By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 05

A regional appeal asks young people to lead transformation. The macro arithmetic shows how far the region has to travel.

On 13 January 2026, at the inaugural Zambezi Regional Youth Indaba, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Land Reform Ruthy Masake asked young people to become partners, producers and leaders in Namibia’s economic transformation. Her argument was that the region’s rivers, fertile land and cross-border position are assets waiting to be worked, and that under NDP6 the youth are the ones who should move from waiting to working.

The macro backdrop is sober. The Zambezi region holds roughly 142,000 people across 14,785 square kilometres, most of them subsistence farmers along the Zambezi, Kwando, Linyanti and Chobe rivers. It remains one of the country’s poorer regions, and a call to lead transformation has to reckon with the arithmetic of where the region actually starts.

The numbers the region starts from

The starting position is measurable. The 2012 Labour Force Survey recorded regional unemployment at 28 percent, and of those who do earn, about 37.8 percent draw wages or salaries, 13.3 percent live from farming, 13 percent from non-farm business and 10.1 percent from pensions. Electricity reaches only about 36 percent of the region, and its Human Development Index sits at a medium 0.628.

Those figures describe an economy that consumes most of what it produces and trades comparatively little. A youth-led shift has to lift that base, not just add activity at the margin, because a labour market where more than a third of the working-age population is outside paid employment does not transform on encouragement alone.

The region does not lack effort; it lacks the paid, tradable work that turns effort into income.

Why subsistence is a macro ceiling

Subsistence farming is a livelihood, not a market. A household that grows food to eat generates security but little surplus, and an economy built mostly on that pattern produces small tradable output, thin tax revenue and few wage jobs. That is the ceiling the region presses against, and it is structural rather than a matter of will.

Transformation, in macro terms, means converting consumption into commercial production – crops grown for sale, fish farmed for market, goods processed for export. The endowment is real, but an endowment that is eaten rather than sold cannot by itself raise regional income, which is the gap the indaba was convened to close.

An economy that eats its own harvest stays fed and stays poor at the same time.

NDP6 as the policy lever

The plan behind the appeal is NDP6, which reprioritises agriculture, fisheries and natural resources as sectors for job creation, food security and export growth, and marks a stated shift from subsistence toward commercial, climate-smart production. It scales up a National Youth Development Fund offering non-collateral loans, alongside Agribank and Development Bank financing for larger projects.

The caution is history. Earlier national plans set employment targets that were not met, and unemployment stayed high through the last plan period. A fund and a reprioritisation are inputs; whether they convert into regional output is the open question, and the Zambezi economy has heard ambitious plans before without seeing the base move.

The policy lever is in place; whether it moves the load is the only test that counts.

What the region has to sell

On the credit side, the assets Masake named are genuine: perennial water, fertile riverine land, inland fisheries potential, tourism linkages and access to cross-border markets in Zambia, Botswana and beyond. Few Namibian regions hold that combination, and each is a plausible base for commercial rather than subsistence income if it can be organised and financed.

The macro task is conversion. An analyst reading the region would watch not the size of the endowment but the share of it that reaches a market: tonnes sold rather than grown, visitors served, goods moved through the corridor. Those ratios, not the appeal itself, will show whether transformation has begun.

Judge the region on what it sells, not on what it is fortunate enough to hold.

For an investor or a regional policymaker, the Zambezi indaba frames a clear macro decision. The endowment is not in doubt; the conversion of it into paid, tradable output is. The choice is whether to fund the commercial rails – processing, markets, finance and skills – that turn a subsistence base into a trading one, or to keep issuing appeals against a poverty line that has not moved.

Sources: The Namibian; Lead economic transformation, Zambezi youth told (New Era); Zambezi Region (population and economy)