24 Jan 2018

United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) ) head of Environment and Climate Change, Dr Oduetse Koboto has underscored the need for Ngamiland community to fully take advantage of partnerships fostered by the organisation aimed at improving their livelihoods.

He said UNDP had fostered a number of partnerships with several organisations such as Conservation International, Conservation South African, Namibian Wood Industry Association and African Centre for Holistic Management.

He said this when responding to comments by stakeholders, who wanted to know about continuity and sustainability of initiatives introduced by UNDP aimed at improving the livelihoods of the communities.

UNDP engaged facilitators from South Africa and Kenya to train and workshop stakeholders on Conservation Agreement (CA) model.

The workshop was funded by government, UNDP and GEF working in collaboration with Conservation South Africa.

Dr Koboto revealed that taking advantage of the partnerships would go a long way to help the communities to sustain initiatives in place when UNDP assistance ends.

“Their partnerships are not for UNDP but are for the stakeholders and the community at large to benefit from. I urge you to take contacts, create and invest in the relationship so that when we are not around, you could continue with the initiatives,” he added.

He said they wanted communities to ensure continuity and initiate other projects and  to find solutions to challenges they encountered.

He said the district was faced with many challenges but noted that solutions were within the communities.

Dr Koboto explained that UNDP existed to help countries in their efforts to achieve sustainable human development and growth by assisting them to build their capacity to design and carry out development programmes in poverty eradication, employment creation and sustainable livelihoods.

Meanwhile, UNDP has been implementing a number of initiatives in the district under the Sustainable Land Management Project and the project is coming to an end next year.

There had been uncertainty amongst the communities who reaped the benefits of the projects as what would happen when the project come to an end.
But, Dr Koboto assured stakeholders and community that many projects were on the pipeline.

Next year, he said they intend to pilot a project, which would focuse on small scale as they wanted to ensure that they achieved local economic development through variables within their respective areas. ENDS