This paper provides an account of a Nambian tax-benefit microsimulation model—
NAMOD—which has been developed for use by government. Following a section on the
importance of social security in Namibia and recent related studies, the paper outlines the taxbenefit
policies that are included within NAMOD and describes the data challenges and
assumptions that had to be made in order to simulate these policies. Results for 2015 are
compared with reported administrative data. In spite of current data challenges, NAMOD can be
used to help inform social security policy design.