Namibia makes steady progress on education SDG

NAMIBIA has made steady progress towards attaining the sustainable development goals associated with offering universal education at all levels.

This was said by experts from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) at a workshop for stakeholders in the education sector on sustainable development goal (SDG) 4: ‘Towards better data and quality education in Namibia.’

The workshop was hosted by the Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) yesterday.

Both Unesco representative to Namibia Djaffa Moussa-Elkadhum and the higher education ministry’s executive director, Alfred Van Kent, who represented both basic education and higher education at the workshop, concurred that education continues to be a top government expenditure area, although the country still needs to put more efforts into improving its quality.

According to statistics, Namibia’s investment in education delivery is above average and compares well with other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

On average, Namibia spends 7% of its annual budget on education, both at lower and tertiary levels.

“The education system in Namibia continues to receive reasonable support, and is a major priority of the government’s expenditure patterns. Efforts, however, need to be made in improving the quality of education at all levels,” Van Kent said in a speech read on his behalf.

While he commended the government’s continued commitment to making education opportunities available to Namibians, Moussa-Elkahum acknowledged progress made in providing access to universal free education at primary level in accordance with the Namibian Constitution.

One of the major target of the SDGs is to ensure that boys and girls at pre- and primary school level complete free, equitable and quality education, as well as lower secondary schools achieving minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics.

Another significant benchmark enshrined in the SDGs is for Namibia to ensure equal access by all women and men to affordable, quality technical, vocational and tertiary education by 2030.

Experts also concurred that while there are still challenges in the Namibian education system, the country is one of the very few African countries which have implemented the universal free primary education model well.

The NSA in late July 2019 released the SDGs’ baseline report for Namibia for 2019.

Statistician general Alex Shimuafeni said at the time that the report will serve as a reference on how Namibia is monitoring the SDGs until 2030, and gauge the progress towards the achievement of the targets.

However, further investigations are necessary in the next few years on how to broaden the monitoring scope in terms of horizontal and vertical data groups.

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