By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 08
The offline third is not a social statistic but an addressable audience waiting on infrastructure.
Roughly a third of Namibians were still offline as the 2026 upgrade was announced, and that figure is the market the N$405 million facility is really aimed at. The loan, roughly US$24 million, funds broadband access and mobile capacity, but its target is people who cannot yet be reached by a website, an app or a digital advert. RMB and Telecom Namibia described the goal as fast, reliable and affordable connectivity for every citizen.
For any business that sells or markets online, that offline third is not a social statistic but an addressable audience waiting on infrastructure. When those people connect, they become reachable for the first time.
The offline third is an untapped audience
About 35% of the population had no internet access when the deal was signed, most of them in rural and low-income areas that fixed and mobile networks reach thinly. Every one of those people is, in marketing terms, unreachable – outside the search results, the social feeds and the messaging channels where commerce increasingly happens.
The facility aims to change that by funding coverage and capacity where the market has been thin. For consumer brands, telcos and digital services, the upgrade quietly expands the total addressable market of the whole country.
Coverage is the precondition for a customer; you cannot market to the unconnected.
Speed changes what can be sold
The national plan behind the loan targets minimum speeds of 25 Mbps and the retirement of the ageing 2G and 3G networks. That shift matters commercially: 25 Mbps supports video, streaming, app stores and rich media, while a 2G connection carries little more than text. The kind of product a business can sell depends on the speed the customer holds.
As the network moves up, so does the ceiling on digital services. Video advertising, online education, streamed entertainment and app-based commerce all become viable for audiences that a slow connection previously shut out.
The bandwidth a customer holds sets the ceiling on what you can sell them.
From connection to consumer behaviour
Getting people online is only the first step; the second is habit. A new user with a faster connection does not immediately behave like a seasoned online shopper, and the businesses that gain most will be those that meet first-time users with simple, data-light, locally relevant services.
That is a marketing problem as much as an infrastructure one. The upgrade opens the door, but the offline third will not walk through it for every brand equally, because trust, language and price will decide who they connect with.
Access creates the audience; relevance decides who it actually follows.
The affordability catch
Coverage without affordability is a half-open door. Telecom Namibia has framed the modernisation around affordable connectivity precisely because a signal a household cannot pay for does not close the gap. The commercial question is whether data prices fall far enough for the newly covered to become active, spending users.
For marketers, that is the variable to watch. The size of the online audience two years from now depends less on where the towers stand than on what a gigabyte costs the people beneath them.
The market grows only as fast as data becomes something ordinary households can afford.
For a consumer brand, a digital marketer or an online service, the RMB-backed upgrade is a signal to plan for a larger, slower-moving audience than the connected cities suggest. The decision is whether to design now for first-time, data-conscious users in newly covered areas, or to keep marketing only to the third of the country already online and cede the rest to whoever reaches them first.
Sources: The Namibian; Telecom secures N$405m social loan to bridge digital divide (Namibia Economist); Digital 2026: Namibia (DataReportal)
