Plan for a festival economy and you quickly confront a contradiction. The features that make Kuomboka commercially valuable – its authenticity, its rootedness in the Lozi calendar, its refusal to be staged – are exactly the features that aggressive commercialisation tends to destroy. So the useful planning question for the next five years is not how big the ceremony’s economy can get, but whether Zambia can grow local income from it while keeping the thing that makes it worth visiting. The scenarios toward 2031 divide on precisely that fault line.
A community-led festival economy is the model that tries to hold both – protecting authenticity while increasing local income – and it is worth planning against explicitly, because the alternatives are not neutral. As reporting on the ceremony documents, Kuomboka already unites cultures, boosts tourism and empowers local people. Whether that holds to 2031 depends on which path is chosen now, and on setting indicators clear enough to tell the paths apart.
Scenario One: Community-Led Growth
In the first scenario, growth is built on local ownership. Community cooperatives run crafts, food and homestays; local operators handle transport; the Barotse Royal Establishment and local structures hold a contractual share of media and sponsorship revenue. Growth is deliberately paced so the ceremony sets the terms and the market adapts to it, rather than the reverse.
This path is slower and harder to organise, and it will frustrate anyone looking for a quick return. Its payoff is durability: income that stays in Western Province, authenticity that survives because the community controls the trade-offs, and an asset that appreciates rather than burns out. It is the only scenario in which growth and public value move together by design.
Scenario Two: Extraction and Erosion
In the second scenario, outside capital and intermediaries lead. The ceremony scales quickly, media and sponsorship money flows to promoters, hospitality is dominated by operators based elsewhere, and the staging bends steadily toward spectacle. On paper the numbers look strong for several seasons. Underneath, the value leaks out of the region and the authenticity that anchored the whole proposition thins.
This is the default path – the one that arrives if no one designs against it – because it follows the money’s natural gradient. Its danger is that the damage is slow and cumulative, easy to miss until the asset is degraded and the community, having borne the costs, is left with little to show. Extraction can look like success right up until the point it is not.
Scenario Three: Stalled Potential
In the third scenario, little changes. Kuomboka stays a proud annual event with modest, poorly captured economic activity. The recognition accumulates; the revenue does not. It is not a disaster, but it is a standing opportunity cost – value that Western Province could have earned, quietly forgone year after year.
Stagnation rarely announces itself, which is what makes it easy to accept. For a region outside Zambia’s main tourist circuits, the cost of doing nothing is simply the industry that never gets built.
Indicators to 2031
The scenarios only become useful if they can be told apart in real time, and that requires tracked indicators: local income and share of value captured within Western Province, visitor numbers and length of stay, community ownership across the value chain, and measures of authenticity such as the role of traditional authorities in governing the event. Watch those numbers and it is possible to know which path Kuomboka is actually on, rather than which one the announcements claim.
The planning choice is real and it is being made now, indicator by indicator. A festival economy that protects what it sells is harder to build than one that sells until there is nothing left – and it is the only one still standing in 2031.
