The European Union (EU) Ambassador to Namibia, Ana Beatriz Martins, undertook a two-day joint visit with a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) delegation to assess educational facilities in the Daures Constituency in the Erongo Region and Khorixas Constituency in the Kunene Region.

The visits were aimed at upgrading and improving the quality of teaching and resources at early childhood centres.

Martins says the visit is to assess centres if they need additional funding for infrastructure and school feeding programmes in the rural parts of the regions.

Daures Constituency has about 14 early childhood development centres.

"We are partnering directly with the Ministry of Gender and Education to upgrade the quality of teaching, the quality of education, and also the qualifications infrastructure in childhood education centres and pre-primary education centres, as well as to contribute to the funding for the food security of children of the age of three to five, so it's quite a vast scope of our cooperation, and UNICEF and WFP are partners on this. The EU has been funding the childhood education sector for over 10 years. So it's a sector that is very important to us."

The delegation is also looking into the sectors of health, mining, and youth skills to address high unemployment, where the EU can support.

"It's very concerning to hear that when you have mining activities close by, the youth here do not have access to jobs in the mines; that's quite frustrating. We do support vocational education programmes. We have a programme up in the north that will not help you, but we are looking at ways of rolling it out. We are going into partnership with the Namibia Training Authority. So these are angles at which we could look at it, and it's really visible for us to hear these struggles that you are facing, very concrete in accessing job opportunities."

The assessment visits conclude at Khorixas, where they engage with the constituency councillor on education challenges there.