In Zambia, trade liberalisation was implemented as one of the most important pillars of the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the early 1990s.  The dramatic open-door policy invited foreign investments, goods and services, while the other major reforms of agricultural policy and privatisation played an active role to prepare the domestic economic situation for liberalising the trade markets towards the capitalistic international markets.  Therefore, in terms of assessing the impact of trade liberalisation on poverty, it is essential to consider the impact of other important policies at the same time rather than trade liberalisation alone; in other words, it is difficult to analyse the poverty impact of trade liberalisation alone.  Moreover, the focus of this paper is on income poverty but not other definitions of poverty or income inequality.  In order to analyse the short-term impact of trade liberalisation on poverty, I am going to describe the economic situation in the pre-reforming era and the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) followed by the analysis of the impact on growth and poverty.