Kabwe, a town of 200,000 people, is often labelled one of the most polluted places on Earth, yet this framing overlooks the lives behind the headlines. Women living beside an abandoned lead-zinc mine bear the daily health and economic impacts but are rarely included in decisions that shape their future. Voices From Kabwe is an advocacy campaign created to change that.
Who stands behind the research
The campaign was launched at the Conference on Land Policy in Africa (CLPA) 2025 in Addis Ababa and grows out of a three-year research collaboration between Dr Fatima Mandhu (ZCAS) and Dr Pamela Durán-Díaz (IHS). Their work investigates how women living and working around Kabwe’s Black Mountain experience environmental harm, legal exclusion, and structural inequalities that remain invisible in Zambia’s mining policies. The research is grounded in qualitative fieldwork, including interviews, observations and collaborative storytelling with women miners and it uses Muted Group Theory (Ardener, 1975) as one of its analytical lenses.
Muted Group Theory argues that the dominant language of public life, including law and policy, is shaped by the group that holds power.
In Kabwe, this plays out through a governance system that grew out of a colonial mining economy. Decisions about land, minerals and health are still shaped by institutions created to serve companies and powerful actors rather than local families, which means the system speaks a language that does not reflect women’s realities. Women are present in every part of the daily life. They mine, they care for children, they face the highest exposure to contamination, but they are systematically unheard because the structures left behind by colonial extraction were never designed to hold what they know or what they endure.
Reclamation of voice, agency and narrative power
Behind the environmental harm lies gender injustice. Women are rarely consulted in mining decisions. They are excluded from licensing. They work in the most dangerous informal pits because they are barred from the safer ones. They raise children on contaminated land. Those children often work beside them, bare-handed, handling ore in soil that contains up to 60,000 mg/kg of lead, when anything above 200 mg/kg is considered hazardous.
To address this, Voices From Kabwe is more than an awareness raising campaign; it is a reclamation of voice, agency and narrative power. The IHS and ZCAS project gathers women’s audio testimonies. Their voices carry laughter, frustration, exhaustion, clarity, and an unmistakable will to survive. These recordings form the heart of a short multimedia reel designed for immediate sharing. The findings support not only Kabwe’s women, but also policymakers, legal advocates and NGOs seeking to strengthen gender-responsive land governance in mining-affected regions.
In the absence of a platform, Voices From Kabwe amplifies women’s testimonies, so they no longer speak into the void.
The moment that transformed our research into action
In late 2023, the Johannesburg High Court dismissed a class-action suit filed by 140,000 Kabwe residents against Anglo American South Africa, the company that operated the mine for roughly fifty years. The judge declared the case “unmanageable” and insisted that every person would need to prove their own poisoning. The court treated collective harm as if it could only be understood as isolated, individual injuries.
The appeal now underway in Johannesburg gives Kabwe a narrow window of hope. Women face it without cooperatives, associations, or legal structures to stand behind them. Thus, our project intends to build collective strength. At CLPA 2025, their voices filled a room of land practitioners, lawyers, activists, and land champions. For the first time, they heard Kabwe’s women directly. Not paraphrased, not softened, not hidden behind technical reports, but in their own words.
Acknowledging the most affected
Impact, in this context, is about recognition and consequence. When the voices of Kabwe’s women travel beyond the slag heaps and into public forums, they begin to unsettle the distance that usually protects institutions from accountability. Their testimonies remind policymakers that contamination and gender exclusion are not a technical problem but a lived reality, and that the global demand for African minerals continues to shape local suffering long after extraction stops.
Voices From Kabwe works to make this connection visible. By widening who listens, it strengthens the possibility that the appeal and future decisions about mining, remediation, and justice will finally acknowledge the people most affected.
Next steps
The next steps are already forming. Several CLPA participants requested deeper training on gender, human rights, and Muted Group Theory. Discussions are underway to build an online technical programme in collaboration with the YILAA Training Center. The goal is to expand the communicative space where women’s perspectives shape land governance rather than remain outside it.
Voices From Kabwe is still young and still growing. Yet it has already done something essential. It has shifted the centre of the conversation toward those who have carried the weight of silence for far too long. By listening to women, amplifying their stories, and refusing narratives that erase them, we begin repairing what extractive systems have broken.
We unmute their story. And once unmuted, a voice rarely falls quiet again.
