DOI: 10.7910/dvn/0b0i0c
title: Zambia Local Bureaucrats Survey

description: This data is from a survey of 153 local government bureaucrats across 16 district councils in Zambia that was conducted in March 2019. The included councils are located in Central, Copperbelt, Lusaka, and Southern Provinces. The data assesses bureaucrats' employment histories, demographic background, education levels, department, and transfer experience. In addition, it captures bureaucrats' career aspirations, office facilities and staffing, incentives and monitoring, and engagement with the local community.
description: This data is from a study conducted with Zambia's local government bureaucrats to assesses bureaucrats' employment histories, demographic background, education levels, department, and transfer experience. In addition, it captures bureaucrats' career aspirations, office facilities and staffing, incentives and monitoring, and engagement with the local community. The survey findings were intended to inform Zambia’s Decentralization Secretariat as the country moves towards greater devolution. 

The survey is split into 8 modules:
1. Location (SA) – location information about the region and district council where the respondent is based 
2. General Information (ID) – basic demographic, educational, and occupational information of respondent 
3. Employment History & Job Responsibilities (EH) – details about respondents’ previous jobs within local government, outside local government, and training courses and workshops 
4. Facilities & Staffing (FS) – details about the availability of facilities and staff to perform your responsibilities in this council 
5. Incentives & Monitoring (IM) – information about respondent’s degree of job satisfaction, job aspirations, how their performance is assessed, and experience with political interference in their professional activities or career trajectory 
6. Council Affairs (CA) – details about how the council and local government functions, as well as the engagement of the council with the local community 
7. Financial Knowledge (FK) – information about council budgets, revenues and expenditures; only asked of staff working in Finance Departments
8. Final (FI) – enumerator observations

This survey includes a sample of 153 respondents who span 16 district councils across 4 provinces of Zambia. The 16 councils were purposely selected to include a mixture of city, municipal, and town councils, to include those that had been newly created as well as those that had not, and to incorporate councils governed by different political parties. 

Within each district council, respondents were stratified according to the department for which they worked: finance, human resources, housing and social services, public health, planning and engineering, and town clerks/council secretaries. Aside from town clerks, respondents were purposely selected within each department to participate in the interview so as to reflect a diversity of job levels, i.e. direct-level, mid-level, and lower-level. Each respondent was shown an authorization letter for the survey by the Decentralization Secretariat at the commencement of every face-to-face interview. 

To preserve confidentiality, the collected data provided here excludes qualitative answers to open-ended questions.