you're listening to ted talks daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day i'm your host elise hugh according to the genie coefficient which is a statistical measure of income or wealth inequality within a population namibia is the second most unequal society in the world it has a high unemployment rate and like most nations in the world suffers suffers from increasing crippling droughts.
As clean economy builder James Mnupe asks, how do we make lemonade out of all of these lemons?
In this talk, James shares how Namibia looked at these massive problems and in just a few years came up with actionable innovative solutions that are bringing the country to the forefront of green industry, creating new opportunities, jobs, and technologies, not just for the population of Namibia, but for countries everywhere.
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How those ahead stay ahead.
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Today, I'm going to talk to you about a curious tale from Southern Africa, about how a small, vulnerable nation decided to build a green industrialization hub of note, without making lemonade from lemons.
So I hail from a small nation with a population of about three million people.
For our troubles, we consume about four and a half terawatt hours of electricity, and in the process, we emit about 0 .01 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions.
So from a climate change perspective, we are not the problem child.
But if we're going to make some lemonades, we're probably going to need some lemons.
So let's talk about those.
Today, Namibia is the second most unequal society in the world as measured by a Gini coefficient.
We have 0 .59 as a score.
We have a stubbornly high unemployment rate of 37%, and we import 40 to 60 % of our energy needs from our neighbors who themselves are energy insecure.
secure. Our largest electricity generator is a hydroelectric power station.
And as you can imagine, when we suffer from debilitating droughts, which as you know are getting worse and worse, we find ourselves in a very sticky situation, having to buy electricity from the Southern African power pool at high prices, and at the same time trying to subsidize and assist our of farmers whose livestock are dying, and of course, their plants are withering.
Okay, enough of the lemons.
We also need some sugar.
So, Namibia is actually quite a wealthy nation from a renewable energy perspective.
Vast tracts of our nation are glorified and covered in solar ingredients of 2 ,200 kilowatt per square meter.
At the same time, we have one of the best wind resources on the planet, and in the southwestern part of our country, we enjoy wind speeds in excess of 11 meters per second that generate capacity factors of more than 50 percent for most turbines.
Now, not all of us in the room are energy nerds, so to illustrate the point, a gentleman called Antoine Albert Albert set the windsurfing record for speed over 500 meters, clocking 99 kilometers an hour, just on a board with a sail.
We didn't give him a speeding ticket.
So with all these ingredients of amazing renewable energy, a thousand kilometers of coastline, we decided to come up with a blueprint that would help us manifest the socioeconomic outcomes we wanted, create new jobs, attract FDI and build new infrastructure.
We realized that our neighbors around us, there's 172 million of them, could actually really use this clean energy.
A lot of them have mineral endowments, such as cobalt, platinum, iron ore and manganese.
And of course, we could use our transport networks in our country to transport these minerals to clients around the world, in Japan, Europe and beyond.
Now, these clients are becoming more and more carbon -conscious, thanks to a lot of good TED Talks.
And they're saying they would like their goods to have lower carbon content.
So the renewable energy will help.
But what if we could also decarbonize the transport routes?
And so, between the president and myself, we crafted what we call the Green Industrialization Blueprint.
Armed with this particular blueprint, we embarked on a very targeted economic diplomatic mission, because for every glass of lemonade you make, you'd need a decent spoon to stir all these ingredients.
So what were we able to do?
Between 2021 and 2024, we came back with more than 80 million euros in grant funding.
And what did we do with this grant funding?
we built stuff like the first direct reduced iron facility of its kind in the world.
It's about 25 megawatt solar array, 13 and a half megawatts of battery.
There's 12 megawatts of electrolyzers, which of course is the largest electrolyzer array in Southern Africa today.
Now those electrolyzers, there are two stacks of six megawatts each and they weigh 46 tons a piece.
These electrolyzers can take water and split it into its constituent molecules of oxygen and hydrogen.
The oxygen you can vent, doesn't harm the environment.
And the hydrogen can be used as a reducing agent for iron ore, which has iron and oxygen.
So what you do is you take the hydrogen that you've now been powering with your renewable electricity, and you put it into the machine, which is a horizontal, gas -tight kiln.
Now, under high temperatures, the hydrogen goes and reacts with the oxygen in the iron ore, because it's recently been separated from the oxygen from the water, and so it reacts with that oxygen from the iron ore.
And on the other side, you get Namibia's first green industrial product since independence.
This is an extremely valuable commodity for us in so many different ways.
a nugget of direct, reduced iron ore.
It has more than 90 percent iron content, and it is a fantastic ingredient for making green steel.
And by the way, steel contributes about seven to nine percent of global emissions.
So this is quite an interesting contribution to humanity from our side.
Now, I did try to bring a nugget for all of you to see and touch, but customs said it was too valuable and I didn't have a tax invoice.
So for now, come to Namibia and we'll show you the real thing.
As much as we're proud of that lovely nugget, we are even more proud of all the people who work at high -ion.
This is what 400 jobs during construction looks like, and this is what empowerment of the people of not just Namibia, but indeed, the world, looks like.
This was a real United Nations effort, right?
The solar panels, batteries and electrolyzers came from China, the kiln came from Germany, the capital came from Europe, the offtake is coming from Japan.
So Toyota, Trudeau is actually looking at buying this particular facility and the iron ore to make green steel.
And then, of course, the labor and the sun came from our beloved Namibia.
And to me, this is what happens when humanity comes together for a common cause.
Now, we have more than one flavor of lemonade.
That was a lime flavor.
This, this is a strawberry flavor.
Africa's first green hydrogen service station.
If you want to attack scope two and scope three emissions, you have to start decarbonizing how you transport these new products as well.
And so at that service station, we want to start producing hydrogen, which will be used to decarbonize long -haul trucking.
We've already started making dual -fuel trucks there.
We're developing a dual -fuel train, as we speak, that will use hydrogen and diesel.
and then, of course, la pièce de résistance, we're going to take that hydrogen and combine it with nitrogen to make ammonia.
Green ammonia is a possible shipping fuel, and Belgium's largest shipping company has decided to choose Namibia as its headquarters to develop a clean shipping fleet that will run on green ammonia, having developed this particular engine in Switzerland.
now if the 80 million euros in grant funding was a spoon our ambition is to take over the whole neighborhood and sell a lot more lemonade so we'd probably need the blender so in 2024 actually in October the climate investment funds introduced a new program called the industry decarbonization program and they invited nations from around the world to apply for an opportunity to get their share of $1 billion of extremely concessional money that you could use to build and scale up some of the industrial clusters that I was showing you.
We took our chances, put together a portfolio, and on January 17th of 2025, we applied.
And just last week, Friday, as I was boarding my plane to come and talk to you, we got told that Namibia's application ranked third in the whole world.
With that, we have now been given an opportunity to apply for up to $250 million of super -concessional capital to give you an idea, 30 -year tenor, 80 -year grace period, and a cost of 1 .1 percent in terms of the cost of capital.
Typically, we borrow at about 7 percent for our Eurobond, for half the tenor.
So it's transformative.
Now, the idea is to take this capital, blend it with financing from multilateral development banks, and if possible, build a billion -dollar fund that will help us blend a lot more lemonade for Namibia.
Now, of course, I couldn't have done all of this on my own.
This is the Namibian Green Hydrogen Program, my teammates.
It has a collection of engineers, lawyers, financiers, and we have worked extremely collaboratively with our government to create what you can see is becoming a revolutionary way of building new economic systems. But there is more.
We don't want to stop here.
What we want to do is to build a Continental Center of Excellence that will codify how to build new sustainable industrial clusters and will systematically and programmatically deploy financing for countries around the continent to do exactly what we've done in Namibia.
I haven't registered the trademark yet, but we would want to call it the African Sustainable Industrialization Institute.
and of course, while we want to be merchants of clean new goods, of clean new industries, what we're really selling is African pride.
And what we're really trying to engender is inspiration for our young people.
And most importantly, we want to see socioeconomic emancipation for all of us on the continent.
My name is James M.
Newpay. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to me.
That was James Mnoube at TED Countdown Summit Nairobi in Kenya in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED .com curation guidelines.
And that's it for today's show.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Samarnivon It was mixed by Christopher Fasey -Bogan Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo I'm Elise Hu, I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed Thanks for listening This episode is sponsored by Lumen.
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