Yes, travel insurance is worth carrying for a trip into Namibia's Zambezi Region, the narrow panhandle once known as the Caprivi Strip, and the honest reason has real teeth here: this is one of the few parts of Namibia that sits inside a genuine malaria-risk zone, unlike the arid center and south most visitors picture first. Most travelers come for river and wildlife safaris along the Zambezi and Chobe, and a policy still needs to answer for illness, evacuation, and lost gear this far from a proper hospital.
Katima Mulilo, the region's main town, has basic local health services, but anything beyond routine treatment is typically stabilized there and then evacuated to Windhoek, Namibia's real hospital hub, several hours south by road or light aircraft. For complex cases, transfer can continue on to Johannesburg, the wider region's tertiary referral center. Confirm your policy explicitly covers medical evacuation and malaria-linked treatment, since routine-clinic reimbursement alone misses the part of the risk that actually matters here.
River safaris on the Zambezi and Chobe, mokoro trips, and wildlife viewing around Bwabwata National Park are the real draw, and this kind of boat-based, wildlife-adjacent activity is worth naming specifically in your policy rather than assuming general trip cover extends to it automatically. The wet season, roughly November through April, brings a genuine flood risk here - the Zambezi and Chobe rivers have historically overflowed their banks and cut regional roads, so check that weather-related travel delay is covered during this window.
Keep any clinic paperwork, safari-operator incident reports, and receipts for treatment or antimalarial medication, since claims from a region this remote rely heavily on documentation you can easily lose track of along the way. Check whether your existing health cover extends abroad and specifically to Namibia before you assume it does, and confirm your policy names both malaria-related treatment and medical evacuation rather than leaving either to interpretation once you are already deep in the Zambezi Region.