After two years of crippling blackouts driven by drought, Zambia is catching a break as water levels at the Kariba Dam climb back up. But the country’s underlying vulnerability to climate swings hasn’t gone away.
A crisis born from drought
Between 2023 and 2024, Zambia went through one of the worst energy crises in its history. The trigger was a severe drought, the worst the country’s southwest had seen in forty years, made worse by El Niño. Rivers dried up, harvests failed, and millions of Zambians lost access to clean water.
The knock-on effects hit hard because Zambia gets roughly 82 percent of its electricity from hydropower, most of it from the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which alone supplies more than 80 percent of the country’s power. By 2024, the lake had dropped to just 13 percent of usable storage, a record low. Households in Lusaka were left with as little as four hours of power a day, sometimes going sixteen to twenty hours without electricity. Hospitals, schools, and small businesses all felt it.
The damage went well beyond the grid. Maize yields fell nearly 54 percent below average. A cholera outbreak in late 2024 put more than five million people at risk. Some local business leaders described the economic fallout as harder to absorb than the COVID-19 lockdowns.
The turnaround in 2026
Since March 2026, the picture has changed considerably. A stronger 2025/2026 rainy season pushed Kariba’s water levels steadily upward. By July 21, the reservoir held 47.47 percent usable storage — around 30.76 billion cubic meters of water — nearly double what it held at the same point the year before, when storage sat at just 23.9 percent. That’s enough to cover the 2026 water allocation of 36 billion cubic meters set aside for power generation, split evenly between Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The relief is seasonal, though. As the dry season sets in, inflows are already tapering off — flow at Victoria Falls dropped from 1,549 cubic meters per second at the end of June to 980 three weeks later — and the reservoir has now passed its annual peak.
Diversifying under pressure
Burned by the 2023-2024 crisis, Zambian authorities have moved to cut the country’s reliance on hydropower.
Solar is scaling up. A presidential directive calls for 1,000 megawatts of renewable capacity across public institutions. A 22-megawatt solar plant, built for $17.5 million, came online in March 2026 — one beneficiary reported it eliminated roughly $12,000 a week in diesel generator costs.
Regional grid connections are also expanding. On May 6, 2026, regulators approved the Kalumbila-Kolwezi Interconnector Project, a 200-kilometer high-voltage line linking Zambia to the Democratic Republic of Congo, costing $270 million. It’s designed to secure power for a key mining site and tap into DRC’s abundant hydropower reserves. A second project, the Zambia-Tanzania-Kenya corridor, backed by $292 million from the World Bank, the EU, and the UK, is expected to open up electricity trading by 2027.
Access to electricity is improving, but unevenly. The national electrification rate rose from 44.6 percent in 2020 to 51.1 percent in 2023, though only 17.6 percent of rural households are connected. The government is aiming for universal access by 2030.
A vulnerability that hasn’t gone away
Zambia’s reliance on a single river system remains a serious weak point. Back in 2023-2024, the government launched a water transfer scheme: a 300-kilometer channel, built by a Chinese contractor, to divert water from the Lwapula River — part of the Congo basin — into the Kafue River, where two of Zambia’s hydropower stations sit.
The regional backdrop only sharpens the stakes. The African Union has designated 2026 the « African Year of Water and Sanitation, » at a time when only 24 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa have access to safe drinking water. A Pacific Institute report also counted 76 water-related conflicts across sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, up from 44 in 2022.
For Zambia, the math hasn’t fundamentally changed. As long as its energy mix stays this tied to rainfall, a poor wet season could easily bring back the conditions of 2023-2024. The current push into solar and cross-border power links is meant to break that pattern — but whether it actually works will only become clear the next time a serious drought hits.
