RUNDU – Elizabeth Nepemba Correctional Facility in Kavango West region says it is pleased to assist nearby schools with restoring their damaged school chairs and desks without compensation with the help of offenders who are being taught basic vocational technical skills.
The correctional facility is situated at Mile 10 village in Kavango West.

“We have a maintenance division where skill transfer is happening by our officers, where our offenders are being given basic training on some technical skills,” said the officer in charge of the correctional facility, Assistant Commissioner Ester Joseph.
“We provide technical assistance to schools – all they need is to provide all the required materials and we repair their chairs, desks, for free. We are only assisting the Namibian child.”
The officer in charge noted that they still have some broken school furniture that they will be repairing as soon as the schools deliver the needed materials.

“Recently we delivered some repaired chairs to Romanus Kamunoko Secondary School in Rundu, and we still have some of their furniture that we need to deliver. All that the schools need to do is make arrangements with us,” she said.
The school told this publication that they were grateful for the assistance. 

“We had a shortage of 317 chairs and we took all the broken chairs to Elizabeth Nepemba and this week we received 197 chairs of some of the chairs that we took there to be fixed and it was free of charge,” said Alexander Ndumba, a teacher at the beneficiary school, Romanus Kamunoko Secondary School in Rundu. Ndumba encouraged schools to make use of the correctional facility’s assistance to repair broken furniture’s especially now that the government is struggling to provide new furniture due to budget constraints.
“We were only asked to buy the materials that they needed in order to fix our broken school chairs. We appreciate their assistance, we are encouraging other schools to do the same to fix their old or broken furniture to be able to accommodate learners especially now that all grades are going back to school,” the teacher added.