By Even Hashikutuva
Namibia has set aside N$126 million to pay employers for hiring young people, and a great deal of it is going to sit unclaimed, not because employers do not want the money and not because graduates do not want the jobs, but because in this country the two of them have no reliable way of finding each other.
That is the uncomfortable truth behind one of the best policies this government has passed in years. Through Section 17E of the Income Tax Act, an employer with a certified internship agreement can now claim a youth internship allowance on top of its normal cost deductions, capped at N$50 000 per intern per year and claimable for up to 36 months, with the Ministry of Finance aiming at roughly 5 075 internship opportunities in the 2024/25 fiscal year and fourteen designated authorities gazetted to certify the agreements while the Namibia Investment
Promotion and Development Board coordinates the whole scheme.
I want to be clear, because opinion pieces about incentives usually arrive as complaints and this one does not.
The subsidy is right in principle and sound in design, because the State has correctly identified that the real barrier to youth employment is the cost and risk of a first hire and has agreed to carry part of that risk on behalf of the private sector.
In a country where 44.4% of young people are unemployed, that is not a gesture but the most consequential
labour-market decision of the past decade.
The problem is that an incentive is a promise, and a promise only works if something exists to deliver it.
The N$126 million assumes that the graduate and the employer can locate one another, and in Namibia they largely cannot, because there is no system linking the young person leaving NUST, UNAM or a vocational centre to the organisation that now has every financial reason to bring them in. The money has been committed, while the channel it needs to travel through has never been built.
A disconnect between education and employment
Think about how a young Namibian actually reaches an internship today. The university runs a career office that shares opportunities on a noticeboard or in a WhatsApp group, while the employer, if it is large, posts on its careers page and drowns in applications, and if it is small, simply asks around.
In between stands the graduate, sending certified copies into inboxes that never answer, with no way of knowing which companies hold certified agreements, which sectors have room, or whether the qualification in their hand matches anything on offer.
Both sides are acting sensibly within their own walls, since universities produce graduates and employers post vacancies, but there is no shared infrastructure that turns a cohort of two thousand graduates into a matched list against two thousand certified placements, so each side waits for the other to reach across.
The subsidy has made reaching across cheaper, but it has not made it happen, and that is the whole difference between policy and systems: policy lowers the cost of an action, while systems are what cause the action to occur.
The South African model
Earlier this year I spent time in Cape Town on business, and although the trip had nothing to do with youth employment, the conversations that stayed with me afterwards all did.
South Africa’s youth unemployment is worse than ours by most measures, yet South Africa has built something we have not, which is a national system that sits between the young person and the employer and does the matching at scale.
It is called SA Youth, a zero-rated mobile platform that a young person can register on without paying for data, run by the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator and holding profiles for millions of young South Africans.
Employers post opportunities, the platform assesses and matches and refers, and when a business tells Harambee what it needs, it receives a short list of candidates already screened for readiness rather than a pile of three thousand CVs.
On top of that sits the Youth Employment Service, known as YES, launched in 2018 as a privately funded partnership between business and government that places around 50 000 young people a year into twelve-month, full-time, paid work placements with private employers.
Companies that take part improve their B-BBEE standing and can claim the Employment Tax Incentive on each placement, the candidate arrives with a profile already built, the employer’s cost is subsidised, and the platform tracks the year and issues a verified record of the work at the end of it.
Look at the shape of that. South Africa did not stop at the incentive but built the matching layer, the readiness layer and the tracking layer around it, so the money flows through a system instead of into a void, and the incentive becomes the fuel while SA Youth and YES become the engine.
I say this carefully, because South Africa’s youth unemployment remains a national emergency and its own economists have found that the Employment Tax Incentive on its own barely moved the numbers, which is exactly the point. A subsidy alone did not work there either, and what produces placements in the tens of thousands is the system wrapped around it. We have built the subsidy, and we have not yet built the system.
Evidence from Namibian initiatives
Where the bridge has been built on purpose in Namibia, it works. MTC’s Namibia National Internship Programme began in 2019 as one company’s effort and has grown into a network spanning NUST, UNAM, NIMT, IUM and NTA-affiliated institutions, placing 332 interns across more than forty disciplines in 2025 and now raising N$14 million to reach 1 600 placements, and what makes it work is not the stipend but the fact that the programme sits between the institutions and the employers and does the matching that neither would manage alone.
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 training, while Nedbank Namibia’s graduate intake draws from UNAM, NUST and IUM with a third of participants already on its bursaries, so the link between paying for someone’s education and placing them in work is designed in rather than left to chance. The Namibia Training Authority’s Work-Integrated Learning division does something similar in the trades, pairing approved employers with accredited providers on a model where most of the learning happens on the job.
Every one of these works because somebody built the bridge deliberately, and every one of them operates at a scale of dozens or hundreds in a country where the need runs to hundreds of thousands, which makes them proof of concept rather than a system.
The lesson from our neighbours is that proof of concept only becomes a system when it is built as shared infrastructure rather than kept as a set of admirable private efforts.
The limits of a subsidy alone
Here is what that means in practice. The N$126 million is available to any employer with a certified agreement, but an employer that has never hosted an intern does not know where to find one, does not know which faculty produces the skills it needs, and does not know how to structure the placement so the designated authority will sign it off, while the graduate who would fit that employer perfectly has no idea the employer exists.
When Bank Windhoek ran a recent graduate trainee intake it received more than 3 000 applications for nine positions, drawing on its own recruitment system and on candidates referred by the Ministry of Labour, Industrial Relations and Employment Creation, and it took psychometric testing and a full day of panel exercises to get from three thousand to nine.
That is what the bridge looks like when one large institution builds it alone, and most Namibian employers cannot run that process, so they do not host interns at all, the allowance goes unclaimed, and the graduates go unplaced.
The subsidy lowers the cost of saying yes, but it does nothing about the cost of finding whom to say yes to. In South Africa that second cost is carried by the platform; here it is carried by nobody.
The case for purpose-built systems
I have argued before that Namibia has capable people and incapable systems, and that far too much of our HR function still runs on colour-coded spreadsheets, and this is the clearest case of it I have seen.
The universities are capable, the employers are capable, the Treasury has been generous, and the failure sits in the connective tissue, in the absence of anything that carries a graduate from a lecture hall to a certified desk without relying on luck or a relative.
That connective tissue is software, not in the abstract but as specific systems doing specific jobs: a live register of every certified internship agreement by sector and region so a graduate in Ongwediva can see that a logistics firm in Walvis Bay has an allowance waiting to be used; a profile layer through which universities and vocational centres commit their graduating cohorts, with consent, described by what they can do rather than by a PDF; a screening engine that turns three thousand applications into a defensible shortlist without a department of twelve, so a hardware supplier in Rundu can host an intern as easily as a bank; and a tracking layer that tells the designated authority twelve months later whether the placement turned into a hire.
South Africa built this with philanthropic money, a non-profit operator and private employers who saw the return, and Namibia does not need to copy that model exactly, but it does need to accept the principle underneath it, which is that an incentive without a platform is a cheque with no address on it.
This is the work that a handful of Namibian institutions have already started, each from a different angle. MTC’s Namibia National Internship Programme is building the convening layer, bringing universities and employers into one intake process and doing the matching between them.
The Ministry of Labour’s Namibia Integrated Employment Information System, NIEIS, is building the public register, giving job seekers a single place to be seen and giving employers a referral channel that already fed candidates into Bank Windhoek’s most recent graduate intake.
And companies like Refrane are building the software underneath, with RecruitFlow OS designed to hold both sides of exactly this pipeline: the employer’s certified roles and learning plans, the institution’s graduate profiles, the screening between them and the conversion evidence at the end.
None of these is the answer on its own, because Namibia needs several systems working together rather than one, and the country needs universities to adopt platforms that treat placement as a measured output, employers to run structured programmes rather than ad hoc placements, and designated authorities equipped to certify in days rather than months.
The more of that infrastructure exists and the better it connects, the more of the N$126 million reaches a young person’s first desk instead of resting unclaimed in the Treasury’s projections.
A shared responsibility for industry and academia
The bridge will not be built by government, and it should not be, because government has already done the part only it could do by putting the money on the table and writing it into law.
What remains is not a public-sector task but a partnership that the private sector and the universities have been avoiding for years, each convinced that the other should move first.
So let me say it to both directly. To the universities, NUST and UNAM and IUM and every vocational centre in the country: the graduate you hand a certificate to is your product, and a product that nobody can find is a product that has failed, however good the teaching was.
Your career offices should not be noticeboards but the front door of a pipeline, holding a profile of every graduating student, with their consent, described by what they can do and who is ready to be placed, and you should be walking into boardrooms with that list in hand and asking employers what they need before the next intake is designed, not after it has graduated.
To the private sector, and I include my own company in this: you have spent years telling universities that graduates arrive unprepared while doing almost nothing to shape what preparation looks like.
The allowance under Section 17E has removed your best excuse, because the cost of a first hire is now shared with the State, so the remaining question is whether you are willing to sit with a faculty and say plainly which skills you cannot find, commit to a number of certified placements you will host, and let the university build towards that number.
MTC has shown that a single company can convene five institutions and place hundreds; Nedbank has shown that a bursary and a placement can be designed as one decision rather than two. There is no reason a chamber of commerce, an industry body or a group of five mid-sized firms cannot do the same in their own sector.
Between the two sits the systems layer, and that is where those who build software have to show up.
A shared register, a screening engine and a tracking layer are not complicated to build, but they are complicated to agree on, and they will only be adopted if universities and employers are already in the same room deciding what they need. The technology follows the partnership, never the other way round.
None of this needs a new law, a new ministry or another line in the budget, because the incentive already exists and the two parties who can activate it already exist.
It needs a university willing to treat placement as an outcome it is measured on, an employer willing to treat the graduate as a future colleague rather than a risk to be filtered out, and both willing to stop waiting for someone else to introduce them. South Africa shows what that partnership produces when it is taken seriously, and every part of it can be under way in this country within a year.
Conclusion: the entry point is funded.
Countries are not judged on the policies they pass but on the systems they build to carry those policies into people’s lives.
Namibia has committed N$126 million to the idea that its young people deserve a first chance and has built the legal channel for that commitment to flow through, which is the hard part, and it is done. What remains is the part everyone forgets, which is connecting the graduate to the desk.
Every experienced professional in this country was once someone’s inexperienced hire, and government has now agreed to underwrite that hire.
The universities hold the graduates, the employers hold the allowance, and what separates them is neither money nor will but the fact that they have never sat down together to build the system that would let them find one another.
Our neighbours built theirs. Ours is waiting for the first university and the first employer to pick up the phone, and I intend to be on one end of that call.
*Even Hashikutuva is a Namibian entrepreneur and business engineer working at the intersection of systems and talent. As Co-Founder and CEO of Refrane, he leads the development of automation platforms, including RecruitFlow OS, focused on unlocking capacity and improving operational efficiency for Namibian businesses.
