28 percent of Namibian people are poor, according to a new report of state released by the countries Central Bureau of Statistics.Denver Isaacs reports in this story from The Namibian, that the country is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The most telling result of the new report is its identification of education as a critical factor in addressing poverty.Among Namibians with no formal education, 50 per cent were found to be poor and 26,7 per cent severely poor.The situation shows improvement as education levels rise, with 12.6 per cent of those who finished high school classified as poor and 5.1 per cent as severely poor."Poverty among those who hold a tertiary degree is virtually non-existent," the report reads, noting that of all poor households identified countrywide,...
from the Mail and Guardian Online A town in Namibia has used its ancient culture to attract visitors and dollars. The switch in the economy was prompted be the closing of the town's tin mine. - KaleHaving lost their only income source when the Uis tin mine that was their lifeline shut down, a community in the Namibian desert is slowly being resurrected by locals using innovative tourism.Discovering the tourist appeal of a pre-historic cave painting in the nearby Dâureb mountain, a group from the community set themselves up as guides, attracting foreigners to their tiny settlement in the desert.Namibia's highest mountain, the granite sides of Dâureb rise up like a giant fortress in the middle of the desert, housing a long unexploited treasure whose tourism value the community stumbled...
from New Era By Anna IngwafaONGWEDIVAThe Poverty Profile launched last week by Oshana Region at Ongwediva presented undisputed evidence of how poverty negatively impacts on regional development, based on a village level participatory poverty assessment.The poverty profile aims to bring together the voices, experiences and perspectives of poor men and women residing in Oshana.The Oshana Participatory Poverty Assessment was undertaken from January 2005 to March 2006 following the completion of a two-week fieldwork exercise in six villages and informal settlements drawn from six constituencies in the region.The villages are Omakulukuma informal settlement in Ondangwa Constituency, Okamukwa in Okaku Constituency, Omukandu in Uukwiyu Constituency, Ongenga in Okatjali Constituency, Onaushe in...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)By Anna IngwafaOutapiThe Omusati region on Friday launched its regional poverty profile based on village level participatory poverty assessment.The regional poverty profile aims at enga-ging those who live in poverty, affording them an opportunity to describe their situation and seeking their views on how their lives could be improved.The Omusati participatory poverty assessment was undertaken from December 2005 to February 2006 following the completion of a two-week fieldwork exercise in six villages drawn from six constituencies.The villages are, Etunda in Onesi Constituency, Okakoto in Okahao Constituency, Amarika in Ontamanzi Constituency, Otjimanangombe in Ruacana Constituency, Oshitundu in Oshikuku Constituency and Onhimbu in Outapi...
from the New Straits Times Namibia will continue receiving Malaysia’s technical assistance to build its individual and institutional capacities. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said Namibia’s National Planning Commission members had met their Malaysian counterparts concerning mechanisms to monitor the Third National Development Plan for Namibia.“I am confident that Namibia will succeed and achieve its target of uplifting the socio-economic standing of its people, in its quest to achieve a developed-nation status by 2030,” Abdullah said.He called on Namibia to jointly identify ways and means to manage problems and minimise negative impacts on the livelihood of its peoples, in the wake of global oil, commodities and food price increases.“We need to cooperate more...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)By Anna ShilongoThe impact of poverty and its resultant evils seems to have an ugly bearing on the society more than it is understood or viewed.It is the very same poverty that is dragging along the unemployed to be involved in evil deeds and despite being a small town, Okahandja is faced with a number of challenges.According to the residents of the town, Okahandja faces numerous challenges such as poverty, unemployment, crime, HIV/Aids, teenage pregnancy and alcohol abuse."Many people in Okahandja are unemployed. There are no jobs in this town, and as a result people have given up on life. People try to solve their problems through alcohol, whether young or old, it doesn't matter," said Banny Reynolds a young unemployed resident.Reynolds, who recently...
from All AfricaThe Namibian (Windhoek)NEWS15 April 2008Posted to the web 15 April 2008WindhoekNamibia is unlikely to meet its Millennium Development Goals in reducing child mortality and providing equal access to primary healthcare, says Nangof, the umbrella organisation for NGOs."Access to primary healthcare remains highly unequal in Namibia," Nangof Trust Advisor Andrew Harris told representatives of non-governmental and community-based organisations during a workshop at Keetmanshoop last week. Harris said rural areas across the country are left without meaningful healthcare provision because of uneven service distribution.He said a lack of primary healthcare centres in rural areas resulted in high rates of poverty-related deaths, especially among pregnant women and children under five....
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)By Petronella SibeeneThis year's severe floods in the country will have an undermining effect on Namibia's efforts to achieve its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), says the Minister of Health and Social Services Dr Richard Kamwi.Kamwi, who was speaking on Monday at Rundu, said floods have made the affected population vulnerable to poverty and ill health."This is indeed a set-back in our efforts to meet the targets of the Millennium Development Goals," the minister said.President Hifikepunye Pohamba early this year expressed serious concern about the pace at which the country is moving in terms of achieving MDGs.He said there are increasing indications that the world is facing development emergencies, particularly in poor developing countries.While...
from SUNY Cortland NewsThe open discussion of AIDS prevention in the southwestern African country of Namibia is being helped by four videos produced by Paul van der Veur, an associate professor of communication studies at SUNY Cortland. During his six months spent in the Sub-Saharan African nation in Spring 2007, van der Veur collaborated with Namibian filmmakers to produce the videos. Each is a real-life documentary, with its own Namibian subjects and film crew. The videos began airing recently on television channels across the country, said van der Veur, who joined the College in 2002 and has chaired the Communication Studies Department since January 2005. He has a doctorate in international media studies from Ohio University’s School of Telecommunications. The 23-minute...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)Climate change is not a future scenario as its impact is already being felt, especially by the poorest of the poor in Namibia."Namibia has come here to do business. It's time for all of us to rise to the occasion and take early action in the face of the urgency of the challenge,"Environment and Tourism Minister, Willem Konjore, said in his address at the United Nations climate change conference here on Wednesday.He said immediate deep cuts in greenhouse gases are necessary and early action definitely outweighs the cost of delay."As a first step, parties should meet their obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. Furthermore, evidence before us calls for the setting of ambitious mitigation targets."We expect developed countries to take the lead in this regard,...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)By Wezi TjarondaWindhoekA consultant has recommended that communal land should have an economic value attached to it in order to improve the living standards of people living in communal areas.He considered the low value and insecure tenure of communal land at present as a missed opportunity for rural areas to develop.There should be a focus on the value of land and its ownership, Dr John Mendelsohn of Research and Information Services of Namibia (RAISON) said in a presentation to the Annual General Meeting of the Namibia Professional Hunters Association last week.Mendelsohn said there is an assumption that people in rural areas are just fine the way they are, yet communal areas have poor land tenure security and land has no value as collateral value while...
from Reuters Alert NetJOHANNESBURG, (IRIN) - Namibia's land reform programme is a "zero sum game" that merely swaps one form of poverty for another in its farm current resettlement programme, according to an independent report on attempts to find a equitable solution to racially skewed land ownership.The Legal Assistance Centre (LAC), a non-governmental human rights organisation based in the capital, Windhoek, said in a report reviewing the achievements so far of Namibia's land reform programme, No Resettlement Available, that "most [resettlement farms] are not doing very well; in fact, it is not apparent that any are."The size of the farms allocated and the agricultural methods practiced were among the problems identified. "Black farmers get smaller units than white farmers held, but...
from All AfricaThe Namibian (Windhoek)NEWS16 November 2007Posted to the web 16 November 2007By Tanja BauseWHEN Will Doll sold his company in the Netherlands, he wanted to help the less fortunate somewhere in the world where it was needed most.In 2005 a friend of his visited Namibia and his e-mails and photos made Doll interested in the country and its people.Later that year Doll made his first trip to Namibia, during which he visited Mangetti Dune where he came into contact with the local San communities.Upon returning to the Netherlands he felt that he had to do something to try and help alleviate the abject poverty in which the San lived.In 2006 he founded the Sanrise Foundation and with the help of Reverend Herman Oosthuizen of the Dutch Reformed Church Luhebu-North at Mangetti Dune,...
Being a New Yorker and having spent the last two years in a city so large, it was of indeterminable size (best guess on Kinshasa: somewhere between 6 and 10 million), life in Lilongwe is dramatically different. For starters, if you didn’t know where City Centre was, you wouldn’t know you’d driven straight through the middle of it.
Lilongwe, despite only having about 600,000 residents, is about as sprawling as African capitals get in the sheer sense of distances between anything of significance. To get to a friend’s house in an adjacent neighbourhood, one more or less has to drive through the bush.
Case 1: Just the other night on the way home to Area 43 from Area 10 (they are next to each other and I’ll come back to this), I saw a snake in the road. For those...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)NEWSBy Emma KakololoWindhoekNamibians are likely to stand up in big numbers today and speak out against poverty and inequality as part of the events organised by non-governmental organisations in collaboration with the UN Millennium Campaign.Today is also observed as International Day for Eradication of Poverty.The "Stand Up and Speak Out Against Poverty" initiative to amplify the Namibian voice regarding poverty and whether enough is being done to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), is spearheaded by the Namibian Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) under the auspices of Namibian Development Trust (NDT) and the Namibian Non-Governmental Organisations Forum (NANGOF).GCAP is a network of more than 115 national anti-poverty coalitions in...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)NEWSBy Petronella SibeeneWindhoekFour civic organisations working towards alleviating rural poverty in Namibia yesterday received financial support to the tune of N$25 million from the European Commission.The funds form part of the N$143 million of the Rural Poverty Reduction Programme funded by the European Commission through the National Planning Commission (NPC).The Namibia National Farmers' Union received about N$9.2 million.The funds, according to the Programme Coordinator, Oloff Manjanu, will be used for the Hoodia Commercialisation and Poverty Reduction project.hoodia is a succulent plant that grows in the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. One of its species, Hoodia Gorgonii had its appetite suppressant elements isolated in 1977 as P57 and is made...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)NEWSBy Wezi TjarondaWindhoekPoverty in the Kunene region has been attributed to the poor state of education in the country. Residents blame the pervasive poverty in the region on the low level of education, which leads to their children not being employed or unable to secure full-time employment.This is contained in the Kunene Poverty Profile, a village level participatory poverty assessment that was carried out between January and March last year in the region. According to statistics quoted in the profile, 40 percent of people above 15 years have never set foot in school, while the literacy rate is 59 percent. In comparison, the national literacy rate stands at 81 percent. The region has 41 percent of its 68735 people classified as poor, while 11 percent...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)By Wezi TjarondaOmitaraThe residents of the small village of Otjivero in the Omitara area have their hopes pinned on the Basic Income Grant (BIG). The poverty-stricken village, 115 km from Windhoek, will be the first beneficiaries of the BIG, a monthly cash grant aimed at reducing destitution, poverty and inequality.With dwelling units made of remnants of other building materials, old tents, iron sheets and plastic sheeting, the first impression is that poverty here rules the game.Most of the 1 000-odd residents of this village, who are former farm workers evicted from the farms surrounding the area, have no source of income of their own. The only people with a regular income are those working for the primary school, the clinic, the police station,...
from All AfricaThe Namibian (Windhoek)NEWSBy Absalom ShigwedhaA FOUR-YEAR project aimed at reducing poverty in rural areas was launched in Windhoek yesterday morning.The project is a partnership between the Namibian Association of Community-Based Natural Resource Management Support Organisations (Nacso) and Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO).It will be known as the Community-Based Natural Resource Management Enterprise Support Project (CESP).The project aims to train 12 conservancies and community management groups in basic business management and tourism skills to help them manage their organisations in a professional manner.The other objective will be to expand rural enterprises and create jobs by supporting existing businesses and nurturing new ones.Launching the project yesterday,...
from The NamibianTONDERAI KATSWARAPOVERTY remains a scourge that the world is grappling with, and the case is no different in Namibia, where stakeholders are meeting for a three-day conference to discuss how the country can find effective means to reduce poverty.The first national conference on poverty reduction, unemployment and entrepreneurship, which began in Windhoek yesterday, is being held under the theme 'Entrepreneurship as an alternative source to employment creation and poverty alleviation'.About 80 delegates are attending.This conference comes at a time when statistics reveal that poverty is a major concern for the country.According to official data released by the National Planning Commission (NPC), the northern regions - where most of Namibia's population lives - have the...
from All AfricaNew Era (Windhoek)Frederick PhilanderWindhoek"The main goal and thrust of Finland's development policy is to contribute to the eradication of extreme poverty from the world."So said the Chargé d'Affaires of the Finnish Embassy, Seija Kinni-Huttunen, yesterday at a one-day round-table conference in the capital. Some 30 representatives of 20 civil society organisations attended the gathering.She explained the Finnish-Namibian relations and the Finnish assistance to Namibia."Activities that help to achieve this goal include prevention of environmental threats, promotion of equality, human rights, democracy and good governance as well as increasing worldwide security and economic interaction, which originally became part of Finland's policy in development cooperation in the...