By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 05

A grant that names women- and youth-led firms as a priority is delivered by a board a woman currently leads.

A fund is only as real as the people who stand behind it, and at the SME Fund’s launch the public face was Jessica Hauuanga, acting chief executive of the NIPDB. She presented a grant that names women- and youth-led businesses as a priority, delivered by a board a woman currently leads. The fund is, in that sense, a women-in-business story from the top of the table down.

The named founders it will back are not yet public, since the first cycle only opened on 10 June 2026, so the individual rising stars remain [TK]. What is on the record is the principal steering the money and the explicit priority she has attached to who should receive it.

The principal at the table

Hauuanga leads the NIPDB in an acting capacity, and it is her framing that sets the fund’s tone. She called it a deliberate effort to move beyond transactional support and invest in the long-term competitiveness of Namibian enterprises, language that treats grantees as businesses to build rather than cases to relieve. The principal sets the posture before a cent moves.

That matters for how the priority reads. A woman-led board naming women- and youth-led firms as a priority is not a label attached to someone else’s programme; it is a stated choice by the person accountable for the results. Leadership and intention sit in the same office.

The fund’s priority is set by the principal who has to answer for its results.

Priority for women- and youth-led firms

The fund does not treat all applicants alike. Among its stated priorities are women- and youth-led businesses with growth potential, a deliberate lean toward the founders who most often stall at the scale-up gap for want of collateral and networks. The priority is a recognition of where the growth constraint bites hardest.

For a woman running a firm past survival but short of a bank’s terms, that lean is practical, not symbolic. It points N$50,000 to N$100,000 and mentorship at exactly the operator a commercial lender is slowest to back, on the argument that her business is under-capitalised rather than unpromising.

The priority reads growth potential, not need, into who is backed to scale.

The rising stars are still [TK]

The honest gap in the story is names. As of the launch, no grantees have been announced, so the women founders the fund will lift remain unnamed, a [TK] the next cycle will fill. A profile written now can point to the priority and the principal, but not yet to the entrepreneurs the money reaches.

That absence is itself a marker to watch. The measure of the women-led priority will not be the announcement but the list: whether, a year on, the backed firms and their founders reflect the priority the launch declared. The record, not the rhetoric, will tell.

The priority is on paper; the named rising stars have yet to appear.

Partnership as people, not just institutions

The launch framed the fund in personal terms. GIZ Namibia country director Tobias Gerster called the Namibia-Germany partnership at its core a partnership between people with ideas, ambition and the determination to create a better future. It is a deliberate reframing of an institutional programme around the founders it means to serve.

For a rising entrepreneur, that framing sets an expectation. A fund that describes itself through people, and puts a named principal and a stated priority behind the claim, invites judgement on whether the founders it actually backs match the ambition it advertises.

A fund described through people will be judged by the people it backs.

For a woman building a business in Namibia, the 2026 fund offers a stated priority and a principal who has put her name to it, if not yet a roster of backed founders to point to. The decision it puts to a rising entrepreneur is whether to enter the first cycle now and become one of the names the priority was written for, rather than wait to see whether the fund delivers on the lean it has publicly declared.

Sources: The Namibian; SME growth fund launched (Windhoek Observer); Namibia Investment Promotion and Development Board