The Ministry of Labour, Industrial Relations, and Employment Creation and its partners are working together to find ways to simplify employment creation and effect broader change in the economy.

The ministry, the Namibian Statistics Agency (NSA), and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) launched the updated Social Accounting Matrix (SAM).

The main goal of the Employment Impact Assessment is to assist in the design of targeted interventions that promote more and better job creation for all, including women and youth.

Statistician General Alex Shimuafeni states that the SAM will generalise the way that organisations operate.

"A Social Accounting Matrix is a comprehensive and detailed accounting framework that captures the interrelationships among different sectors of an economy and various social groups. This tool provides a systematic way to organise and analyse economic and social data, offering valuable insights into the complex interactions within a society."

Shimuafeni adds that SAM will also be used to build economy-wide macroeconomic models, explicitly designed to analyse the distributional impacts of policy change.

This, the Ministry's acting Executive Director, Aune Mundjanima, says, is in line with the government's objectives under the Harambee Prosperity Plans for economic advancement and enhancing the productivity of priority economic sectors.

"It provides the government with insight to actually formulate policy options to enhance the employment outcome of investment, such as identifying the skills required for implementing the project, putting measures in place to make such skills available, adopting policies to increase domestically produced input to increase employment within the economy, and ensuring that more productive and decent jobs are created for all economically active job seekers that are available and are looking for jobs."

SAM, on a global scale, is expected to link Namibia with industry players to promote investment in the country's economic development.