By Tangeni Namene
Every experienced professional in this country was once somebody’s risk. We have stopped taking that risk, and then we complain that nobody is ready.
Namibia has a youth unemployment rate of 44.4% and a job market that routinely asks entry-level candidates for three years’ experience. Those two facts cannot coexist indefinitely.
One of them has to give, and for the better part of a decade it has been the young people who have given.
The rejection cycle is by now so familiar that graduates can recite it before the email arrives. Not enough experience. Two years. Three years. Experience with a particular system, a particular client base, a particular kind of office.
Even the positions labelled entry-level arrive with entry criteria that make one wonder what, precisely, anyone is meant to be entering.
And so thousands of young Namibians sit inside a piece of arithmetic that does not resolve: you need work to get experience, and experience to get work, and both conditions are checked by the same person, at the same desk, in the same breath.
Youth unemployment in this country is not a single problem with a single cause. Economic growth, the pace of job creation, the quality of schooling, access to capital and the structure of our economy all bear on it.
No serious person claims that hiring practice alone explains the figure. But hiring practice is the gate. It decides who is allowed into the economy in the first place, and it is the one part of the system that every employer, large or small, controls directly.
That makes it the part we are most reluctant to examine.
The scale of the problem
The numbers are not in dispute. The Namibia Statistics Agency’s 2023 Labour Force Survey put unemployment among 15- to 34-year-olds at 44.4%, a figure that climbs in economically marginalised regions and climbs again if discouraged workers are counted.
Close to 42% of young people aged 15 to 24 are not in education, employment or training. More than a million working-age Namibians are outside the labour force altogether, and the survey found that discouraged workers are concentrated most heavily in rural areas.
With roughly 70% of the population under 35, this is not a marginal constituency. It is the country.
These are not people who failed to polish a CV. This is a generation waiting outside a door that is barely open, and the longer they wait, the harder the door becomes to open.
A graduate who spends two years unemployed is not standing still. In the eyes of the next recruiter, that gap is itself a mark against them. The system punishes the very people it has excluded, for having been excluded.
Where experienced people come from
None of this makes employers villains. A person who has done the work before needs less supervision, produces sooner, and costs less to get wrong. In a tight economy, that reads as the prudent choice, and taken one vacancy at a time, it is.
But it is worth pausing on where experienced people actually come from. Nobody is born withbtwo years in logistics. Every branch manager once had to be shown how the branch worked.
Every senior developer once broke a system they had never seen. Every auditor once signed off on something they should have queried and learnt from the correction.
The people we now call experienced became so because, at some point, an organisation handed them responsibility a little before they had earned it, and then stayed close enough to catch them if they fell.
Experience is not found. It is made, and it is made by somebody deciding to let it begin.
If every organisation waits for someone else to do the making, the making stops. That is not a moral failing on anyone’s part. It is what happens when a thousand individually sensible decisions add up to a collectively senseless outcome.
The ceiling on self-improvement
We have grown fond of telling young people to make themselves employable. Do the online
course, volunteer, network, start something on the side. It is not bad advice, and in a market this crowded it is probably necessary. But it has a ceiling.
No certificate teaches a person how to handle a client who changes the brief on a Thursday afternoon, or how to read a workplace where half the rules are unwritten, or what it feels like to make a decision with a real consequence attached.
Those things are learnt inside a working organisation or not at all. When we lock people out of the building and then mark them down for not knowing the layout, we are not measuring employability. We are measuring access.
This is the quiet dishonesty at the centre of the employability conversation. It takes a structural problem and hands it back to the individual as a personal deficiency.
The graduate is told the fault is theirs: not enough initiative, not enough hustle, not enough certificates. And somevgraduates believe it, and blame themselves, and stop applying. They then appear in the statistics as discouraged workers, which allows the rest of us to conclude that the problem is motivation.
The myth of the ready-made graduate
The same trap catches our universities. There is an expectation that NUST and UNAM should deliver graduates who arrive already fluent in every internal system a company runs, every client relationship, every unwritten norm of a specific office.
They cannot, and it is unrealistic to ask. Universities can supply knowledge, technical grounding and the capacity to think. They cannot supply a workplace, because a workplace is not a curriculum.
This is not an argument for universities to ignore applied learning. Work-integrated learning, industry attachments and practical assessment matter, and the institutions that do them well produce noticeably more confident graduates.
But there is a hard limit to what can be simulated in a lecture theatre. Rejecting a graduate for not already knowing an environment they have never been permitted to enter is not rigour. It is a refusal to teach, disguised as a standard.
Some readiness can only be produced at work, and the honest question is whether Namibian organisations are prepared to do that producing.
A small market eating its own supply
This matters more here than almost anywhere. Namibia does not have a deep reservoir of experienced professionals moving between employers.
We have a shallow one, and the same people circulate through it. One company develops a specialist; another poaches them.
That company develops a replacement; someone else poaches the replacement. Salaries for experienced people climb, not because the work has become more valuable but because the, supply has been allowed to stay artificially thin.
Experience becomes concentrated and expensive. Meanwhile the young people who could be tomorrow’s supply stand outside because nobody wants to fund their first eighteen months.
Employers then complain, with complete sincerity, that skilled people are hard to find. They are hard to find because nobody is making them.
A small labour market cannot keep consuming experience without producing it. Eventually everybody is bidding for the same forty people, and the forty people know it.
What is already being done
In fairness, some are trying, and they deserve to be named. MTC’s Namibia National Internship Programme, launched in 2019, placed 332 interns in 2025 alone, drawn from NUST, UNAM,NIMT, IUM and NTA-affiliated institutions, and now aims to raise N$14 million to create 1,600 placements across more than forty disciplines, from geology and welding to logistics and animal health.
Interns receive a monthly stipend to cover transport and meals while they gain workplace exposure. What began as one company’s initiative has grown into a national programme involving universities, vocational centres and public institutions.
Bank Windhoek’s Emerging Bankers Programme, backed by N$3.24 million from the Capricorn Foundation for 2026/27, takes thirteen school leavers from small towns and remote areas through eighteen months of structured workplace exposure, certified training and mentoring, deliberately reaching young people who may not have access to tertiary study at all. It is the second cohort, following a first intake in 2024.
Government introduced a youth employment tax incentive worth N$126 million for the 2024/25 fiscal year, intended to support roughly 5,075 internship opportunities, with the Ministry of Finance gazetting designated authorities per sector to certify internship agreements and guard against abuse.
At this year’s UNAM graduation, President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah confirmed that offices, ministries and agencies have been directed to budget for internships and apprenticeships, including graduate interns, and called on the private sector to follow.
The Namibia Training Authority’s apprenticeship scheme, meanwhile, pairs approved employers with accredited training institutions on a model where the bulk of learning happens on the job.
And in Kavango East, trainees from Rundu Vocational Training Centre built a 128-bed hostel at Neyuva Combined School so competently that the project ran two months ahead of schedule, drawing an unannounced visit and public praise from the prime minister.
Proof, if any were needed, that the capability exists. What is scarce is not capable young Namibians. It is the willingness to give them something real to do.
Why it is not enough
These are real efforts. They are also, measured against the need, a teaspoon against a tide. A few thousand placements a year set against hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people is a beginning, not a solution.
And the model itself is under strain. Commentators in this country’s own press have noted that many interns perform the exact same duties as permanent staff for an allowance, and that some employers have gone as far as a pay-to-work model where graduates are expected to pay for the privilege of gaining experience. An internship that is a job with the salary removed is not an entry point. It is a discount.
The government’s move to revise stipends is welcome. It is not reform. Reform would mean every internship having a defined learning outcome, a named mentor, a fixed duration and an honest conversation at the end about whether a permanent role exists.
Without that structure, the tax incentive risks subsidising cheap labour rather than producing experienced workers, and the young people cycling through it will emerge two years older with a certificate of attendance and no clearer path.
What organisations can actually change
Not every business can run a graduate academy, and nobody is asking them to. Small and medium enterprises operate on thin margins and cannot carry people who do not perform. That is legitimate. But the alternative to a large programme is not nothing.
It is asking different questions when a vacancy opens. Could this role be redesigned as a junior position with a senior person alongside it?
Could someone with the right foundations be grown into the post over a year rather than hired ready-made? Could an experienced employee be given the time and recognition to mentor?
Could adaptability and the capacity to learn carry as much weight in the shortlist as the length of the employment history? Larger organisations have less excuse.
They have the resources to build graduate pipelines and succession systems that deliberately manufacture future capability instead of hoping to buy it later at a premium.
The principle is the same at every scale: an employer should take at least some responsibility for developing the talent it claims it cannot find.
The filter dressed up as a standard
There is a quieter, more practical layer to this, and it is where the argument should land, because it is the part employers can actually control.
Most Namibian organisations do not refuse to hire juniors out of malice. They refuse because the process is expensive and the risk feels unmanageable.
When Bank Windhoek ran a recent graduate trainee intake, it received more than 3,000 applications for nine positions and had to screen, vet, assess and interview its way down through psychometric testing and a full day of panel exercises before selecting the final group. Very few companies have the human resources capacity to do that well.
So they shortcut. They write “three years’ experience” at the top of theadvert as a filter, not because the job needs it but because the pile does.
The requirement is a labour-saving device dressed up as a standard, and it works precisely because it is never questioned.
Removing the excuse
That is the kind of problem software is built to solve. Recruitment platforms designed for this market, among them RecruitFlow OS, developed in Windhoek by Refrane, exist to make it cheaper and less daunting to open the door wider: to screen for aptitude rather than employment history, to structure an internship so that it has milestones and a mentor and an end state, to track how a junior develops over their first year so the organisation can see the return on the risk it took, and to stop good candidates vanishing into a spreadsheet nobody reopens.
A hiring process that can handle three thousand applications without a team of twelve is a hiring process that no longer needs “three years’ experience” as a crutch.
Tools like these are not a cure for youth unemployment. They do not create jobs, and they do not replace the judgement of a good manager.
What they do is remove the excuse. When it costs an organisation almost nothing to consider a candidate on potential, “we could not find anyone suitable” stops being true. The filter can be replaced by a decision.
Who will let it begin?
That phrase, “no suitable candidates”, is the sentence this country needs to interrogate. The young people building hostels ahead of schedule, sending three thousand applications for nine posts, and accepting stipends to do full-time work are not unsuitable.
There is only a doorway too narrow to admit them, and a room full of employers who each, individually, made a sensible decision not to widen it. Individually rational. Collectively ruinous.
Namibia’s youth unemployment will not be solved by employers alone, nor by universities alone, nor by government or the young people themselves.
But every actor in that list controls one piece of the gate, and employers control the largest piece. Each time an organisation decides that only candidates with prior experience are worth considering, it makes a reasonable choice for that vacancy.
When every organisation makes that same choice, the country pays for it in a generation locked out.
Every experienced professional in Namibia was once someone’s inexperienced hire. Experience has to begin somewhere. The question this country has not yet answered is not whether our young people are ready. It is who is willing to let it begin with them.
* Tangeni Namene is the Co founder| Refrane Technology CC
