Namibia Economic, Energy, Climate Risk & Green Hydrogen Observatory

Wilka Igulu · 2026 · Windhoek, Namibia · Power BI · Python · GitHub Actions

Namibia's public finances, electricity supply, drought risk and green hydrogen pipeline are reported in different places, on different schedules, in different units. I built one observatory that puts them side by side, and made it check its own numbers.

Executive Overview page of the Namibia Observatory: headline sentence, five tiles for GDP growth, latest monthly inflation, unemployment, debt-to-GDP and climate risk, and four trend charts. — **Figure 1. Executive Overview.** One sentence, five tiles, four trends. Colours follow direction: a rise in debt or unemployment is never shown as good news.

Figures on this page are as of 30 October 2026.

The question

Can the state carry its debt? What is inflation doing now that fuel prices are rising? Where is drought biting? Is the green hydrogen pipeline moving, or slipping? None of these has a single home. Each sits in a budget document, a statistics bulletin, a climate dataset or a press report, so a reader has to assemble the picture by hand.

What it shows right now

68.7%

Debt-to-GDP in the October 2026 Mid-Year Budget Review (N$201.7bn), against a 60% SADC benchmark.

5.4%

Annual inflation, September 2026, the highest in over two years. Transport is the main driver.

45.8%

Of electricity supply was imported in FY2024 (NamPower Integrated Annual Report).

End-2027

Hyphen's final investment decision, after a delay reported in October 2026.

The four pages

Economy & Finance sets debt, deficit and interest payments against benchmarks, and shows unemployment from three sources, labelled so they cannot be confused.

Economy and Finance page: tiles for GDP per capita, FDI, total public debt, fiscal deficit and interest payments, with charts for inflation, unemployment, GDP per capita, debt, deficit and interest. — **Figure 2. Economy & Finance.** Debt and interest figures come from the October 2026 Mid-Year Budget Review. Older IMF projections were removed because they sat below the latest outturn.

Climate & Energy combines a region-by-year climate risk heat map, drought status by region from the Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI-12), the FY2024 electricity mix and the new-generation pipeline.

Climate and Energy page: climate risk heat map by region and year, SPI-12 drought status by region, electricity supply mix, energy security against targets, and the new generation pipeline. — **Figure 3. Climate & Energy.** The risk index counts only rainfall deficit and heat excess, so a wet year is never scored as risk.

Green Hydrogen separates money that is approved or received from money that is only pledged, announced or pending, and tracks the milestones that are slipping.

Green Hydrogen page: five tiles, funding by partner coloured by status, a milestones table with status colours, and a dated news table with a verification column. — **Figure 4. Green Hydrogen.** US$69.7m is approved or received; US$270m is pledged, announced or pending. The EIB's proposed loan is excluded because it is not committed.

How it works

Python pipeline. Pulls World Bank and NASA POWER data, computes SPI-based climate risk for ten regions, and builds a star schema: two fact tables and three dimensions.
A quality gate that fails closed. Every run checks schema, plausible ranges, staleness and that every series the report depends on is present. If a check fails, the run stops and the last good warehouse stays in place.
Power BI. Reusable DAX measures, a light and dark theme, unit-aware tiles and direction-aware colours.
Automation. GitHub Actions refreshes the national and climate data on the first of each month. A CI check lints the code and rebuilds the warehouse on every change.

A polished dashboard with stale numbers is worse than none.

What I corrected along the way

Before publishing, I audited every figure against current sources, and several of my own numbers changed. Debt rose to 68.7% of GDP in the October review. A green-investment figure I had carried had no source behind it and was replaced by one that does. Projections that fell below the latest outturn were dropped rather than shown as a forecast.

Where two numbers cannot be compared, the report says so. Namibia's labour-force survey changed its definition of unemployment between 2018 and 2023, so the report shows the official 2023 rate and no year-on-year change. A higher "broad" figure is an analyst estimate on the old definition and is labelled that way.

Limits

Only the World Bank and NASA POWER data refresh automatically. Debt, inflation, unemployment, the electricity tables and the green hydrogen tables are curated by hand from official releases, and each hydrogen row carries a source and a verification flag. Items I could not fully confirm are marked "Partly verified" or "Unverified". The hydrogen page is not on the automated refresh and says so.

About the author: Wilka Igulu is a quantitative analyst based in Windhoek, Namibia, working on data pipelines and statistical methods for imperfect data. Get in touch or see the repository.