By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 16

The wager is that a small economy can design the connective structure it has been waiting to grow.

Strip away the ribbon-cutting and ScaleUp Namibia is an argument about how a small economy should organise itself. Its premise is that Namibia does not lack entrepreneurs or ideas; it lacks the connective structure that turns them into companies, and that structure can be designed rather than waited for.

That is a foresight claim as much as a policy one. Deputy Minister Dino Ballotti framed the platform as a response to systemic challenges rooted in fragmentation, not in any shortage of talent. The big idea is that fragmentation itself is the problem worth solving.

Fragmentation as the real diagnosis

Most support schemes treat the symptom – too little funding, too few skills – and add another programme to a crowded field. ScaleUp Namibia starts from a different diagnosis: the programmes already exist but do not talk to each other, so a founder falls through the gaps between them. The intervention is coordination, not another silo.

This reframing is the intellectual move. It shifts the question from what new thing to build to how existing things connect, which is a cheaper and often harder problem. Naming the disease as fragmentation changes what a solution is allowed to look like.

Diagnose the gaps between programmes, and coordination becomes the innovation.

From ideation to commercialisation

The platform describes its purpose as bridging the distance between an idea and a business that sells something. That gap, between a working prototype and a firm in the market, is where research economies stall, and where NCRST, the platform’s coordinator, works through accreditation, technology support and the mission it sets itself of building a knowledge-based society.

Read as foresight, this is a bet on the whole value chain rather than a single stage. Funding the research or celebrating the launch is easy; wiring the messy middle, from lab to ledger, is the part that decides whether ideas become an economy.

The value is created in the middle – between the idea and the invoice.

The ecosystem as an institution

The more ambitious reading is that Namibia is trying to build an institution, not run a project. An earlier version launched in 2025 gathered 16 partner organisations; by February 2026 the framework counted more than 18 hubs. NIPDB Executive Peter Shivute had called those partners the foundations and pillars of the entrepreneurship ecosystem, language that describes a permanent structure rather than a campaign.

Institutions outlast the officials who start them, which is the point. A platform that becomes the default place startups are supported can keep working after the launch enthusiasm and the founding personalities have moved on.

That durability is the quiet test of any foresight play. Programmes end when their funding cycles do; institutions accrete habits, records and relationships that make them hard to unwind. Whether ScaleUp Namibia becomes the second thing rather than the first is the difference between a good idea and a lasting one, and it will not be visible for years.

A project ends with its budget; an institution keeps working after the launch.

The idea's weak point

The risk in a coordination-first idea is that coordination is not the same as capability. Connecting 18 hubs does not create funding, skilled mentors or paying customers if those were thin to begin with; it can produce a well-mapped ecosystem that is still shallow. Professor Anicia Peters, as NCRST head, put the human aim plainly, wishing for startups to find a home where they can thrive – but a home still has to be stocked.

The foresight bet only pays if the connected parts are individually strong. Otherwise the platform organises scarcity more efficiently than before, which is progress, but not the transformation it describes.

Coordinating weak parts yields a tidy system, not necessarily a strong one.

For a policymaker, a researcher or anyone thinking about how economies actually change, ScaleUp Namibia is a wager that architecture beats addition – that connecting what exists will do more than launching one more fund. The decision it poses is whether to invest in the connective tissue of an economy, which rarely photographs well, or to keep funding the visible projects that are easier to announce and easier to count.

Sources: The Namibian; NCRST – mandate and knowledge-based society; ScaleUp Namibia launched to drive economic growth (NIPDB)