By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 10

A development bank carves out a protected pool for women and structures it to answer why they were refused before.

On 25 March 2026 the Development Bank of Namibia set aside a specific pool of capital for a group of borrowers it had largely missed. DBN For Her ring-fences N$400 million, about US$23 million, exclusively for enterprises that are wholly women-owned, and the way the money is put together says as much as the sum itself. The bank launched the facility as a deliberate correction rather than a gesture.

The women-only pool sits inside a larger arrangement. The African Development Bank has extended a line of credit of N$1.5 billion to DBN, from which the women’s portion is carved out and protected, so that capital meant for women cannot quietly drift toward easier, more familiar borrowers. Ring-fencing is the point: without it, a general fund tends to finance the applicants a bank already knows.

How the capital is put together

The structure blends several instruments. Alongside the N$400 million pool sits N$40 million in blended finance meant to bring down the cost of borrowing, plus credit guarantees and credit-life cover that stand in for the collateral many women cannot post. Loans run from N$150,000 to N$10 million at the prime rate, with a 12-month grace period during which no interest accrues.

Each feature answers a known reason women are turned away. The guarantees replace the fixed assets that lending has historically demanded; the grace period gives a young enterprise room before repayment starts; the blended tranche softens the price. Read together, they describe a facility engineered around the borrower rather than the balance sheet.

The design treats missing collateral as a problem to price around, not a reason to decline.

Why the market was mispriced

DBN’s own record shows the gap. Women-owned businesses had historically received only 14.12 percent of the bank’s total funding, a share far below their weight in the economy. That imbalance was not proof that women are weaker credit risks; it was proof that standard tests screened them out before performance could be measured.

The correction, then, is less about generosity than about pricing. If sound businesses were being refused for want of collateral rather than for want of cash flow, a lender that removes the collateral test should find performing loans where it previously saw none. The protected pool is a wager that the risk was overstated all along.

A borrower base the bank never tested is a mispriced asset, not a bad one.

What co-financiers should read into it

For other investors, the telling signal is the African Development Bank’s role. Its N$1.5 billion line of credit, routed through AFAWA, its Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa, brings both money and method: guarantees, technical assistance and a template already run in dozens of markets. A national bank is not experimenting on its own here.

That matters for anyone weighing a co-investment. A facility carrying a multilateral guarantee and an established programme behind it has a lower effective risk than the headline segment suggests. The presence of AFAWA is, in effect, a credit enhancement that a commercial co-lender can price against rather than shy from.

The bank’s AFAWA counterpart put the logic plainly. Alex Area, the African Development Bank’s chief AFAWA officer, said real impact happens when finance meets intention, a line that reads less as slogan than as underwriting philosophy: capital performs when it is aimed, not merely offered. For a commercial lender, the aimed pool is the proof of concept it can follow.

A multilateral guarantee turns an unfamiliar segment into a priced, shareable risk.

The limits of a ring-fence

The structure has a ceiling. N$400 million, spread in loans of up to N$10 million, reaches a few hundred enterprises at most, against a far larger population of underserved firms. A ring-fence proves the segment performs; it does not, by itself, close the shortfall.

The open question is what happens when the pool is drawn down. If the loans perform, the case for a second, larger tranche writes itself and commercial capital should follow. If they do not, the ring-fence will have been an expensive lesson. Either way, the first N$400 million is a test the whole market will be watching.

The pilot’s real yield is the data it produces, not only the loans it books.

For an investor, a commercial bank or a development financier, DBN For Her is less a welfare line than a live experiment in whether women-owned firms have been under-lent to all along. The decision it puts on the table is whether to wait for the repayment record or to help fund the next tranche now, while the segment is still cheap to enter.

Sources: The Namibian; DBN launches DBN For Her (Development Bank of Namibia); Namibia launches DBN For Her facility (Devdiscourse)