Copperbelt University is a public university in Kitwe, Zambia. It is the largest public university in Zambia. The language of instruction at the university is English.
This study examines the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on financial performance of SME suppliers and contractors in the mining industry in Zambia and tests the direct and mediating effects of entrepreneurial leadership on this relationship. Using primary data from 254 SMEs in the Copperbelt Province of Zambia, we conducted a regression analysis to evaluate the effect of CSR on financial performance and the mediating role of entrepreneurial leadership. The results indicate a positive relationship between CSR and financial performance and that this relationship was partially mediated by entrepreneurial leadership. This suggests that SMEs who embrace entrepreneurial leadership along with CSR initiatives are more likely to see improvements in their financial performance. Therefore, the study recommends that owner-managers of SMEs should embrace entrepreneurial leadership and integrate CSR activities to improve their financial performance. This study makes contribution to the literature in the domain of sustainable performance of SMEs. The study also contributes to our knowledge on how CSR practices can improve the financial performance of SMEs in developing countries. In addition, this study is different from others because it introduces entrepreneurial leadership as a mediating factor in the CSR-financial performance relationship.
ABSTRACT Fresh fish is highly perishable and requires an efficient cold chain to maintain quality and safety. In Zambia, recurrent load shedding disrupts refrigeration and storage systems, increasing the risk of post‐harvest losses and food safety. This study examined the effects of load shedding on fresh fish handling, supply and consumer access in Chinsali District of Muchinga Province, Zambia, in June 2024. Semi‐structured questionnaires were administered to fish suppliers (n = 19) and consumers (n = 169), and data were analysed using descriptive statistics and the chi‐square test of independence. Results showed that 93% of suppliers and 84% of consumers were negatively affected by load shedding, mainly through accelerated spoilage, inconsistent supply and increased operational costs. Consumers responded by purchasing smaller quantities or shifting to alternative protein sources, whereas suppliers adopted coping measures, such as reducing inventory and investing in alternative energy options. The findings highlight the vulnerability of the fresh fish value chain to energy disruptions and emphasize the need for improved preservation technologies, training in post‐harvest handling and policy support to strengthen cold‐chain resilience in rural aquaculture and fisheries markets.
Copper and cobalt are critically important metals for the transition to renewable energy and various aspects of modern life. Their production from primary sources, ores, necessitates metallurgical separation from the unwanted host materials, resulting in the generation of a huge amount of waste. Copper smelting slag is one of these metallurgical wastes, with 39 million tonnes of slag generated and discarded globally each year. These massive amounts of slag occupy a considerable and growing land footprint, often close to residential areas, and present a hazard that potentially releases contaminants into the environment. On the other hand, they also represent a material that often contains a significant residual amount of valuable copper and cobalt. To better understand and address the challenge of reducing the adverse impacts of the waste, as well as the possible commercial opportunity the contained critical metals present, this study reviews global smelting slag production over the last 25 years, its composition, and technical reprocessing options. A summary of the chemical and mineralogical characterization of the copper slag from diverse research is thus provided, as well as a comprehensive overview of the processing strategies for metal recovery from copper slag, such as flotation, pyrometallurgy, and hydrometallurgy. The study demonstrates that a huge amount of smelting slag has been produced, with great variation and complexity, which represents a major potential resource for cobalt and copper metals. The chemical and mineralogical composition of smelting slag varies from location to location, depending on the properties of the feed concentrate, type of fluxes, furnace type, and cooling rates employed during and after the smelting processes. The overview of the production trends and reprocessing techniques shows that while some notable effective options exist or are emerging, further research is needed into the reprocessing of smelting slag waste in order to create economic value, improve energy efficiency in metal production, increase critical metal supply, and reduce negative environmental impacts.
Lead (Pb) pollution is a persistent environmental and public health crisis worsened by mining activities in African mining landscapes. Pb is a non-biodegradable toxicant that can enter the food chain via surface deposition or plant uptake from the rhizosphere. This review synthesizes the current status of Pb pollution, the food chain as a pathway for exposure, associated health challenges, and intervention strategies for Pb contamination in African mining areas. Following PRISMA guidelines, 92 peer-reviewed articles from 2000 to 2024 were identified across multiple databases. Original articles from reputable journals with complete metadata, abstracts, and full texts were included, while duplicates, theses, non-English studies, and articles outside this scope were excluded. Results show that soil Pb levels in West and Southern Africa exceeded permissible limits, while monitoring gaps exist in Northern and East Africa. The review notes Pb bioaccumulation in food crops, posing major health risks, especially to children, necessitating long-term interventions. Although bioremediation and amendment-assisted phytoremediation have shown promise, their suitability for large-scale application and community replicability requires further study. Amendment-assisted phytoremediation with biochar has shown potential to stabilize Pb in soil, but its effectiveness depends on many variables and requires adapting methods to local conditions. There is a significant knowledge gap regarding the long-term stability of sequestered Pb and the replicability of interventions across varying environments. Future research should focus on optimizing local, cost-effective remediation and establishing unified monitoring frameworks to protect food security and public health continent-wide.
This paper presents BREATHE (Building Respiratory Early Alerts Through Hybrid Explainable-Ensembles), a novel integrative hybrid framework for interpretable and reliable prediction in complex real-world settings. The framework integrates time-series modeling, ensemble learning, and surrogate-based explainability into a single, end-to-end pipeline designed to preserve temporal ordering and provide inherent interpretability. To demonstrate its value, BREATHE was applied to a long-term, multidisciplinary dataset from a mining community in Kankoyo, Zambia, to forecast three distinct SO2-linked respiratory illnesses. Disease-specific hybrid models were developed for asthma, pneumonia (RI_P), and non-pneumonia respiratory illnesses (RI_non_P) using combinations of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), Random Forest (RF), AdaBoost, and Prophet, with Ridge regression as the meta-learner. To ensure transparency, high-fidelity surrogate models ( $R^{2} = 1.0$ ) enabled global and local interpretation via SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values and permutation importance. The models achieved strong predictive performance, with $R^{2}$ values of 0.8425 for RI_non_P, 0.6986 for asthma, and 0.5753 for RI_P. The key contributions of this work are: 1) a novel, transferable architecture for disease-specific forecasting in data-scarce, high-pollution environments; 2) a fully interpretable pipeline anchored by high-fidelity surrogates; and 3) a practical application that yields actionable public health insights. BREATHE provides an ethically grounded blueprint for building transparent AI surveillance systems in environmental and epidemiological domains.
