Kavango East Electoral Officer Paulus Sifire assured stakeholders the ECN is ready to ensure smooth regional and local authority elections. He gave the assurance at a stakeholders meeting at Rundu.  

The ECN is at an advanced stage in the preparations for the November Regional Council and Local Authorities Elections. 

The stakeholders, however, questioned the electoral body on how it intends to address challenges experienced in the previous elections, such as poor network coverage at some polling stations, which hindered the timely uploading of data.

Electoral Officer of the Kavango East Region, Paulus Sifire, responded, "One thing we should remember is the network is something that is beyond our control. One day it's good; the next day you wake up, and it's not doing good. One thing that we do is we also do a network test. We test the speed of the network at that specific centre that will be established before we decide that."

Other challenges mentioned are malfunctioning of electronic equipment and shortages of ballot paper.

Sifire said the situation will be monitored closely to ensure that there are sufficient ballot papers. He further assured the stakeholders that voter education was done, including in the remotest areas of the region.

"The flyers that you are seeing and the posters that you are seeing, we always distribute them accordingly to ensure that they have the information when they go to the polling stations, " Sifire concluded.

Kavango East Region will have 475 polling stations.