The Programme Basic Education Namibia

With the support of the Basic Education Programme a School Cluster System has been developed and successively introduced in all 13 education regions of Namibia. Such a system structures an education region into a regional education office, circuit education offices and school clusters with a certain number of individual cluster schools.

The nation-wide introduction and the continuous support for the decentralised school cluster system led to a strengthening of decentralised education structures within the education system. Thus improving the internal efficiency of the education system with regard to education management and service delivery at all regional levels.

The focus is to improve the capacity of education officers to perform more efficiently within the decentralised structures at the level of the 13 Regional Councils as well as the Regional Education Offices and their 56 Circuits of Education. In line with national objectives, the regional education officials are empowered to plan independently, to draw up regional budget plans and to implement them as well as to ascertain relevant data for planning within the framework of a national Education Management Information System (EMIS), to analyse them, and to build up efficient communication with schools for monitoring and evaluation in order to recognise disparities regarding the quality of education and to arrange for support measures.

With respect to the pedagogical standards measures are taken to further qualify the Inspectors of Education and Advisory Teachers within the school cluster system. They are the agents to carry out in-service teacher training programmes for the introduction of the new textbooks; they are evaluating the quality of mother tongue education and the improvement of learning through regular supervision.

The implementation of the decentralisation policy within the education sector was also supported by the German Bank for Development, the 'Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau' (KfW). The Basic Education Programme (BEP/AfriLa) was instrumental in the planning and in supporting complementary infrastructure measure in the framework of financial cooperation. Apart from building classrooms, cluster centres and teacher resource centres were newly constructed or rehabilitated. These are the venues where in-service training for principals and teachers as well as meetings to improve the cooperation between schools, communities and parents are taking place now. Furthermore, circuit education offices were built; cluster centres extended ensuring that the provision of decentralised education services is now possible at lower levels of the education system at adequate venues and with transferred education officers available where education takes place.