Budgeting against Uncertainty: Cross-Class and Transethnic Redistribution Mechanisms in Urban Zambia

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Periodical article

Title:	Budgeting against Uncertainty: Cross-Class and Transethnic Redistribution Mechanisms in Urban Zambia
Author:	Hansen, Karen T.
Year:	1985
Periodical:	African Urban Studies
Issue:	21
Period:	Spring
Pages:	65-73
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Zambia
Subjects:	income distribution domestic workers Economics and Trade Urbanization and Migration
Abstract:	Eking out a living in Lusaka, Zambia, is characterized by active planning and strategic intervention to reduce uncertainty. A sample survey of domestic servants and their employers in 168 households of middle to high income, conducted in Lusaka in 1983 and 1984, indicates that in their daily struggle to get by, servants ask for wage advances as well as assistance in cash and kind from their employers, in addition to participating in a variety of essentially dyadic lending and borrowing arrangements, such as 'chilimba' (partial wage pooling) and 'kaloba' (borrowing at 50 percent interest). These practices create a tenuously balanced reciprocal order of lending, borrowing, and handing out, and its anti-order, negative reciprocity of material redistribution by self-help. They help to alleviate the day-to-day struggle for a living without radically changing the existing gap between rich and poor. Bibliogr., notes.