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NUPPEZ says the K38.2 billion proposed for education falls short of the 20 percent benchmark and includes no allocation for teacher recruitment. An economist notes that school feeding funds nearly double.
The National Union of Public and Private Educators of Zambia, NUPPEZ, says the share of the 2027 budget that goes to education is too small. News Diggers reports that the union’s executive president, Charity Kampamba, said in a statement on Saturday that the 13.4 percent allocation falls short of the 20 percent level that is internationally recognised as a threshold.
On Friday, Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane proposed K38.2 billion for the education function, or 13.4 percent of the K284.8 billion budget. News Diggers says this is up from K33.04 billion in the 2026 budget. The Daily Mail’s pre-budget report gave the 2026 education allocation as K33 billion, which is consistent. By our own arithmetic, the proposed amount is about K5.2 billion more than last year, an increase of roughly 16 percent.
Ms Kampamba said the union is concerned that the budget did not provide an allocation for teacher recruitment in 2027. We could read only the opening of the News Diggers report, because the rest is for members, so we have not seen the full list of the union’s concerns or any response from government.
Economist Lubinda Haabazoka, in budget commentary carried by Zambia Monitor, says education and health together get K68.5 billion, about 24 percent of proposed spending. He says funding for the school feeding programme nearly doubles, from K523 million to K1 billion. In his view, the increase could ease costs for families and create reliable markets for local farmers who supply food to schools.
The figures are the minister’s proposals. The union’s call is therefore an argument about priorities in the spending plan, and the amounts set aside for individual programmes inside the education allocation have not been reported in the sources we could open.
Education spending, and whether it pays for more teachers, affects class sizes and school quality. The union's objection puts a number on the gap between the proposal and a widely used benchmark.
The News Diggers article is partly for members only, so we read only the opening. The K38.2 billion figure and the teacher recruitment point come from that report and from the union's statement, and we did not find the Ministry of Finance table. We did not verify the 20 percent benchmark independently.
Each link goes to the specific article or document we used. Two articles carrying the same wire report count as one source.
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