About

It is expected of the Namibia Training Authority as the official regulating body in the Vocational Education and Training sector, to ensure that all training providers operating within the borders of our country, indeed meet quality training standards.

The NTA does so in line with the provisions of the Vocational Education and Training Act of 2008. However, the same Act empowers the NTA, as the agent of quality standards in Vocational Education and Training to identify instances of non-compliance, and to issue sanctions and/or penalties, if these are not rectified within a stated period.

The VET Act provides for a range of sanctions, escalating from enforceable undertakings and additional conditions on registration, through to cancelling the registration of a training provider.

As such, the NTA may:
- Amend, shorten, and/or revoke registration;
- Impose conditions on a registration;
- Issue directions under the legislation for an organisation to take specific steps or refrain from doing certain things;
- Issue infringement notices as an alternative to prosecution; and/or
- Prosecute organisations that breach the legislation.

The NTA officially launched the Regulations for the Registration of Vocational Education and Training Providers in March 2013, following the official publication thereof in the Government Gazette in December, 2012, (Notice 300).

The formulation and gazetting of the Regulations for the Registration of Vocational Education and Training Providers was a decisive and bold step towards a regulated, systematic approach to secure the sustainability and currency of training in Namibia and to counter some of the symptoms of our current training market, which include inter alia:

- Institutions which charge money for training and later on close down for undetermined reasons, fleecing thousands of dollars from unsuspecting trainees;
- Institutions which charge exorbitant fees, but offer cheap and non-effective training, leaving trainees with no skills to competitively enter the job market;
- Institutions run by unqualified managers and equally under-qualified trainers;
- Institutions which lack the required human and infrastructure resources to run training,
- Institutions which trained in areas for which there was no market demand, meaning that people with skills in those areas remain redundant in the market; and
- Institutions with little or no understanding of the concept of quality in training.