#copperseries

zambia has one of the greatest mineral endowments on earth. the katanga supergroup — 880 million years old, stratiform copper sulphide deposits of extraordinary grade and size. the question the series has been asking is not whether the copper is there. it is whether zambia is positioned to capture the full value of what it has.

the answer, as of 2026: partially. zambia produces cathode copper at the nkana refinery — good. but zambia still exports significant quantities of copper concentrate, carrying the smelting and refining margin to whoever processes it. the fabrication gap — wire rod, copper tube, copper sheet — remains unclosed. USD 160 million per year in additional revenue from full domestic fabrication is still being exported with the copper.

zambia's social contract with its mining communities is imperfect. copperbelt communities still face unresolved questions about employment access and environmental quality. the artisanal mining sector operates in conditions of legal uncertainty, physical risk, and economic precarity. the china relationship is asymmetric in ways that create structural risks.

but the opportunity is more compelling in 2026 than it has ever been. the energy transition is creating a demand surge for copper, cobalt, and nickel. zambia sits on the second largest cobalt resource, a top-ten copper resource, and an emerging nickel resource — at the precise historical moment when the value of those resources is being structurally repriced upward.

the decisions zambia makes in the next five to ten years will determine whether this generation of zambians captures the opportunity that the energy transition is offering.

the ground holds what zambia needs. the decision is zambia's.

the colonial copper industry was a male industry. mine townships built around male migrant labour — men recruited from rural areas to work underground, housed in mine compounds without their families. women in the mine townships were wives, dependants, domestic workers. not miners. the legal framework of colonial northern rhodesia reflected and reinforced this gender division of the copper economy.

through the ZCCM era, the formal employment structure changed in many ways — but the gender composition of the mining workforce changed very little. women in the formal mine sector were employed primarily in administrative, catering, health, and education roles. the support functions of the mine township economy rather than the production functions of the mine.

the legal prohibition on women working underground in zambian mines persisted from the colonial era through independence and into the post-privatisation era — only formally removed by the mines and minerals development act of 2015. the regulatory change is significant. the cultural and structural change that follows regulatory change is slower.

the current picture: women now work in zambia's copper mines across the spectrum — underground miners, processing plant operators, environmental officers, safety managers, and geologists. first quantum minerals has published targets for women's representation reflecting the industry's recognition of the gender gap and the effort to close it.

at the community level — in the artisanal and small-scale mining sector — women are active as ore sorters, small-scale processors, and traders. roles that are economically significant and chronically underpaid relative to the value added. the ASM economy's gender dynamics, like those of the formal sector, reflect historical exclusions that are changing more slowly than the regulatory framework would suggest.

the gender story in the copper sector is not separate from the broader copper story. it is the same story — who gets to participate in the wealth the katanga supergroup generates, and on what terms.

artisanal and small-scale mining — ASM — refers to mining activity conducted by individuals, families, and small groups using basic equipment, without the large capital investment or formal corporate structures of the large mines. in zambia, ASM copper mining is concentrated on the copperbelt — around chingola, ndola, and older mine lease areas where historical waste dumps, old tailings, and near-surface ore occurrences can be worked with basic tools.

tens of thousands of people are directly involved in artisanal copper mining on the copperbelt at any given time, with hundreds of thousands more in supply, processing, and trading relationships. the majority of ASM activity operates in a grey zone between formal artisanal licensing and unlicensed activity.

environmental and safety risks. processing copper from waste dumps typically involves acid leaching — using sulphuric acid to dissolve copper content from low-grade material — creating contamination risks for soil and water. underground artisanal workings present collapse risks that have resulted in fatalities.

the social dimension. the people working in ASM copper are predominantly young men, many migrants from other provinces who found the formal mine employment market too restricted. the ASM economy is for many workers the only available copper economy. precarious, physically dangerous, often technically illegal in its specific location. and for tens of thousands of families: what stands between them and destitution.

the formalisation debate. decades of discussion about how to bring artisanal miners into a regulatory framework without destroying the flexibility that makes ASM accessible. the international evidence is clear: formalisation without genuine economic empowerment does not work. the formalisation that works is the one that makes legal operation cheaper and safer than illegal operation.

the informal copper economy is not a marginal story. it is the copper story for tens of thousands of zambian families. the large mines and the small miners are working the same geology, on the same plateau, in the same communities.

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