Phoenix Resource Association is building a network of Circular Economy Centres: industrial campuses where rolling stock, heavy equipment and aircraft are returned to service or recovered, and where young people written off by their economies become the skilled workforce those economies need. The first Centre is planned for Namibia.
Circular Economy Centres · Namibia first · RECLAIM · BUILD · RISE
In Erongo a young person can hold a stack of qualifications and still have nowhere to use them. Across southern Africa, locomotives, wagons and heavy equipment stand idle for want of parts and skilled hands, while the railways, mines and fleets that need them are short of serviceable equipment.
Namibia does not primarily have a skills deficit. It has a deficit of pathways.
What is missing are industries that can absorb the workforce a training system already produces. Put the two write-offs in the same place and each solves the other’s problem. The assets need skilled hands to be returned to service or recovered to a certified standard, and those hands need an industry to be skilled for.
Phoenix Resource Association exists to build that missing layer. Not another training programme bolted onto an economy with no room for its graduates, but a new industry developed in unison with the workforce and the small enterprises it is built to create, so that opportunity is designed in rather than hoped for downstream.
Rolling stock, heavy equipment and aircraft, treated as scrap.
Filed as NEET: not in employment, education or training. Talent, unused.
Recovered value funds training that leads to formal, safe and decent work.
Recovered human potential becomes national industrial capacity.
Two write-offs. One solution.
The model is deliberately asset-agnostic. Railways across the region’s shared Cape gauge network need serviceable rolling stock and the people to keep it running; mines and transport fleets retire heavy equipment every year; and aircraft reach the end of their lives worldwide. The Centre is built to take all three, so it depends on no single asset class, counterparty or market.
Locomotives, wagons and coaches. Overhauled and returned to service first; recovered only when life-expired.
Mining and transport equipment at end of life, recovered for components, alloys and metals.
The end of the line: certified dismantling of airframes that will not fly again.
Young Namibians, trained on all three into formal, safe and decent work.
What an economy calls waste is a resource.
The assets need skilled hands. The hands need an industry. The Centre puts them in the same place.
Infrastructure of Opportunity is the institutional, industrial, and educational infrastructure that converts Africa’s underused human and material capacity into productive economies. In Phoenix Resource Association’s model, it takes physical form as Circular Economy Centres — campuses where end-of-life industrial assets are dismantled into commercial value, and where the young people written off by their economies are trained into the skilled workforce those economies need. It is not a programme, a project, or a pilot. It is the layer of institutions, industrial systems, and accredited training that has been missing — the layer above “NEET training”, “TVET initiative”, “youth employment programme”, or “circular economy startup”, each of which is a sub-component, not the whole. When the infrastructure is built, opportunity stops depending on luck or rescue, and becomes a feature the system itself produces at scale.
What is being recovered: industrial assets, and the people the system has discarded.
The institutional and industrial work the Centres perform: the workshop floor, the training, the grid, the enterprises.
The outcome: talent, enterprise and infrastructure that compound across the SADC region.
“Phoenix Resource Association builds adaptive systems for opportunity — infrastructure designed not just to respond to youth exclusion and industrial waste, but to evolve faster than the challenges it exists to solve. The model self-funds, self-reinforces, and replicates — because any solution that depends on permanent subsidy has already accepted the permanence of the problem.”
In 2001, a thirteen-year-old boy in Malawi was forced out of school when his family could no longer pay the fees. During a devastating famine, he found his way to the village library, taught himself electrical engineering from a physics textbook, and built a wind turbine from scrap metal that pumped water to his family’s crops. He saved his village.
His name is William Kamkwamba. He went on to Dartmouth College and later founded the Moving Windmills Project.
But William’s story is not extraordinary because of what he did. It is extraordinary because of what it reveals: Africa is full of young people like William. They are not short of talent or creativity or drive. They are short of a pathway.
Everything that follows exists for one reason: a change of mindset. A young person who has been told they are surplus discovers that their hands and judgement have value, and that what an economy calls waste is a resource. Industry learns the same lesson about its retired assets.
A mindset cannot be measured honestly, so Phoenix Resource Association does not try, and never scores a learner’s attitude. It measures what a changed mindset produces: formal, safe and decent work, and ventures that are actually registered. That is the product of the Phoenix Institute for Circular Industries (PICI). It is not a trade or a certificate; it is a visible pathway into the formal economy.
Every learner, on every pathway, starts with the circular economy: reuse, repair, remanufacture, and recycle only last.
Built on the four pillars of the ILO Decent Work Agenda: employment, rights at work, social protection and social dialogue.
The ten principles of the UN Global Compact, taught as practice: human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption.
Mostly practical, on real rolling stock, heavy equipment and aircraft, under a safety culture aligned to ISO 45001.
Literacy, numeracy, digital skills and workplace readiness for learners who need pre-entry support. Classroom, VR and observation only.
Circular economy in practice; the UN Global Compact and responsible industry; HSE; workshop fundamentals; technical literacy; logistics and supply chain.
Aircraft Structures and Systems, or Heavy-Equipment Recycling, on the Centre’s floor: recovery, traceability, rigging, hydraulics, materials.
A cross-pillar project on a real asset, then supported placement into formal work, or the Entrepreneurship Accelerator.
Around the diploma sit the Entrepreneurship Accelerator, which turns opportunities spotted on the floor into registered micro-enterprises and cooperatives; the Innovation Centre, where learners ask what is wasted here and what it could become; and short courses for people already in work, railway and mine staff among them.
A written contract, a safe workplace, social security cover and a pension. An income a bank will lend against, and a record of skill that travels with them.
People trained on real assets to a known standard, who stay. Lower turnover and fewer incidents, and a supply chain that passes a buyer’s or lender’s scrutiny.
Tax and social contributions that fund public services, value kept in the region rather than exported as scrap, and a skilled base that attracts further industry.
PICI is built to hold its own Namibia Training Authority registration. It does not hold it yet; delivery begins with registered partners.
Mostly practical, under a safety culture aligned to ISO 45001. Skills learned on one asset class travel to the next.
That purpose needs a working industrial site to happen on. A Circular Economy Centre is one campus with four pillars, not four programmes. Pillar 1 generates the revenue that cross-subsidises Pillar 2; Pillar 3 reduces the operating cost of the whole; Pillar 4 anchors the industrial-policy story.
Southern Africa is short of serviceable rolling stock, so scrapping is the last option, not the first. Heavy equipment follows the same order; aircraft are the end of the line.
At the heart of the campus: an ILO-aligned TVET institute built to hold its own registration, using the live assets of Pillar 1 as its classroom and funded in part by Pillar 1’s revenue.
Solar-hybrid power with battery storage, sized to the final site. It lowers the operating cost of every other pillar and has an expansion path to a community grid.
Applied research on end-of-life composites and advanced materials, turning hard-to-recycle waste into new products, enterprises and local capability, designed to run with university partners.
Phoenix Resource Association is developing a shared standard for overhauling recovered rail components, with accredited workshops and a life-tracking registry and parts pool across the Cape gauge network, designed to work through regional standards institutions that already exist.
A narrow, veto-only golden share blocks a closed list of mission-critical harms: dilution of the decent-work standard, capture of scholarship intake, rerouting of the surplus, or capture of governance.
Recover › Earn › Cross-subsidise › Graduate & grow
One structure, built for many households.
A sociable weaver’s nest houses a whole colony. The Centre is built the same way: for the enterprises that grow around it.
The Centre is built to create small enterprises, not just to host them. Every asset that comes through it produces parts, materials, services and know-how, and each of those streams is a business someone can own. The market is regional: railways across the Cape gauge network, mines from Erongo to the Copperbelt, ports and corridors, airfields, farms and municipalities.
Reconditioned rail couplers, brake valves and springs; heavy-equipment component exchange; certified used aircraft parts; parts brokerage.
Hydraulic cylinder rebuilds; traction-motor and alternator rewinds; component overhaul; test-bench and calibration services.
Alloy grading that stops stainless and weathering steels being sold as carbon scrap; copper recovery with certified provenance.
Insulated wagons into cold storage; tank wagons into water storage; underframes into heavy trailers; panels and furniture from recovered metal.
Fluid drain and decontamination; controlled stripping of hazardous materials; waste audits and ESG reporting for small firms.
Digital parts passports and track-and-trace; parts marketplaces; preservation packaging; heavy haulage, rigging and customs documentation.
Solar installation and maintenance; battery and inverter servicing for farms, lodges, small industry and municipalities.
Repair cafés and appliance, tool and small-engine repair, keeping value and skills in the neighbourhood.
A learner sees value in an output stream during live work.
The Innovation Centre pressure-tests the idea as a design challenge.
The Accelerator takes it to a mentored, registered business with a Demo Day pitch.
The Centre is often the first supplier or customer; the region is the market.
The model is built to travel, but it has to be proved somewhere first. Namibia is a stable, English-speaking country with a national railway, a deep-water port, a mining industry and an industrialisation agenda under its Sixth National Development Plan (NDP6). Erongo holds all of them within one region, which is why it is where the work starts.
Namibia is not the region’s rail hub, and the case does not rest on pretending otherwise. It is the place to show the training model, a shared standard for recovered components and a life-tracking registry working at small scale, before they are taken to the corridors that need them most.
Location within Namibia is deliberately open. Each part of the Centre sits where its work is: a rail workshop belongs on the network, close to the rolling stock it serves; aircraft work belongs beside an airport; and the training institute belongs where learners and live assets meet.
A national rail network and a deep-water port, linking the region to inland corridors and to sea.
An established mining and industrial base whose heavy equipment reaches end of life every year.
Able to receive end-of-life airframes, for the aircraft work at the end of the line.
Industrialisation, value addition, skills and green industrialisation.
Pathways into formal, safe and decent work, including for young people from the rural regions and from communities living with the end of mining.
Rolling stock and equipment returned to service or recovered locally rather than exported as scrap, and the skills to keep rail and mining fleets running.
Small firms that trade parts, services and recovered materials across the region, built on skills learned at home.
Aligned with NDP6 and Vision 2030, the ILO Decent Work Agenda and the ten principles of the UN Global Compact. Safeguarding and gender inclusion are built into curriculum design and operating standards. Goals 7 and 13 reflect the design intent of the campus solar-hybrid micro-grid, which is not yet built.
Swiss Verein, Geneva Commercial Register.
To Namibia’s investment promotion board.
Signed, with Addendum No. 1.
Mission, philosophy and the Infrastructure of Opportunity category.
Structured engagement across five national institutions.
Panel on local content and empowerment, Swakopmund. The model extended to rolling stock.
Established on a route agreed with counsel.
“Phoenix Resource Association creates the infrastructure for young people written off by their economies to become the skilled workforce those economies need — through Circular Economy Centres that turn industrial waste into training, employment, and self-sustaining opportunity.”
Most youth programmes start with a classroom. Phoenix Resource Association starts with an asset. Its founder, David Mercer, spent seventeen years as a Royal Navy officer and helicopter pilot and thirteen years as an airline captain, with an Executive MBA from the University of Geneva along the way. Aviation, logistics and command run on the discipline this work needs: safety culture, recognised competencies, measurable outcomes and cross-cultural delivery.
Africa’s young people are not a problem to be managed. They are an asset waiting for a pathway.
David Mercer is Chair and Executive Director of Phoenix Resource Association, a Geneva-based Swiss non-profit building a network of Circular Economy Centres in southern Africa, starting in Namibia.
Chaired by David Mercer, the governance team draws on senior experience across private banking, aerospace, development finance and public service in the SADC region. A mission-lock golden share, held by the Phoenix Resource Foundation in each CEC operating entity, keeps commercial operations subordinate to youth, jobs, and circular-economy outcomes.
Founder. Executive leadership across all workstreams. Former Royal Navy helicopter pilot and airline captain; Executive MBA, University of Geneva.
Private Equity Real Assets at Pictet Group. Digital transformation executive and COO. EMBA (IMD); former airline captain. Certified in impact investing, ESG, and AI & data analytics.
Senior HR and social impact professional. Corporate experience at Boeing and Standard Chartered. Expertise in ILO Decent Work, DEI frameworks and youth safeguarding.
Aviation industry expert covering MRO, airside infrastructure, OEM relationships and aviation-safety compliance. Advises on digital learning systems, VR simulation and CEC campus design.
Deputy Executive Director, Botswana Public Service College. More than 20 years spanning public service, government ministries and the private sector. Former Deputy Permanent Secretary for Labour and Social Security.
Infrastructure finance practitioner. DBSA (9+ years), African Development Bank, New Development Bank, and Nedbank CIB Co-Head of Africa Infrastructure Finance.
The first step is taken in Windhoek.
A Namibian-led organisation, a Namibian team, and Geneva in an oversight role.
The first step is institutional, and it comes before any site or asset. To register as a training provider and reach national skills funding, the Centre needs a Namibian entity. Phoenix Resource Association is establishing one: a not-for-profit company, Namibian-led, on a route agreed with Windhoek counsel.
The entity is headed by a Namibian resident director, with a Namibian team in Windhoek. Geneva’s role is oversight through Phoenix Resource Association’s board, not day-to-day management. That is the vehicle that can register with the Namibia Training Authority, take premises on a lease, and receive and account for funding locally.
Training then begins where the assets are. A founding cohort starts the common foundation term with registered delivery partners and moves onto a training floor where rolling stock, heavy equipment and, where available, airframes become the hands-on classroom. The work follows the order the Centre is built around: overhaul and return to service first, recovery of components next, and melting last. Skills learned on a live asset travel across asset classes.
That the Centre is run from Namibia by Namibians, with Geneva in an oversight role.
That the training meets the national registration path and can reach national skills funding.
That learners gain real skills on live assets, whatever the asset class on the floor.
Formal employment at six and twelve months, written contracts, social security registration and retention.
A Namibian-led organisation able to register, lease and train is the moment this stops being a concept. Three kinds of partner make it happen.
Funders for the first step: establishing the Namibian entity and its first year. Philanthropic, concessional or blended.
Railways, mines, fleet operators and aircraft owners with end-of-life or idle assets in or reachable from southern Africa.
Government, agencies, standards and accreditation bodies, and employers who want the industry built properly from the start.
Planning detail and the supporting record are shared with qualified partners under mutual non-disclosure. Ask through the form below and we will send what fits your conversation.
Shared under mutual NDA, after the request has been verified.
If your organisation sees a role in what we are building, as a funder, an asset holder or an institutional partner, the quickest way in is a direct conversation.
Nothing on this page describes land as allocated or an agreement as signed.
