Dear Namibia,

You are betting that sun, wind and sea can be shipped to the world as fuel. In May 2023 your government signed a feasibility and implementation agreement with Hyphen Hydrogen Energy for a $10 billion project, aimed at two million tonnes of green ammonia a year at full scale. The electricity you generate already comes almost entirely from renewable sources: 93.4 percent in 2021.

Your schools are well staffed, with about 25 pupils for every teacher in the last count, and 86.5 percent of you have basic drinking water. The World Bank is financing transmission expansion and energy storage, the grid that a hydrogen economy and a connected household both need.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Sixty-one in every hundred of you lived below $8.30 a day at the last count, in 2015. Fifty-four in every hundred of you cannot always count on enough good food. Only forty-six in every hundred of you cook with clean fuel. Income sets your Coverage today, at 38.9 out of 100, with food and clean energy close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

A green hydrogen industry will need land, water, ports and a grid. Each of those can be built so that it serves the town beside it as well as the ship at the quay. Write that into the agreements while they are still being drafted.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Namibia: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Namibian falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“You may yet export sunlight to the world. Let the first of it reach every Namibian home.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Namibia Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Namibia will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.