Abstract
Namibia envisions becoming an industrialised knowledge-based economy through the productive capacities of its human resources by the year 2030. Through a “Growth at Home Strategy”, that prioritizes diversification of the manufacturing industrial policy reforms are executed in selected strategic industries such as the Metal Fabrication Industry of Namibia. Since the Namibian Metal Fabrication Industry has a critically low stock of specialized skills, the current study adopts a mixed research methodology to understand how this shortage and its existing development initiatives impact on the Metal Fabrication Industry. This methodology involves desk research and semi-structured interview methods respectively to collect sector-level quantitative and qualitative data taking into consideration both the demand and supply side of the Namibian Metal Fabrication Industry. A total of eight (8) purposefully sampled respondents representing the following key stakeholder groups of the Namibian Metal Fabrication Industry: academia, firms and government are interviewed. The overall objective is to gather evidence in support of a coherent strategy for Metal Fabrication industry specific specialized skills development. This Study focuses on Namibia’s 4th and 5th National Development Plan (NDP 4 and 5) implementation period which covers the years 2012-2019. The research findings led to the conclusions that firstly this shortage of specialized skills has negatively affected the metal fabrication industry’s capacity to diversify along the value chains which then limits the industry’s economic competitiveness. Secondly, the existing training programs for technical skills under the auspices of Namibia Training Authority (NTA) has increased the number of metal fabrication- related specialized skills in the market, though not significantly. Thirdly, the Metal Fabrication Industry of Namibia suffers from poor stakeholder coordination which negatively affect resources mobilization and synergies towards developing specialized skills
v
for this industry. However, the window of opportunity still exists to develop specialized skills for the Namibian Metal Fabrication industry in sufficient quantities and qualities. Two recommendations are made. Firstly, an increase in Public-Private dialogue to create better synergies and opportunities for leveraging resources toward specialised skills development. Secondly, certain industrial policy interventions are required to ensure regularly monitored apprenticeships. Further research can look into profiling the key specialized skills for the Namibian metal fabrication industry to inform its value chain development and industrial policy direction. Key words: Specialized skills, Metal Fabrication Industry of Namibia, Human Capital, Industrial policy, Namibia Vision 2030, Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVET).