Dr.

Micheal Tjivikua Describes himself as an educationalist at heart who prescribes to the notion that
education is a lifelong process. He is an American educated with a Doctorate in Education.

He started at NIPAM in 2016 and the journey has been an excellent one as we were able to accomplish a
lot of this. At the time I came in we were able to train 1500 people and I think that was a good feet for
an organization beginning or rather in its early stages.

The journey has also been excellent as I have had and have good colleagues that have been very
supportive and we had various successes we were able to offer the SMDP AND MMDP programs and we
also managed to redesign those programs so that they may better meet the needs of the public services
and we are about to conclude that process.

The other programs we are working on

 Executive development
 Senior management program
 Middle management development program

With regards to policy, we have put in place the research and capacity evaluation policy and that has
become operational and I have also worked on other policies such as the quality insurance policy,
enrollment policy, and the program development and review policy, and the assessment and
moderation policy. I am currently working on the accreditation process of NIPAM with the National
Qualification Authority.

We were faced with the challenges of making the courses that we were offering relevant to the
Namibian public service. That was one major challenge and we are currently in the process of concluding
that challenge. The economic downturn coupled with the Covid-19 has made our stakeholders
remaining steadfast with NIPAM a challenge.

I hope that we can find different ways of funding programs at NIPAM so that we may be able to train as
many public servants as possible. As an educationalist, I remain steadfast in the cause of education and
capacity development.

“a nation that is educated accomplishes much with its educated cadre”. This means that you cannot
develop without education and education is a lifelong process and does not end when you get that
qualification.

Once you qualify your people they still need to be re-trained and re-skilled as the socio-economic
situation out there changes a lot. I believe if we remain focused on education and training Namibia can
accomplish a lot not just here as NIPAM but the entire education process of people within the nation.
We must rise to the level of the Asian Tigers. They have risen to such heights by focusing on the
education of their people give them a good education and them coming out and making contributions to
national development this is the way we can get out of the quagmire of underdevelopment.

As far as the government is concerned I believe we need to put in a lot more money in our education
institutions particularly our higher education institutions so that they can make an impact on society. to
do this we need to come up with mechanisms where we can have more people in our universities
alternatively we need to also make use of young Namibians who don’t make it to that level so that the
future generation collectively can make contributions to the nation in the future.