and provide a forum for MicroZAMOD users to exchange and learn. A key feature is that the national team is taking the lead in organizing and delivering the retreat to ensure maximum ownership.

At the same time, the retreat shall serve as a forum to build a community of MicroZAMOD users in Zambia, creating ownership of the model beyond ZIPAR, and in the long-term, establishing MicroZAMOD versed counterparts in stakeholder institutions such as all the ministries that administer policies modelled in MicroZAMOD.

In addition to ZIPAR, participants include government officials from stakeholder institutions such as the Ministry of Finance, Zambian Revenue Authority (ZRA), Ministry of Community Development, Zambia Statistics (ZAMSTATS), and the International Labour Organization (ILO) Zambia. The chosen participants are those who have an interest in country-level tax benefit policies to improve household welfare.

This initiative is part of UNU-WIDER's SOUTHMOD - simulating tax and benefit policies for development project. SOUTHMOD 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).