Zambia - April 2024

The EU-Zambia Business Forum: "Growing the Copper Industry through sustainable value chains" took place in Zambia from the 10-12 April 2024. The forum brought together Zambian and European businesses with the aim of forging corporate partnerships and facilitate a dialogue around attracting finance, upscaling through the copper value-chain, and realising the potentials of circular economy, in order to strengthen the EU-Zambia copper-trade. The Forum builds on a study commissioned by the EU, on the various opportunities for expanding and enforcing the EU-Zambia copper-trade. In essence, the study uncovered no less than 9 different areas with under-utilised potential for expanding and growing the Zambian copper-industry, which can largely be separated into three categories: o Upstream opportunities (though not exploration and extraction) o Downstream opportunities o Opportunities within circular economy relating to re-processing and selling by-products from copper mining Therefore, the EU hosted a business forum in collaboration with relevant local partners, that aimed to forge EU-Zambian business partnerships to begin realising these opportunities, as well as igniting a series of dialogues around important issues such as: o ESG regulations and its implications for EU-Zambian investments and other financial agreements o Business development in Zambia o Potential investment-barriers and how to overcome them The program contained a mixture of panel-debates, keynote talks, but importantly also individual Business-to-Business meetings. https://international-partnerships.ec.europa.eu/eu-business-fora/eu-zambia-business-forum-2024-04-10_en