By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 13
The region already grows crops it struggles to sell. The binding constraint on youth agribusiness sits downstream of the field.
The core of Masake’s message was agricultural: a shift from subsistence toward commercial, climate-smart production, with young people in crop production, aquaculture, livestock and agro-processing. The region already grows food. What the indaba really tested is whether it can add value to what it grows, which is the difference between a harvest and an agribusiness that pays.
The Kalimbeza rice green scheme, east of Katima Mulilo, is the region’s clearest case. Declared a national project in 2009, it covers 222 hectares and grows three rice varieties – Supa, Irga and Angola. It demonstrates both the promise of commercial farming in the Zambezi and precisely where that promise has kept stalling.
The scheme that grows rice it cannot sell
Kalimbeza has produced real output, harvesting over 100 tonnes of rice in a recent season, and in 2024 it received N$8 million for rehabilitation. Yet it has been held back less by the growing than by everything after it: a broken processing machine, inadequate storage and the absence of a reliable market. Production had halted around 2020 when the agency then running the green schemes was dissolved, and operations returned to the ministry in 2022.
That is the lesson in miniature. The field is not the constraint; the processing, storage and buyer are. A scheme that can grow rice but cannot mill, store or sell it reliably has proved the easy half of agribusiness and stalled on the hard half.
Growing the crop was never the problem; selling it at value is where the scheme keeps failing.
Value chains, not just planting
Agribusiness is the chain from field to market – processing, storage, transport and a buyer – and NDP6’s stated emphasis on value addition points straight at it. There is movement: across government green schemes roughly 90 percent of irrigable land is now reported under cultivation, producing over 10,000 tonnes of maize and other crops, and a sugar plantation with a processing facility has been proposed for Katima Mulilo.
For young entrants, the opening is downstream of the paddy. Milling, packing, cold storage and distribution are where a grown crop becomes a sold one, and they are also where a region that imports processed food can substitute its own. A youth agribusiness plan that stops at planting repeats the Kalimbeza pattern.
The margin in Zambezi farming is in the mill and the market, not the seed.
Aquaculture and livestock as youth entries
The rivers and rangeland widen the options. The perennial Zambezi, Kwando, Linyanti and Chobe give the region genuine inland-fisheries and aquaculture potential, while cattle farming remains the most important agricultural activity in the region, supported by feed production. These are the sectors Masake named for young producers, and each has a shorter route to a buyer than a bulk grain crop does.
The value-chain logic still holds. Farmed fish needs cold chain and a market; cattle need feed, abattoir capacity and reliable offtake. The youth advantage lies in the chains that are shortest and least capital-heavy, where a young operator can reach a paying customer without waiting for a large facility to be built first.
Fish and livestock pay soonest where the chain to the buyer is shortest.
From access to market
The finance is being assembled. The National Youth Development Fund offers non-collateral loans, with Agribank and the Development Bank of Namibia positioned for larger projects, and green schemes and irrigation support sit behind them. Capital, for once, is not the first missing piece for a young Zambezi farmer.
The test is whether a buyer waits at the other end. Capital that funds production without securing a market simply builds another Kalimbeza – real output with nowhere reliable to go. Market access, contracts and processing are the constraints that decide whether the money produces income or inventory.
Finance without a buyer does not build a business; it builds a warehouse of unsold crop.
For an agribusiness founder or a development financier, the Zambezi indaba marks where the returns in regional farming actually sit: in the processing, storage and market links that turn a harvest into a sale. The decision it puts on the table is whether to fund the value chain around the field – the mill, the cold store, the buyer contract – or to keep financing planting into a market that, as Kalimbeza shows, is not yet there to receive it.
Sources: The Namibian; Kalimbeza green scheme receives N$8m (The Namibian); Ministry reports major progress at green schemes (The Namibian)
