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A Small Nation’s Surprising Solution to Unemployment | James Mnyupe | TED

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A Small Nation’s Surprising Solution to Unemployment | James Mnyupe | TED

TED 12.08.2025 41 250 просмотров 1 355 лайков обн. 18.02.2026

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How did a small, economically vulnerable country become a trailblazer in sustainable industry? Clean economy builder James Mnyupe explores how Namibia is teaming up with partners from around the world to turn sun, wind and water into green hydrogen — a key ingredient in fueling everything from clean steel to eco-friendly transportation. Discover how this bold blueprint is creating jobs, cutting carbon and sparking a wave of African pride and possibility. (Recorded at TED Countdown Summit 2025 on June 18, 2025) Countdown is TED's global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, in the race to a zero-carbon world. Get involved at https://countdown.ted.com Join us in person at a TED conference: https://tedtalks.social/events Become a TED Member to support our mission: https://ted.com/membership Subscribe to a TED newsletter: https://ted.com/newsletters Follow TED! X: https://www.twitter.com/TEDTalks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ted Facebook: https://facebook.com/TED LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoks The TED Talks channel features talks, performances and original series from the world's leading thinkers and doers. Subscribe to our channel for videos on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. Visit https://TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more. Watch more: https://go.ted.com/jamesmnyupe https://youtu.be/zYg6bLCBMxY TED's videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request at https://media-requests.ted.com #TED #TEDTalks

Оглавление (9 сегментов)

0:00 Introduction 161 сл.
1:26 Namibias Renewable Energy 365 сл.
3:56 Targeted Economic Diplomacy 182 сл.
5:14 How It Works 137 сл.
6:10 What It Looks Like 280 сл.
7:56 Hydrogen Service Station 176 сл.
9:03 Green Ammonia 97 сл.
9:45 Industry Decarbonization 106 сл.
10:37 Conclusion 239 сл.

Introduction

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. 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 lemonade, 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 percent, and we import 40 to 60 percent of our energy needs from our neighbors, who themselves are energy insecure.

Namibias Renewable Energy

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 farmers whose livestock are dying, and of course, their plants are withering. OK, 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 irradiance of 2,200 kilowatt hours 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 metres 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 Albeau set the wind surfing record for speed over 500 metres, 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, 1,000 kilometer of coastline, we decided to come up with a blueprint that would help us manifest the socio economic outcomes we wanted, create new jobs, attract FDI and build new infrastructure. So what do you see there? 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?

Targeted Economic Diplomacy

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 this. This is the first direct reduced iron facility of its kind in the world. And what you can see in the picture there is about 25-megawatt solar array, 13. 5 megawatt of battery. In that little house, there's 12 megawatt of electrolyzers, which of course is the largest electrolyzer array in southern Africa today. And then that machine has a pretty innovative piece of equipment, which I will zoom into right now. So on the right-hand side, this is what electrolyzers look like. They are two stacks of six megawatts each, and they weigh 46 tons apiece.

How It Works

Now those 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 on the left-hand side, 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. And what does it look like?

What It Looks Like

This is an extremely valuable commodity for us in so many different ways. This is what a nugget of direct reduced iron ore looks like. 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, we're going to have to do with this one. However, come to Namibia and we'll show you the real thing. As much as we're proud of that lovely nugget, we're even more proud of this picture. [These] are all the people who work at High Iron. 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. One of the things -- Thank you. (Applause) I didn't say in the beginning, when I showed you this photo of the plant, was 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 Tsusho 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.

Hydrogen Service Station

Now we have more than one flavor of lemonade. That was the lime flavor. This, this is a strawberry flavor. What you're seeing in your top left-hand side is Africa's first green hydrogen service station. Remember all those red arrows that we're going to transport all of these goods? 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 piece de la resistance, 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.

Green Ammonia

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 a 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 a billion US dollars of extremely concessional money that you could use to build and scale up some of the industrial clusters that I was showing you.

Industry Decarbonization

We took our chances, put together a portfolio, and on January 17 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. (Applause) With that, we have now been given an opportunity to apply for up to 250 million US dollars of super concessional capital. To give you an idea, 30-year tenure, eight-year grace period, and a cost of 1. 1 percent in terms of the cost of capital. Typically, we borrow at about seven percent for our Eurobond for half the tenure.

Conclusion

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. And [these are] my teammates. This is the Namibian green hydrogen program. 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 socio-economic emancipation for all of us on the continent. My name is James Mnyupe, thank you so much for taking the time to listen to me. (Cheers and applause)

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