Necessary business Registrations

I am happy to announce that our business, F.L.I.C.C Investments cc, is finally registered for all the necessary registrations as a business in Namibia. Here I will walk you through what it takes to get each.

1. Ministry of Trade and Industry 

I previously blogged about how to register a business with the Ministry. Find the post here: Registering a business in Namibia  

 

     2.  Ministry of Finance

You neeed to register your business with the ministry, they deal with all tax issues (income tax deductions, VAT certificates, etc.). They require you to have a business bank account (it can be a personal account) and the application form asks for the bank's stamp to confirm the account.

We import some of our merchandise from abroad, so we needed to apply for a VAT certificate which is required to in order get an import/export certificate in order to anything into/out of the country. You also applly for this certificate with the Ministry of Finance.  

     3. Social Security Commission (SSC)

This is for the employees benefits mostly. It includes services such as leave, pension, death benefit fund and insurance. We currently have 5 employees. Every time one applies for a tender, it is required that one gets a certificate of good standing from the SSC (as well as the Ministry of Finance) and you have to have been registered with the SSC in order to get this certificate. The certificate of good standing is specific and once off, you have to re-apply at every occassion you need one.

     4. City/Town Municipality

This is basically to register the business in the municipal area where the business exists. The Municipality come over to your facilities and make sure that the environment is at least minimmaly suitable for running a business. They also give you a certificate of good standing if you have good sanitation, suitable environemntal for the workers, necessary convenience for the customers and so forth. This registration requires you to get the consent of your neighbors of a certain distance from you (depending on the type of business). 

     5. Small and Medium Entrepreneur (SME)

This registraton is optional and only beneficial to one's business. SMEs Competitiveness Consultancy (Pty) Ltd is a consultancy firm known by the acronym SMEs Compete that helps Namibian SMEs to grow business, create wealth and employment. SMEs Compete provides assistance and support for income growth and job creation in the Namibian SME sector. The primary objective of the firm is to improve entrepreneurial, management, marketing and information technology skills of SMEs in Namibia. Read more about them here: http://www.smecompete.com/



Happy Holidays Everyone!

This year went by so fast. Personally I wouldn't ask for a better year. It feels so good at this point to have achieved most of my year's resolutions. I am grateful for the support and motivation I got from everyone both in South Africa and Namibia, the people I met this year and amazing colleagues at work.

I am looking forward to new challenges in 2014 and I wish only the best for all of us this coming year. 

 Marry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Fabienne & Martin

I met these friends at the Kalahari Anib Lodge near Mariental (Namibia) were I was accommodated while doing my field work in the area. What a beautiful place to stay at? Great people, good service, and a kind of silence not too much to get you bored but just enough to have you relaxed. Lucky for met I Fabienne and Martin at the pool while we were all trying to keep cool in the middle of a hot and dry day that was. They are from Switzerland and they visited Namibia during their Africa&Asia Trip.  What a lovely couple they are?! We got to talk about my country and theirs as well and we ended up being friends and exchanging emails. I promised them to visit them in Switzerland and I'm particularly excited about skiing and their food.  

The lodge is located on the farm so one gets to see the animals while relaxing by the pool. Although the sunset is beautifully red and orange, it goes down so much faster than I would have liked. It gets hot during the day in November, however, the rainy season is just beginning and the few showers cools it down a little. The food is so good and tasty that I literally thought it was organic or something. Seriously, even the inland tourists that I met there were amazed. 

Please check out Fabienne and Martin's travel blog here: www.travelafricaasia.jimdo.com

Eureka!

Sometimes in life, now and then, here and there ... you get to find exactly what you are looking for and you get exactly what you want.

During my field visit around the Mariental district, I found this humongous Sociable Weaver nest I have been looking for. This will definitely help me gain more insight on their nesting behavior and why they nest on powerlines.  

I don’t belong - Wishing to become a time traveller

I am pretty sure there are other people like me out there who feel like they don’t fit it in wherever they are. Be it is at work, school or whatever environment or circumstances it could be. For most parts of my life I felt like I don’t belong; that perhaps no one really understand me and I feel judged. Actually not even my own mother understands me. She questions every other move I make although not so much in a negative way. My whole being is literally lost, I don’t know what I can identify with. My home and birthplace are so strange to me. I don’t hate the place, I just don’t understand it. I don’t know What makes me feel How, who I am or why I do what I do. Basically my soul is confused.

The reason I get to love and appreciate tremendous diversity as such in big cities like London is because everything is possible and that means there's less judgement for a small person like me. You get so much freedom that way. I grew up in a small village so you can forget about such freedom. Why would one person be tied down to one personality? Why can't I be different people in one lifetime and do different things? Why can't I experience everything there is to experience?*

Good example is the fact that I like spending time with people who like being alone. They give me a good combination of company and silence all at the same time. I'm really curious of what's outside my comfort zone, outside my personality, outside my country, outside my universe until there is no outside anymore. I dream of being in big cities or out alone in the wilderness. Places where I can be insignificant. Places where I'm unknown. Where I can just wonder around observing and be different things at once. Somebody please free my soul! 

*For the level of intelligence and emotional development at which we are as a species, our life cycle and life expectancy are way too short for us to explore maximally.

NamPower/NNF Strategic Partnership workshop

I presented the outcomes of my Honours research at the above mentioned workshop on the 17th of October this year.

I presented my solutions to the bird-nests on power lines issue that I have been working on since last year. Below is a screenshot of the most important slide. My conclusion was that most mitigation methods shall be combined because none proved to be ultimately best individually. My next step is to test out each one of the methods in the field and hopefully by the end of 2014 I will have the results and recommendations.

EGO

My experience over the past two months has been absolutely humbling. I have been working so much and traveling between Namibia and South Africa back and forth, I had an opportunity to work with kids from my previous school and now I have a new outlook on life.

As ordinary humans, sometimes we feel that we need to defend ourselves from the world and everything in life. We have the need to be praised or at least for our efforts to be rewarded. We feel uncomfortable when our peers are doing better than us. We feel that in life we have to be our competitive selves in areas of expertise. I am not going to lie, I have felt like this over a couple of instances in my life; it is human nature.

After the humbling experience, however, I have never felt free in my life. My heart became clear of any ego or alter egos. I finally felt like I became the person I was supposed to be and found my purpose in life. My heart is full of nothing but love. The love for all. I realised that all I wish for everyone is the best. I feel like I need to help people. I felt no need for me to be better than anyone else. I felt the need to not judge but rather understand people. I felt like everyone could be my friend and there is really no need to be hateful or resentful.

I want to talk to people. I want to find out what's going on in their heads. I want to know what they know, I want to learn from them and work with them towards something bigger than each one of us individually.

If you ever found me being boastful or egoistic, tarnishing someone or trying to diminish them, I give you the right to slap me in the face as hard as you can. I am certain that I have fallen in love with life.