jls-consulting.org (19.03.2026) On 29 February 2024, Zambia declared a national disaster. The El Niño-induced drought had pushed over 9 million people into deepening insecurity across 84 districts. One of the drought’s policy lessons was not only that households needed more support, but that support had to move across sectors faster than the system was designed to do. Agriculture, nutrition, health, energy, education, protection, and public finance were all simultaneously under stress. Systems built sector by sector are not equipped for a shock that moves across all of them at once. In an era of rising climate volatility, poverty reduction depends less on the scale of emergency response than on the continuity and integration of essential services. This challenge  requires a structural response: a minimum integration pathway that enables households to move across services without being lost at the intersections between programmes.