The world is going green and Zambia happens to be a major contributor to that transition. Copper has been dubbed by some as the metal of the energy of the energy transition and Zambia happens to be Africa’s second largest copper producer.
One of the core use cases of copper is in electric vehicles (which require up to four times the copper of regular combustion vehicles) for their internal wiring, battery packs and electric motors. This demand has seen copper’s price grow by more than 290% since 2016. The saying goes, “a rising tide lifts all the boats”, but when you take a closer look at the people working in the copper supply chain in Zambia – some boats are being left behind.
Copperbelt workers in Zambia are trapped in short contracts further anchored by low wages. The raw materials driving multi-trillion dollar global industries are being extracted in economy where the legal baseline for a worker’s dignity is just $80/month. Global supply chains extract maximum value while leaving local labour forces in structural poverty.
Now it would be easy to argue that the minimum wage shouldn’t be tied to one industry as the economy is more complex and that would be a fair argument. A separate argument to illustrate why it’s important to question who the real beneficiaries of the copper boom in Zambia comes from a Copper Framework Report released in 2021 in the fact that Zambia’s mining sector only accounted for a meager 2.4% of total national employment despite contributing 74% of export earnings.
Put simply – Zambia presents a profound economic irony. A single sector—mining—generates nearly three-quarters of the country’s export wealth and nearly half of its public revenue. Yet, it employs just over 2 out of every 100 Zambian workers. This is the math behind the country’s 76.3% informality rate, because when the primary driver of GDP is an industrial enclave, the rest of the population is structurally exiled to the informal margins.
Some of it is self imposed as Zambia has historically exported unrefined copper and only recently started focusing on the fact that processing could yield more jobs. The country’s latest strategy acknowledges all this and targets formal mining employment to grow from 56,000 to 200,000 jobs by 2031 along with generating another 300,000 indirect contracted jobs simultaneously.
This piece is a SADC comparison piece, in collaboration with DailyViz263 as part of the roll out of our 2026 State Of Employment Report.
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