US-Zambia inaugural business summit to boost trade, investment

Zambia is hosting a two-day business summit in Lusaka this week to try to attract American investors to the country, in effort to diversify the economy and decrease dependence on extractive industries such as copper, according to Zambian officials.
Moving away from dependence on extractive industries, which account for most of the country’s exports, is Zambia’s priority and the United States should be a key partner in that effort, the country’s Commerce Minister Chipoka Mulenga said. “But our focus right now is to see how best we can create jobs and revive our economic fortunes by value addition,” he added. “We want to take advantage of the new energy system that the world is migrating to from fossil fuels into clean and green energy. And we are trying to take advantage of the minerals that we have and bring a consortium of developed players that have the technology already to see how we can develop our copper from exporting concentrates in its raw form into developing it into finished products for the green energy system that we want to go into.”
Zambia is Africa’s second-largest producer of copper — after the Democratic Republic of Congo — and an important source of other critical minerals like cobalt, manganese and nickel. But economists say the South African nation’s dependence on minerals means it has not taken advantage of being a member in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) or the Southern African Development Community (SADC). “But going forward the engagement with the US is very critical,“ said Boyd Muleya of the think tank Zambia Trade and Policy Dialogue. „We need to change the narrative because what we have seen in the past is mostly, we focus on aid that comes from the US, approximately about $500 million United States dollars annually.” Zambia-US annual, bilateral trade was only $182 million in 2019, according to government figures.