NSA board lauds Shimuafeni
By Hilary Mare
THE Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) board has lauded the efforts of Statistician-General and CEO, Alex Shimuafeni, who they say under his watch NSA has consistently produced regular spatial, economic and demographic statistics.
This week, the board announced the reappointment of Shimuafeni for an additional five-year term effective April 1 2021 until March 31 2026.
“This decision has been done in close consultation with the Director-General of the National Planning Commission and has been endorsed by Cabinet of Republic of Namibia,” board chairperson, John Steytler said this week.
Affirming Shimuafeni’s leadership, Steytler noted that the NSA successfully concluded the census mapping exercise where it mapped and verified 955 037 built up structures countrywide and employed over 517 temporary staff for this exercise.
He added that this project was conducted for the first time with digital maps, as well as digitally capturing the information.
“During the tenure of Shimuafeni, the NSA produced its second Strategic Plan internally, as well as its first National Spatial Data Infrastructure Strategic Plan.
Both these plans were focusing on the external stakeholders since the initial Strategic Plan was focusing on building the NSA. In the quest for NSA to continue to carry out its mandate of providing data to the nation at all times, the NSA Management under the leadership of Shimuafeni developed several dissemination tools such as the Statistics Mobile App which is available to download for all types of phones, as well as the Geoportal for accessing location based statistics.
“It is further noteworthy that the NSA has consistently managed its resources well.
This was also documented and confirmed by various Financial Audits carried out by external private audit firms that provided unqualified opinions since the inception of the NSA in 2012,” Steytler added.
Locally, the NSA cooperated with the Ministry of Health and Social Services during the Covid pandemic outbreak by developing the Covid Dashboard as a monitoring tool (amongst others); Ministry of Urban and Rural Development with the National Housing Information System being developed (which is one of the resolutions from the 2nd Land Conference), as well as the Data Capturing and Analyses of the Road Accident forms for the National Road Safety Council (NRSC); the Publishing of the first ever Land Statistics Booklet which served as an input for discussions for the 2nd Land Conference.
“The board is also proud to indicate that there has been employee growth within the agency which is essential since the staff are the most valuable assets in the NSA.
“As a board, we are happy that the past five years can be characterised as successful years.
We have thus no doubt that with Shimuafeni at the helm, the next five years will be successful as well and we wish him all the best in that,” Steytler extended.