As part my MBA studies, our first module was economics.
And somewhere between learning about inflation, scarcity, supply and demand, unemployment, production, markets, exchange rates, externalities and public goods, I found myself asking a surprisingly uncomfortable question: Why was I never taught this?
I have a science degree background, including computer science. I spent years learning how computers work, how systems are designed, how algorithms solve problems and how technology can be used to improve organisations.
But nobody thought it necessary to teach me even the basics of how an economy works. Why isn’t economic literacy treated as part of a basic university education? Scarcity is not an abstract concept.
We experience it every day. We have limited money, limited time, limited resources and unlimited things we would like to do with them. Supply and demand are not ideas confined to textbooks.
They explain why the price of a product changes, why a hotel room costs more during a busy weekend, and why a developer can charge differently when there are 10 clients competing for the same service.
Inflation is not merely a statistic announced every month. It determines what happens to the N$500 in your wallet. Interest rates are not just something bankers discuss.
They affect the cost of a mortgage, a vehicle loan, a business loan and a microloan. Exchange rates affect the price of the computer I buy from abroad, the software subscription my company pays for, and the imported goods sitting on a Namibian shop shelf.
Even the concept of incentives becomes obvious once you start looking at real life. People respond to prices, salaries, taxes, risks and opportunities every day.
Yet these basic concepts can be completely unfamiliar to someone who has spent years at university studying science, engineering, technology or even other disciplines outside commerce.
Namibia is a small economy with a population of just over three million. The Namibia Statistics Agency reports 2025 annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 1.7% and an unemployment rate of 36.9%.
These are not simply numbers. They describe part of the economic environment in which Namibians live and businesses operate.
The National Planning Commission’s sixth National Development Plan places economic diversification, structural transformation, wealth and employment creation at the centre of the country’s development agenda.
One of its targets is economic growth of 7% or more by 2030, alongside an employment rate of 75%.
These are not simply government phrases. They are economics.
When we talk about diversification, we are talking about production and the structure of an economy. Unemployment concerns labour markets.
Poverty encompasses income, productivity and distribution. Inflation is about purchasing power. Debt reflects our choices between current consumption and future resources.
Namibia’s currency peg to the South African rand is monetary policy and the room the country has to act independently.
The Bank of Namibia identifies price stability and sustaining the one-to-one parity with the South African rand as central to its monetary policy framework.
This is where my technology work has unexpectedly made the economics lesson more tangible.
For example, when you operate technology for microlenders, interest rates stop being a chapter in a textbook.
A monetary-policy decision eventually finds its way into a loan calculation, a repayment schedule and a customer’s monthly instalment.
Estate agencies and property markets stop being a theoretical market structure.
Supply, demand, affordability and access to finance determine whether a property moves. When you run an online bookshop, demand, pricing, purchasing power, logistics and exchange rates become daily operational considerations.
When graduates leave university and begin earning salaries, borrowing money, buying houses, starting companies, paying taxes, investing, employing people or making business decisions, they suddenly enter the world of economics.
And they are often expected to figure it out themselves. Namibia’s economic problems cannot simply be reduced to whether GDP is rising or falling.
A country can record economic growth while unemployment remains high.
It can maintain relatively contained inflation while households still struggle with the cost of living. It can attract investment while still asking whether enough value is being created locally.
Those apparent contradictions are precisely why economic literacy matters. Economics has made me look differently at the country I thought I already understood. And perhaps that is the bigger question for our universities.
We should not only ask whether a graduate knows enough to become a good programmer, engineer, scientist, teacher or lawyer.
We should also ask whether that graduate understands the economic environment in which he or she will live, work, borrow, earn, spend, invest and build. Because eventually, every graduate leaves the lecture hall and enters the economy. `
– Timo Neisho
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