By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 05

An operator, a founder and a scientist – several of the people steering the platform are women.

A platform is a structure until you notice who is standing in it. At the front of ScaleUp Namibia’s new Windhoek home, several of the people setting its direction are women – running the lead agency, founding the firms it showcases and leading the science body that coordinates it.

When the hubs were brought under one roof, NIPDB Acting Chief Executive Jessica Hauuanga was among those making the case for the platform, arguing that competitiveness today is not just about policies and incentives on paper. It was a practitioner’s point, not a ceremonial one.

The operator: Jessica Hauuanga

As Acting Chief Executive of the Namibia Investment Promotion and Development Board, Hauuanga sits where policy meets delivery. NIPDB is the platform’s facilitator, responsible for mentorship, investment facilitation and acceleration, which makes her office accountable for whether the coordination promised on launch day turns into support founders can use.

Her framing, that paper incentives are not enough, is the operator’s creed. It puts the emphasis on what firms actually receive rather than what a strategy document lists, and it is the standard by which the platform she helps lead will fairly be judged.

The test of a facilitator is delivered support, not announced intent.

The founder: Meike Neitz

Among the entrepreneurs the platform gathers is Meike Neitz, founder of the startup Embassidy, who welcomed the hubs being drawn together, describing the value of bringing them under one roof to join forces and do great things together. Founders like her are the platform’s customers and its proof of concept at once.

Her presence matters because a support system is only credible if the people it claims to serve are in the room shaping it. A founder who has built a company brings the practical test of whether a shared space and a directory actually shorten the road she had to walk.

The people a platform serves are most useful when they help design it.

The scientist: Anicia Peters

The coordinating science body, NCRST, is led by Professor Anicia Peters as chief executive, a computer scientist who set the human goal of wanting startups to find a home in Namibia where they can thrive. Her office connects the research and commercialisation sides that ScaleUp Namibia now tries to bridge.

That a woman scientist shapes the coordinating institution matters for signal as much as substance. In a field where technical leadership is still often assumed to be male, the founding record of this platform reads differently.

It also links two worlds that rarely share a leader: the laboratory and the ledger. A research administrator who talks about where startups make their home is describing the same bridge, from idea to enterprise, that the platform is built to carry, and setting that tone from the science side gives the coordination a coherence it might otherwise lack.

Technical leadership shapes what an ecosystem believes is possible, and who belongs.

Rising firms need capital, not applause

Profiles risk flattering the moment while the structural gap stays open. Women-owned firms in Namibia still face a documented gender financing gap, which is why the Development Bank of Namibia runs DBN For Her, a facility for wholly women-owned enterprises lending from N$150,000 to N$10 million at prime, with an interest-free first year. Recognition is cheap; that kind of capital is not.

The honest profile therefore pairs the visible women with the invisible constraint. A platform that puts women on the launch stage has done something; a system that routes real finance to the firms they run would do more.

Put women on the stage by all means, but route the capital to their firms.

For a mentor, a funder or anyone building Namibia’s next generation of companies, the people around ScaleUp Namibia – an operator, a founder, a scientist – are the more telling story than the platform itself. The decision they pose is whether to back the specific women already running and using this system with capital and contracts, rather than adding them to a guest list.

Sources: The Namibian; ScaleUp Namibia office opens to grow start-ups (New Era); DBN For Her – Women Entrepreneurs Financing Facility