By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 12
The named principals are men; the people most likely to gain from closing the gap are women.
The N$405 million Telecom Namibia facility, about US$24 million, has two names attached to it in public: Stanley Shanapinda, the operator’s chief executive, and Leonard Hamunyela, the RMB Namibia transactor who structured the loan. Shanapinda set the goal as connectivity that lets every citizen reach education, commerce and online health services. Both named principals are men.
That is worth noticing in a story about inclusion, because the people most likely to gain from closing the connectivity gap, and to build businesses on the far side of it, are disproportionately women. The named leadership and the intended beneficiaries point in different directions.
The official on record
Shanapinda, who has led Telecom Namibia through a transformation programme built around network modernisation and customer experience, is the accountable figure for this deal. His framing of the upgrade around health, education and commerce access describes exactly the services that rural and low-income women rely on most when they come online. The mandate he states carries a gendered dividend, whether or not it is named as one.
He is a real, named official carrying a concrete plan, and that is the honest anchor for this profile. The rising stars the money might create, however, are still notional.
The named leader is clear; the women who could rise on this upgrade are not yet named.
The missing names
A profile of the women in business who stand to gain from this facility cannot yet name them, because the connection has not reached them and their enterprises do not yet exist in the record. Who the first women-led online businesses in the newly covered areas will be is, at the announcement, unknown [TK]. To invent a name would be to fabricate the very rising star the lens is meant to find.
This is a case where the honest move is to mark the gap. The infrastructure is being financed now; the entrepreneurs it enables are a near-future the deal makes possible but has not yet produced.
You cannot profile a rising star before the network that lets her rise is built.
Why the dividend is gendered
Connectivity does not fall evenly. Where affordable data arrives, women running informal trade, home-based services and small retail gain a channel to customers, payments and information they were previously cut off from, and studies of digital inclusion consistently find outsized gains for women once access is real. The offline third the loan targets is not gender-neutral.
That is why a financing story is also a women-in-business story. The N$405 million does not create entrepreneurs directly, but it lays the rail on which the next cohort of women-led digital enterprises can run.
Access is not neutral: closing the gap tends to lift women furthest.
The profile to write in two years
The meaningful profile here is prospective. If the modernisation delivers, the rising stars will be the women who build businesses on faster connections in towns that had 2G or nothing, and their names belong in a later edition, not an invented one now. The deal is the setting; the protagonists arrive after it.
For anyone tracking founders, that is the watch-list to open. The people to profile are not on the loan document; they are the users the loan is meant to reach, and they will surface as the coverage does.
This deal writes the stage directions; the women who take the stage come later.
For an investor in women-led enterprise, an incubator or a development agency, the Telecom Namibia deal marks where to look rather than who to back today. The named principals are the men who financed and lead the build; the decision for anyone serious about a gendered digital dividend is whether to prepare the finance, training and market access so that the women in the newly connected third become the rising stars this infrastructure makes possible.
Sources: The Namibian; Telecom Namibia (corporate); Namibia targets full digital transformation (New Era)
