By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 08
In one of Namibia's driest regions, a mine that needs water is also funding the land around it. Both facts are the story.
Alongside the N$7.9 billion headline of 23 October 2024 sat a quieter announcement: Swakop Uranium had donated 1,000 goats and sheep, worth N$3 million, to farming cooperatives in Erongo under its Hope Farm project. The gift, made as the mine reported that it had injected N$7.9 billion into the local economy, points to the region’s deeper constraint: this is arid land, and both mining and farming compete for the same scarce water.
That tension is the food-systems question hiding inside a uranium story. On the driest coast of a dry country, a large industrial water user and a fragile farming economy have to share one resource, and the mine’s social spending is partly an attempt to hold that balance.
Water is the binding constraint
Erongo is among Namibia’s most water-stressed regions, and its uranium mines run on desalinated seawater rather than groundwater for exactly that reason. The Erongo Desalination Plant at Wlotzkasbaken, built between 2008 and 2010 at a cost of N$2.5 billion, about US$150 million at the time, produces up to 20 million cubic metres a year and sells water on through the state utility NamWater to the coast’s mines and towns.
For farming, that scarcity is the whole game. Where a mine can buy desalinated water at industrial scale, a smallholder cannot, so any model that lets both mining and agriculture draw on a fragile commons has to treat water as the resource to be managed first.
In Erongo the real currency is not uranium but water, and everything competes for it.
Turning mining revenue into livestock
The Hope Farm project is an attempt to convert mining income into food-system resilience. The 1,000 goats and sheep, valued at N$3 million, were directed to cooperatives with the stated aim of building sustainable livelihoods for women and youth, seeding herds that can breed, feed households and generate income independent of the mine.
Livestock is a considered choice on arid land. Goats and hardy sheep tolerate sparse grazing far better than crops, so a herd is a more durable asset than a garden in a place where rainfall cannot be relied on.
A herd that breeds is a food supply that compounds; a cash gift is spent once.
Feeding the community around the pit
The social programme reaches beyond livestock. Swakop Uranium’s foundation has invested in education, agriculture and disaster relief, and its 2024 spending funded school feeding facilities and hostel improvements across Erongo and neighbouring regions. These are food-security rails as much as social ones, keeping nutrition and local supply attached to the mine’s presence.
For a sustainable local economy, that circulation matters. A feeding scheme sourced locally and a herd raised in the region keep more of the mine’s benefit on the land than a one-off cash transfer that leaks straight back out to distant suppliers.
The durability of the arrangement rests on that breadth. When a mine’s water use is visible and its farming support is real, communities have reason to accept the trade-off; when the extraction is felt but the benefit is not, the same communities have every reason to resist. Spreading benefit widely is therefore not charity but the licence that lets a thirsty industry operate on thirsty land.
Local food and livestock are how a mine’s money stays rooted in the region it draws from.
The stewardship test
The measure of success is whether the arid commons can carry both uses over time: whether the mines keep sourcing water without draining the aquifers, and whether the herds and gardens the mine funds outlast the donation that started them. Those are long-horizon questions, and they are the right ones for a semi-arid region.
The risk is that the balance tips. If industrial water demand grows faster than supply, or if social projects fade once the cameras leave, the region keeps the extraction and loses the resilience the spending was meant to build.
The land carries mining and farming together only if neither is allowed to exhaust the water.
For anyone working in agribusiness, water policy or community land management, Husab is a case study in sharing a scarce resource: a large water user underwriting the farming economy around it. The decision it poses to the region is whether mining revenue can be turned into lasting food-system resilience, or whether the goats and the school kitchens fade while the pit and its thirst remain.
Sources: The Namibian; Swakop Uranium donates 1,000 goats and sheep to Erongo farmers (Windhoek Observer); Erongo Desalination Plant (Wikipedia)
