Namibia can learn from Finland: Venaani

WINDHOEK, 17 SEP  – Namibia can learn from its Nordic counterpart – Finland – in areas of value addition, vocational training and renewable energy to arrest its high poverty and unemployment levels, leader of the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM) McHenry Venaani said.
The president of the official opposition made these observations when the Finnish Ambassador to Namibia, Pirkko-Liisa Kyöstilä paid him a courtesy visit on Monday.
During the short conversation before the two went into a closed-door meeting, Venaani stressed the importance of value addition in employment creation.
Value addition to commodities is, according to Venaani, Africa’s biggest challenge.
“Our problem in Africa is that we are importing labour from China while we are supposed to give those jobs to our people. And I think Finland can help us in the areas of vocational training so that we create people with skills,” said Venaani.
As such, Africa must identify strategic partners that seek to address value addition as a key driver in employment creation.
“For example, cocoa trade where countries such as Côte d’Ivoire are the biggest planters of cocoa but only get 5 per cent from cocoa trade,” Venaani bemoaned.
He continued: “Switzerland who are producing the final product from cocoa (chocolate) are making the money. From cocoa alone, Africa could create over 100 000 jobs.”
Equally, he noted how Namibia could learn from the Nordic countries, particularly Finland in the field of renewable energy.
“We have the sun in abundance, more than Finland. We have wind but we are doing nothing to make sure that we deliver services,” he said.
On her part, Kyöstilä indicated that the Namibia-Finland relationship spans over 15 decades.
However, Namibia’s ranking as upper-middle income country is to its detriment in terms of benefiting from Finland’s development programmes.
“We don’t anymore have the bilateral development programme. We are supporting your civil society organisations and we have a lot of good cooperation in that field,” the ambassador said.
Despite this ranking, she observed that economic relations and diplomacy was now the way forward between the two countries.
This is in a bid to improve business opportunities for Finnish and Namibian business in either country.
“That is our priority,” she said.
To this effect, a Finnish business delegation led by its Minister of Economic Affairs Mika Lintilä will visit Namibia towards the end of October.
It will be composed of 13 Finnish companies and nine representatives of higher learning institutions in the field of education and vocational education. – NAMPA