By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 10
A development budget half again as large is where money for irrigation and mechanisation must come from – if it reaches the field.
Agriculture seldom takes the headline in a Namibian budget, yet it sits close to the argument the 2024/25 statement makes about demand and investment. A development budget lifted by roughly 58 per cent, reaching N$12.7 billion (about US$670 million), is the pool from which public money for irrigation, mechanisation and farm technology would have to be drawn, and the minister set it out in the budget review.
The question for the sector is whether any of that investment reaches the field – the green schemes, the solar pumps and the tractors – or stops at the larger, more visible projects that are easier to announce.
A small sector with an outsized claim
Agriculture contributes just over four per cent of GDP, a modest share for an activity that a large part of the population depends on directly or indirectly. Most of that dependence sits in the communal, low-technology farming that dominates the north, where output per hectare is low and rain-fed risk is high.
That mismatch is the case for spending on the sector. A branch of the economy that feeds most people while earning little national income is exactly where well-aimed technology, not more land, lifts both livelihoods and food security. The budget’s welfare and demand measures reach these households; the harder task is reaching their fields.
The sector that feeds the most people earns the least, which is precisely why its technology matters.
What the green schemes actually need
Namibia already runs eleven Green Scheme irrigation projects covering roughly 9,000 hectares along its perennial border rivers, and the Neckartal Dam, the country’s largest, can irrigate a further 5,000 hectares of high-value crops. These schemes are being leased to private operators to run.
Their binding constraint is not soil or water rights but equipment: efficient irrigation, reliable machinery and the working capital to keep both maintained. That is the point where a larger development budget and private investment could meet, turning idle or underused schemes into producing ones. The land is ready; the kit is not.
The green schemes are short of machines, not land – and machines are what money buys.
Agritech that has already been proven
The template for what such money can do already exists in the north. The climate-resilient CRAVE project, backed by roughly US$10 million from the Green Climate Fund, put 35 tractors to work, installed 41 solar-powered water pumps and a 125-kilowatt solar plant, and piloted crop insurance for vulnerable smallholders across the Kavango and Zambezi regions.
The lesson is not the novelty of any single tool but the combination. Solar irrigation, mechanisation and index insurance together lifted smallholder output and steadied incomes in a way no one measure could alone. It is a working demonstration of what a serious agritech allocation could scale across the schemes.
Solar pumps, tractors and insurance already work together in the north; the question is scale.
The competition for a thin slice
The obstacle is arithmetic. Agriculture competes for the development budget against education, health and the fixed claim of debt servicing, and a run of poor rains raises emergency relief needs that pull money toward feeding people now rather than equipping them to grow more later.
That is the sector’s recurring trap. Drought spending is urgent and visible; investment in irrigation and mechanisation is slow and quiet, and the second is always tempting to defer. Yet it is the deferred investment that would shrink the relief bill in the seasons to come.
Every season money goes to drought relief is a season it does not go to drought-proofing.
For an agribusiness, an equipment supplier or an investor in food systems, the 2024/25 budget marks where public and private capital could combine: solar-powered irrigation, mechanised green schemes and insurance that lets a smallholder take a risk. The decision is whether to move now, alongside a development budget the state has enlarged, or to wait and watch the money drain each dry year into relief that buys survival but no extra capacity.
Sources: The Namibian; CRAVE climate-resilient agriculture, Namibia (Green Climate Fund); Namibia – Agricultural Sector (US Commercial Guide, trade.gov)
