- After a decade of unemployment, Zambia's Copperbelt region is recovering thanks to surging world copper prices. But, with among the worst HIV infection rates in the country, the legacy of the recession will be felt for many years to come.
Copper and cobalt have generated Zambia's wealth for over 70 years, with a string of major towns growing up around the mines. But privatisation of the industry in the 1990s, triggered by low world prices and a broke government, led to huge job losses and falling living standards in the highly urbanised central province.
Poverty, sex work, and inevitably HIV/AIDS are closely interrelated. For widows like Joyce Mutale, still waiting for benefits owed after the death of her husband on the mines in 1999, sex work is something she has had to come to terms with - her youngest sister is on the streets.
As heart-breaking as the experience has been, "it would be hypocritical for me to turn a blind eye to our present suffering and tell my younger sister to quit commercial sex - she is the one supporting us. Maybe I can discourage her once I get my late husband's termination benefits," said Mutale.
"I know there is HIV and it is real because we have seen many of our colleagues - even fellow widows - dying, but I always encourage my sister to insist on condoms ... There is nothing much else I can do to change things at the moment."
Three Copperbelt towns - Ndola, Kitwe and Chingola - have the country's highest HIV infection rate at 26.6 percent. Prevalence is 22 percent in the capital, Lusaka, and the national average 16 percent.
"The HIV pandemic has given birth to many orphans and vulnerable children in the mining towns who are now turning into street kids [who are vulnerable to exploitation]," said Aaron Nkhuwa, HIV/AIDS specialist for the development agency Care International.
Formal employment in the mining sector was in decline for most of the 1990s, and dropped to an all time low of 34,966 in 2001. But with record metal prices, investors are returning to the Copperbelt. According to mines minister Kalombo Mwansa, jobs recovered to 51,000 in January this year.
Although the new, often casual jobs don't include the perks and benefits provided by the former state mining company, broken up and finally privatised in 2000, they are putting some money back in people's pockets, and companies that service the mines back in business.
The irony is that the new economic confidence means the sex industry is also booming.
"I don't regret having left Livingstone [Zambia's tourism capital] because I am making more bucks out here," said 32-year-old Josephine Chanda, who relocated to Ndola in March from the southern province with her two children. "Just now the Copperbelt is the place to be for every serious commercial sex provider."
Working the bars of the mining town Chanda claims she makes over US$50 a night; a civil servant on average earns about $210 a month. "Sometimes we are beaten by clients when we insist on using a condom and they force us to have live [unprotected] sex for which we charge a little more," said Chanda.
"The increase in commercial sexual activities on the Copperbelt is our major concern – it is likely to worsen the HIV/AIDS scenario of the mining towns because HIV thrives where there are heightened sexual activities," said Henry Loongo of the Copperbelt AIDS Task Force.
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