BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year 2024: Who is Barbra Banda?

Banda made her senior international debut for Zambia in 2016.

At the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021, she became the first woman to score two hat-tricks in the same Olympic football tournament.

Three years later in Paris, the Zambia captain scored four goals, including a first-half hat-trick against Australia, to become Africa’s all-time top scorer – male or female – in Olympic football history with 10 goals.

At the 2023 Women’s World Cup, she scored in Zambia’s first ever win at the tournament. Her strike also marked the 1,000th goal in the Women’s World Cup.

Off the pitch, she launched the Barbra Banda Foundation in Zambia in 2021, which aims to alleviate poverty, promote equality through sport, and help raise awareness for issues affecting girls. She has spoken openly about the challenges of growing up as a young girl in Zambia, telling BBC Sport it “has never been easy” and it was “difficult” to get into sport.

In 10 years of the BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year award, Banda is one of only three Africans to have been nominated, and is the second to win it after Nigerian Asisat Oshoala in 2015.