By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 05

A finance minister, a gender minister and a bank's board chair put their authority behind a single women's fund.

Policies are announced by institutions but carried by people, and DBN For Her arrived in the hands of three women in senior office. A finance minister, a gender minister and a development bank’s board chairperson stood behind the N$400 million facility, about US$23 million, and each brought a different kind of authority to it. The launch put them on one platform.

That alignment is itself part of the story. A women’s finance facility introduced by women who hold the finance, gender and banking-governance levers is a rare convergence, and it shapes how the pledge should be read.

Ericah Shafudah, minister of finance

The finance minister gave the facility its fiscal weight. Ericah Shafudah described DBN For Her as a deliberate and strategic response to structural imbalances in the economy, framing women’s exclusion from credit as a macroeconomic problem rather than a social one. From the finance chair, that framing carries budgetary consequence.

Her argument was that access to finance is only the beginning, and that the aim is for women to become active drivers of growth, jobs and national development. Coming from the office that holds the purse, the words position the fund as economic policy, not charity.

When the finance minister calls exclusion a structural problem, the fix becomes fiscal, not charitable.

Emma Kantema, minister of gender equality

The gender minister supplied the moral frame. Emma Kantema, minister of gender equality and child welfare, argued that empowering women is not an act of charity but an act of justice and an investment in progress. Her office connects the facility to the wider machinery of women’s economic empowerment.

That voice matters for reach as much as principle. The gender ministry sits closest to the associations and community networks through which many of the target borrowers can actually be found, making the minister both an advocate for the fund and a channel for its message.

The gender portfolio brings the networks a finance product cannot reach on its own.

Evangelina Nailenge, board chairperson

Inside the bank, governance sat with its board chairperson. Evangelina Nailenge presented DBN For Her as a strategic intervention correcting women’s exclusion from economic participation, speaking not as a campaigner but as head of the body accountable for the bank’s lending decisions.

That distinction is important. A minister can champion a fund; a board chair has to answer for whether it is run prudently. Her endorsement signals that the facility is meant to sit inside the bank’s ordinary governance, judged by repayment and performance like any other book.

Having a woman chair the board that oversees a women’s fund also closes a small but real credibility loop. The people setting the bank’s risk appetite now include someone who understands, at first hand, the assumptions that have kept women out of it, which is precisely the perspective a corrective facility needs at the governance table rather than only at the launch podium.

A fund for women is more credible when a woman is accountable for how it lends.

Leaders, not yet a track record

The profiles come with a caution. Three senior women launching a fund is a strong signal of intent, but leadership at a podium is not the same as delivery in a branch. Namibia’s launch is also one node in a continental push to close the finance gap for women entrepreneurs, and it will be measured against that wider effort.

That is the honest limit of a launch-day profile. The leaders are real and their authority is real; the entrepreneurs the facility exists to create are still ahead. A year from now the more interesting names may be the women who built businesses on the money, not those who announced it.

Today’s names convened the fund; tomorrow’s will be the women it financed.

For anyone tracking who shapes Namibian enterprise, DBN For Her put three women with real institutional power behind a single pledge, which raises both expectation and accountability. The decision they now own is whether to convert a well-championed launch into a lending record that produces the next set of names, this time from the businesses the fund was built to back.

Sources: The Namibian; AfDB-funded credit facility for women-owned enterprises in Namibia (AfDB); Closing the finance gap for women entrepreneurs (African Leadership Magazine)