Key takeaways
- Job Expo Zambia 2026 runs on 16 October at the Lusaka Showgrounds Polo Fields. Registration is free but mandatory at jobexpo.africa.
- The event is built around one idea: put job seekers and employers in the same space so conversations can replace scattered applications.
- Zambia’s official unemployment rate was 9.9 percent in the 2024 labour survey, but 51.4 percent of Zambians aged 15 to 35 were not in employment, education or training.
- The organisers list graduates, professionals, students, job seekers and entrepreneurs as intended attendees.
- Enquiries are handled on WhatsApp only, at 0773 505 988.
Job Expo Zambia 2026 is a one-day recruitment event taking place on Friday 16 October 2026 at the Lusaka Showgrounds Polo Fields. Attendance is free, but registration is mandatory in advance at jobexpo.africa, and enquiries are handled on WhatsApp only at 0773 505 988.
The event’s calling card is a photograph that has travelled widely on Zambian social media. A man in a dark hoodie and a face mask stands at a city intersection holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign: “LOOKING FOR A JOB – PROJECT ENGINEER”. Nothing about it is complicated. Somebody with a technical trade to sell has resorted to advertising at the roadside because the usual hiring channels never connected him to the people doing the hiring.
That sign is one person’s version of a matching problem the statistics have described for years. Zambia does not only have a shortage of work. It has a shortage of encounters between people who need work and organisations that need people. A jobs fair cannot fix an economy, but it can manufacture those encounters at scale, which is what this one says it intends to do.
What the labour numbers show
Zambia’s headline unemployment rate has been falling. The Zambia Statistics Agency’s 2024 Labour Force Survey put the rate at 9.9 percent, down from 12.9 percent in 2021 and 12.6 percent in 2022.
The improvement is real, and it is also narrower than it looks. Unemployment among youth aged 19 to 34 ran at 18.4 percent, nearly double the national rate. A larger figure sits behind it: 51.4 percent of Zambians aged 15 to 35, about 3.4 million people, were not in employment, education or training at all. Among those who do work, informality dominates. The same survey found 75.5 percent of employed women and 68.5 percent of employed men in informal jobs, where pay tends to be lower and legal protections thinner.
Read together, the numbers describe a labour market with a vast informal core, a thin formal layer, and millions of young people standing outside both. An engineer holding a sign at the roadside fits somewhere in that picture, and so does every employer complaining about a shortage of experienced candidates in a country with millions of idle young people. The two complaints are the same complaint.
What happens on 16 October
The expo runs for one day at the Polo Fields of the Lusaka Showgrounds. In the organisers’ words, it exists so that skills meet opportunities, CVs meet recruiters, and conversations can lead to careers. For job seekers used to firing CVs into silent inboxes, the offer is face time: a chance to be questioned and remembered by the people who actually hold the vacancies.
Registration is free but mandatory at jobexpo.africa. The organisers take enquiries on WhatsApp only, at 0773 505 988.
Who should go, and what to carry
The organisers list their audience plainly: graduates, professionals, students, job seekers and entrepreneurs. For graduates and job seekers, the mechanics matter more than the branding. Register before travelling, because entry is tied to registration. Carry printed CVs, more copies than feel reasonable, because data bundles die at the worst moments. Prepare a two-minute introduction that states your trade as plainly as the cardboard sign does, then be ready to say what you have built, fixed, managed or delivered.
Students who are not yet job hunting should treat the expo as market research: a rare chance to hear employers describe, unprompted, what they actually screen for. Entrepreneurs belong there too. A jobs expo is a room full of employed and employable people, which makes it a reasonable place to find staff, partners and customers. Those building businesses may also find our Doing Business in Zambia guide useful preparation.
Why employers should take the other side seriously
Expos live or die on the employer side. A recruiter with vacancies can spend weeks and placement fees sourcing candidates one at a time. A single-day event puts candidates in one place, documents in hand. For small firms without human resources departments, that concentration is worth more than it is to big companies with established pipelines.
The timing helps. Zambia’s economy has spent 2026 consolidating rather than accelerating: inflation and the kwacha have steadied, but as we noted in our Q2 review, the growth dividend, and with it broad-based hiring, has been slower to arrive. When demand does turn, the firms that already know who they can call will move first. Events like this are one way to build that list before it is urgent.
The bottom line
A cardboard sign is a cry for attention, not a career strategy, and no engineer should need one. Whether Job Expo Zambia 2026 delivers will be decided by who turns up on both sides of the stands. For anyone hunting for work in Lusaka this October, the cheapest available move is to register and find out.
Job Expo Zambia 2026 takes place on 16 October 2026 at the Lusaka Showgrounds Polo Fields. Registration is free but mandatory at jobexpo.africa. Enquiries: WhatsApp only, 0773 505 988.
Related reading: Zambia’s Q2 2026 Economy: Stability Deepens, the Growth Dividend Still Missing, Grow Zambia Targets Offer Real Opportunities, Says Haabazoka and Strong Grounds for Take-Off: Zambia Is Entering a Sweet Spot of Economic Positivity. For upcoming events, see our Events page.
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