By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 11
Behind the fund's talk of manufacturing and agriculture sits a quieter bet on hair, music, food and hospitality.
The National Youth Development Fund is described in the language of industry: agriculture, agro-processing, manufacturing, value addition. Read its full list of eligible sectors, though, and a softer economy appears alongside them, creative industries, beauty and hair, tourism and hospitality, the trades where much youth enterprise already lives.
That inclusion matters because it recognises where young Namibians earn. A salon, a small studio, a caterer or a guesthouse is not a fallback from the real economy; for many it is the business. Financing the leisure economy on the same terms as a factory is a statement about what counts as productive.
Where young enterprise already trades
Beauty services, catering, events, music and small-scale hospitality are among the most common youth ventures because they need modest capital and sell into everyday life. They have long run informally, on cash and word of mouth. Naming them as eligible sectors brings that existing activity inside the fund rather than inventing it.
The effect is to formalise trades that were already sustaining young people. A hairdresser or a caterer who can borrow N$60,000 at 2% to buy equipment is not being pushed into a new line, but backed in one they already know. Recognition, here, does nearly as much as capital.
The fund does not create the leisure economy; it finally lends to the one that exists.
Culture as an economic sector
Namibia has increasingly framed its cultural and creative industries, fashion, film, crafts and music, as economic activity rather than pastime. Funding them on commercial terms treats a designer or a musician as a business owner with a cash flow, not a hobbyist seeking a handout. That framing changes how the work is valued.
It also keeps cultural value circulating at home. A craft made and sold locally, a song recorded in a Namibian studio, keeps spending and skill in the country rather than importing both. The leisure economy is where a good deal of that local circulation happens.
Treating culture as a sector turns a pastime into a payroll.
Leisure ventures are labour-heavy
Salons, kitchens and small lodges share a useful trait: they employ people. A hospitality or beauty business grows by adding hands, not only machines, which makes the sector a direct route from one loan to several jobs. For a fund judged partly on employment, that ratio is attractive.
The same labour intensity is a fragility. These businesses live on discretionary spending that falls first when household budgets tighten, and their margins are thin. The jobs they create are real but exposed, which is why cheap, patient capital suits them better than expensive credit.
Leisure ventures turn a single loan into several wages, and several fragile ones.
The risk of a crowded corner
The ease of entry that makes beauty and catering popular also makes them crowded. If the fund finances many similar salons or food ventures in the same towns, it risks backing businesses that compete each other’s margins away rather than opening new demand. Access can tip into oversupply.
The answer is not to exclude these trades but to reward what sets a venture apart, a distinct offering, a location, a brand. In a leisure economy, differentiation is survival, and capital works best where it backs the operator doing something the street does not already have.
In a crowded trade, the fund should finance difference, not another identical shop.
For a young operator in beauty, food, culture or hospitality, the fund’s quiet message is that the leisure economy is now bankable on the same terms as any factory. The decision it raises for the fund is whether to back these labour-heavy, easily copied trades indiscriminately, or to finance the ventures that bring something the local market does not yet have.
Sources: The Namibian; National Youth Development Fund brochure (Ministry of Finance); Side hustles become a lifeline for the youth (Windhoek Observer)
