Yearly on Might 25, Africa Day gives us with a second to pause and replicate on the form of continent we’re constructing. However this isn’t a query for governments nor for improvement banks alone, it’s one that each enterprise that operates on the African soil needs to be asking.
The African Union declared 2026 the 12 months of “Assuring Sustainable Water Availability and Secure Sanitation Methods to Obtain the Targets of Agenda 2063”, and this lofty ask is a name to arms. Water is the muse of meals safety, public well being, human dignity and industrial output. For a continent the place local weather variability is reshaping lives and livelihoods, getting water proper is a precedence, and this is a matter which Namibians perceive at an on a regular basis stage.
As one of many driest international locations south of the Sahara, our relationship with water shapes how we run our industries, agriculture, plan our cities, and the way we think about the long run. Namibia has constructed a secure and rising economic system, and our story deserves to be informed extra loudly on this continent, as a result of it accommodates classes from which different international locations can be taught.
Africa’s pure bounty is our alternative
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The African Continental Free Commerce Space (AfCFTA) represents essentially the most bold financial challenge this continent has ever tried. Its logic is elegant: Africa is wealthy in what Africa wants, and we should always commerce extra of it with one another. For too lengthy, African uncooked supplies have left our ports solely to return as completed items at costs which our folks wrestle to afford, and the AfCFTA makes an attempt to offer a structural reply to that indignity.
Enterprise must decide to the mannequin for it to work in follow. Regional provide chains, and intra-continental commerce are commercially sound methods that generate multiplier results far past the manufacturing facility flooring. When a producer sources grain from regional farmers, these farmers can put money into their land. When a enterprise pays aggressive wages, these wages flow into in native communities. When exports go to African neighbours reasonably than solely to distant markets, we hold our wealth on the continent.
The spirit of Africa Day will be illustrated by a chilly bottle of Windhoek or Tafel Lager. Namibia Breweries Restricted (NBL) has constructed a mannequin of pan-African self-reliance and our operations help provide chains that stretch throughout Southern Africa, creating direct employment for over 900 Namibians and sustaining companies far past our breweries. That is precisely the form of intra-continental worth creation that the African Continental Free Commerce Space was designed to speed up – items conceived, produced, and consumed on African soil, producing African livelihoods at each step. NBL contributes N$1.155 billion in annual excise taxes and generates N$2 billion in family earnings nationally. For each N$100 in worth added, N$252 flows by the broader economic system. These numbers replicate what dedicated native funding, and financial integration, produces.
The lesson for African policymakers and enterprise leaders alike is that industrial depth issues. An economic system constructed on extraction and export earns overseas forex however creates little home wealth. We should construct robust economies based mostly on manufacturing, processing, and worth addition that result in job creation, expertise improvement, tax income and the form of financial resilience that weathers world shocks.
Water safety is a shared accountability
The companies and governments that perceive that water safety is just not a sustainability add-on; it’s an financial precondition will outline the subsequent decade of African improvement.
The decision on this Africa Day is for Namibian and African companies to deal with funding in sustainability not as a price of doing enterprise, however as a situation of thriving. The businesses constructing drought resilience now, by round water methods, renewable vitality, and sustainable provide chains, are the businesses that can nonetheless be working when the subsequent dry cycle arrives. The institution of the Northern Industrial Discussion board spearheaded by NBL noticed firms who use the Windhoek Northern Aquifer useful resource come collectively to fee to hold out an aquifer sustainability examine, shared overtly with municipal authorities. Such actions, along with initiatives like NBL’s adoption of aggressive water-reduction targets in manufacturing, level in the direction of a mannequin of personal sector water stewardship that governments can’t and mustn’t ship alone.
100 years of improvement
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There’s a model of Africa in 2063 that’s inside attain – a continent that feeds itself, trades with itself, manages its water correctly, employs its younger folks productively, and that has transformed its pure and human wealth into broadly shared prosperity. Getting there requires companies that behave like long-term stakeholders within the societies they function in, governments that create the situations for industrial improvement, and younger Africans to be outfitted, trusted and given actual accountability.
Namibia, with its secure establishments, rising manufacturing base, and hard-won classes about residing responsibly in a fragile setting, can proceed to contribute meaningfully to the continental story. NBL has been a part of Namibia’s story for over a century. Our dedication going ahead is identical because it has at all times been: to construct one thing right here that lasts and creates jobs, and that makes this nation and this continent proud. Africa Day shouldn’t be seen solely as a commemoration of the 1963 inception of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), however a down cost on what the continent will be if all of us work collectively.
- Von Lieres is the Managing Director of Namibia Breweries Restricted
