Reviewed by Aaron Mubanga JnrZambia sports betting writer
Published 16 September 2026
Catherine Phiri became Zambia’s first WBC world champion on 30 January 2016, taking the WBC female bantamweight title from Yazmin Rivas in Mexico, thousands of miles from home.
Rivas was the champion, she was at home, and she was by far the more experienced of the two. Phiri arrived with ten wins and a single defeat.
The fight ended in the sixth round on a technical decision. An accidental clash of heads opened a cut above Rivas’s right eye late in the round, the ringside doctor stopped the contest, and the judges’ cards to that point decided it. One card had the fight level at fifty seven each. The other two read fifty eight to fifty six and fifty nine to fifty five, both for Phiri.
The route to Mexico
Phiri turned professional in 2011 and won on her debut against a fellow Zambian. She took the WBC female bantamweight silver title in March 2014 by beating Pia Mazelanik of Germany, and lost for the first time in 2015 to Christina McMahon of Ireland.
That silver belt is what put her in the picture. It is the WBC’s secondary championship, one rung below the world title, and winning it is how a fighter from a small market gets seen at all.
The defence in Lusaka
She defended the title at home on 27 August 2016 against Gabisile Tshabalala of South Africa and won. Staging a world title defence in Lusaka rather than travelling to it is the harder half of the job in a small market.
Zambia had produced world ranked men before without producing a WBC champion. Lottie Mwale, the best known of them, went to a world title fight in the 1980s and lost it, and Esther Phiri had won world titles with the smaller WIBA sanctioning body from 2010. Catherine Phiri closed that gap, and she did it in a division and a sport where Zambian women had been competing professionally for only about a decade.
Where to bet: Zambian boxing fans find bout markets on Betway and Premierbet, licensed by the Gaming Regulatory Board, with odds in kwacha on fight winner, method of victory and round betting when a major card is on. Method of victory is the market to read carefully on a championship bout, because a technical decision after an accidental clash of heads settles differently from a stoppage. Compare the two books before a big night. Our guide to the best betting sites in Zambia covers licensing and withdrawal times, and there is more in Zambia boxing news from AXN Sports. 18+. Gamble responsibly.
