About the AUD/ZMW rate
The AUD/ZMW rate is how many ZMW one Australian dollar buys. It moves constantly with interest-rate expectations, commodity prices and global risk sentiment - see what moves the rate. Tradergy shows the mid-market reference rate and does not forecast where it’s heading. For the 52-week highs and lows and a daily table, see the AUD/ZMW rate history.
The other directions of this rate: the reverse rate, ZMW → AUD, is on the receiving Zambian kwacha view, and sending Australian dollars to Zambia is covered on the AUD → ZMW transfer page. Every AUD pair sits on the convert hub, and to work in more than one currency at once there is the currency converter.
Zambia's two attempts at making the kwacha compulsory
Statutory Instrument 33 of 2012 made it an offence to quote a price in Zambia in anything but kwacha. Regulation 4(1) provided that a person shall not quote, pay, demand to be paid or receive foreign currency as legal tender for goods, services or any other domestic transaction. It was made under section 57 of the Bank of Zambia Act on the Bank's recommendation and signed by the Minister of Finance on 7 May 2012.
Its reach went backwards as well as forwards. Regulation 4(2) deemed every pre-existing contract, sale, bill, note, instrument or security for money to be executed or discharged in Zambia to refer instead to the corresponding kwacha amount, calculated at the commercial bank spot selling rate. The penalty in regulation 6 was a fine of up to one hundred thousand penalty units or imprisonment up to ten years, or both, with directors and managers of a body corporate deemed to have committed the same offence unless they could prove absence of knowledge, consent or connivance.
It did not last two years. The Zambian Legal Information Institute records the instrument as revoked on 28 March 2014 by the Bank of Zambia (Currency) (Revocation) Order.
Zambia returned to the question in 2025, and the design of the second attempt turns on the first. In remarks published by the Bank for International Settlements, the Governor of the Bank of Zambia set out Currency Directives requiring domestic transactions to be settled in kwacha, with exemptions for specified economic activities, while quoting and invoicing in a foreign currency remain permitted. Only where government is a party must quoting, invoicing and settlement all be in kwacha. The Governor recorded that stakeholders had expressly asked the Bank to draw the lessons of the implementation and subsequent revocation of Statutory Instrument 33, and described the approach as phased and simplified rather than strictly rule-based.
Sources: Statutory Instrument No. 33 of 2012, The Bank of Zambia (Currency) Regulations, 2012 · Zambian Legal Information Institute, Statutory Instrument 33 of 2012 · Denny H. Kalyalya, Governor of the Bank of Zambia, opening remarks on the Bank of Zambia Currency Directives 2025, 9 October 2025, published by the Bank for International Settlements