University of Namibia students are participating in a range of activities to create awareness on the need to stamp out gender-based violence after research showed that the problem - which has become an acknowledged social challenge in the country - exists at their institution. Lucy Edwards, one of two UNAM lecturers who led the research, said that gender-based violence had lately been rearing its ugly head in various forms at the university and that both male and female students were taking a stand against it. The research conducted by Edwards and her colleague is collaboration between five universities in Southern Africa and the African Gender Institute.

A UN working group has expressed ‘widespread concern about the general human rights situation in Namibia’, including the government’s ‘non-compliance with several core international human rights norms’, NAMRIGHTS reports.

With Namibia reaching 21 years of independence on 21 March, Henning Melber argues that the country’s government has failed to provide socio-economic opportunities for its wider population.

Bertha Hamases is a tall, lanky woman with a weathered face and a friendly sparkle in her eyes. A few years ago she was one of the many people circling the drain in Otjivero, a dead end settlement one hundred kilometres from the capital. Here evicted farm workers gathered in misery. For Hamases, a single mom with four kids aged between 9 and 16, life looked hopeless. Until a coalition of civil society organisations picked Otjivero for a privately-funded pilot project to show that a universal basic income grant can make all the difference.

A gay rights organisation has been established in Namibia aiming to amplify voices of the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people who often face human rights violations such as social homophobia, lack of access to public health and loss of employment due to their sexual orientation. OutRight Namibia (ORN) was formed in March 2010 by Namibian LGBTI, MSM and WSW activists. It prioritizes leadership development, human rights, emancipation of movement building as well as health and legal reform as its main strategic areas of focus.

Two decades after Namibian independence, scholar, activist and longstanding Swapo (South West Africa People’s Organisation) member Henning Melber pulls no punches in his judgement of the party’s moral failures, power struggles and willingness to trade on its liberation legacy, in an interview with Khadija Sharife.

Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba has publicly expressed frustration at the slow pace of the country's land redistribution programme, a process which he urged government to swiftly address. Pohamba told the country's first cabinet session in 2011 that the largely discredited willing buyer willing seller principle had been a failure and implored the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement to speedily finalise the Consolidated Draft Land Bill and the implementation of small scale farming projects.

Namibia’s opposition parties have taken issue with government once again, this time over what they termed as the ruling Swapo party’s unfair rubberstamping of laws without adequate deliberations in the country’s legislative chambers. Swapo used its two-thirds majority in the legislative chambers last December to rush through a bill that gave optimum power to the President to appoint regional governors, as opposed to the former system where governors were selected from among regional councillors.

Twenty years after independence, representation of women in senior government structures and in Parliament is declining in Namibia. According to the latest demographic survey results of August 2010, out of a population of around two million, women outnumber men 10:9. In 2001, the ratio was 94 males per 100 females. In 2010 Namibia reformed its national gender policy in line with the United Nation’s millennium development goals (MDGs) and its own Vision 2030, a national development policy dissected into five-yearly development plans. It includes the increase of women in decision-making positions in government, the private sector, religious groups and community institutions.

Namibia is set to develop its rich uranium resources and intends to pursue uranium enrichment locally. It also plans to build its own nuclear electricity plant. Nuclear energy experts from Finland’s Nuclear and Radiation Authority are currently helping the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) to draft Namibia’s first ever nuclear policy, which is to be completed mid-2011, together with relevant laws. Namibia plans to generate electricity from its own nuclear reactor by 2018.

The Omusati Region of northern Namibia is on the margins of what any farmer would consider arable land, with temperatures routinely hitting 40 degrees Celsius or more and rainfall seldom exceeding a pitiful 270 millimeters per year. To make matters worse 83 per cent of the little rain that does fall evaporates as soon as it hits the ground. In a report to the United Framework Convention on Climate Change, the government of Namibia has predicted global warming will cause a temperature rise of between two to six degrees Celsius in Namibia, while annual rainfall could diminish up to a further staggering 200mm.

The NamRights 2010 human rights report for Namibia notes that experience has 'strongly shown' that a systematic disregard for the democracy, human rights and good governance principles, rather than the absence of the law, constitutes 'the biggest root cause of the multitude of the interrelated, intertwined and interdependent civil, cultural, economic, environmental, political and social problems afflicting the Namibian people.' The report covers the period between 10 December 2009 and 10 December 2010. However, it is only an interim report deliberately released for the purposes of marking the 62nd Anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Namibia's ruling party overwhelmingly won last weekend's local and regional elections, claiming 92 per cent of constituencies in regional voting, officials announced late last Monday. The South West Africa People's Organisation (Swapo), which has ruled Namibia since independence in 1990, won 98 out of 107 constituencies in the regional vote, state broadcaster Namibia Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) said.

When Victoire Mpelo fled his native Democratic Republic of the Congo, practising medicine again was probably one of the last things on his mind. Yet, some 10 years later, the doctor is kept busy every day, looking after fellow refugees in Namibia's Osire settlement. Meanwhile, the nearby Osire Secondary School, headed by another refugee, Come Niyongabo from Burundi, is ranked among the top secondary education establishments in the country.

Namibia's land redistribution programme has progressed at a snail'space, with farms not changing hands as fast as government would have wanted. White commercial farmers and inflated prices of land have emerged as a bulwark against much vaunted promises for land. Ongoing flare-ups over ancestral land in cases which have been dramatised by direct defiance of court rulings are only a microcosm of a much bigger problem. The plan by government for blacks to own land is flagging, observers and analysts have concluded.

The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance (WGEID) has adopted two new General Comments on the crime of enforced disappearance. Phil ya Nangoloh, the Executive Director of NAMRIGHTS, states that in Namibia this effectively means, for example, that the perpetrators of the enforced disappearances of thousands of Namibians should be held responsible for the said disappearances starting before June 25 2002 when Namibia ratified the Rome Statute (RS) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and continuing after such ratification.

With only weeks to go before regional and local elections, Namibia's ruling Swapo Party is coming under tremendous pressure from the civil servants who plan to march on the government unless the entire management of the state pension fund is dismissed and millions of Namibian dollars in unpaid empowerment loans are recovered.

A pilot project using 'early warning indicators' (EWIs) to minimise antiretroviral (ART) resistance in Namibia has provided further evidence of the potential value of this strategy in settings where routine viral load monitoring is not feasible. With more than four million people in the developing world now receiving antiretroviral therapy, but few of those people able to access the relatively costly laboratory tests that are a standard component of HIV medical care in wealthy countries, there is ongoing concern that high rates of undetected treatment failure could cause widespread drug resistance.

Namibia has called on the European Union (EU) to “take a step backwards from the current excessive demands in the economic partnership agreement (EPA) negotiations to allow Africa the policy space which it requires to advance its development”. Speaking at the Parliamentary High-level Conference on EU-Africa in Brussels, Peter Katjavivi, Swapo Chief Whip in the National Assembly (NA), on Wednesday called for greater understanding by the EU towards Africa, “as the consequences [of the EPA] will greatly affect Africa, far more than Europe”.

In permitting the rise and enrichment of a self-serving political elite, Namibia’s party of liberation, SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation), has betrayed its once noble goals of creating a more egalitarian society, writes Henning Melber. In the absence of a ‘human-’ rather than ‘elite-centred’ postcolonial trajectory, the country now sustains two sides of an ugly face of privilege and poverty, Melber concludes.