Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Economic policies loom over Zambia’s election, Spain comes up with a plan for the more than 1,000 Moroccan children who remain in Ceuta, and Colombia’s new administration recognizes Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Economic policies loom over Zambia’s election, Spain comes up with a plan for the more than 1,000 Moroccan children who remain in Ceuta, and Colombia’s new administration recognizes Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Zambians head to the polls on Aug. 13 for an election that will test President Hakainde Hichilema’s economic policies amid intense rivalry between the United States and China over the country’s critical minerals.

Although analysts initially expected Hichilema to secure a comfortable second-term win, a newly reorganized opposition that emerged out of the Patriotic Front, the former ruling party from 2011 to 2021, has transformed the election into a close contest.

International media coverage of Zambia largely focuses on U.S.-China competition over economic influence in the country, which is Africa’s second-largest copper producer. Zambia is also home to large deposits of other critical minerals including cobalt, lithium, nickel, and graphite.

The U.S.-led Lobito Corridor hopes to upgrade an 810-mile railway connecting Angola’s port of Lobito to Zambia through the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo. In response, China announced last year that it would modernize the Tazara line connecting the Tanzanian seaport of Dar es Salaam to Zambia’s copper provinces.

Yet while Zambia’s natural resources have put this election under international scrutiny, voter frustrations center on rising food prices and rolling blackouts. As much as they “do acknowledge some of these broader issues,” said Menzi Ndhlovu, a lead analyst at Signal Risk, Zambians care more about how Hichilema’s economic reforms have “translated to a change in people’s living standards.” 

Hichilema inherited the first African economy to have defaulted on its sovereign debt during the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020. After taking office in 2021, Hichilema forged closer ties with the International Monetary Fund, ended fuel and energy subsidies, and introduced free primary and secondary school education. (Lusaka temporarily reimplemented fuel subsidies until September amid an energy crisis.) He also ramped up Zambia’s copper output.

On his campaign trail, Hichilema has pointed to his success in restructuring $6.3 billion of debt with foreign nations through the G20 Common Framework. His government recently bought debt back from private bondholders and plans to invest the saved interest payments in electricity generation. Annual inflation has dropped to 6.5 percent, its lowest in eight years.

But copper extraction has failed to create well-paid jobs. Around 60........

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