The Land, Livelihoods and Housing Programme aims at deepening and expanding the focus on these three key issues in Namibia. This thematic approach seeks to reflect the wide-ranging skills exiting at the FNRSS, and was developed to guide ILMI’s activities during the 2014-18 period. The programme is organised in four aspects: institutional, environmental, fiscal and spatial processes.

This document outlines some pertinent questions regarding urbanization in Namibia, provides central policy recommendations and identifies relevant research gaps to guide the policy debate on urban land reform as part of the 2nd National Land Conference scheduled for 1-5 October 2018.

ILMI is delighted to publish this bibliography in its Working Paper Series. It sees this as a small

contribution to encourage and facilitate research on land reform in Namibia. Perhaps more

ambitiously, this bibliography may serve as a starting point to collect the titles listed in order to

strengthen the resource centre on land administration and land reform.

This short field work report gives an overview of the forest inventory work done during the first two years of The Future Okavango (TFO) project, a project implemented till 2015 and funded by the

German Ministry of Education and Research. TFO aims to integrate ecosystem functions and services into an ecological and economic approach to sustainable land management at a regional scale.

Ancestral land refers to ‘land of ancestors’. That is the land occupied by ones’ forebearers for generations and left something behind of value for current and future generations. There are usually contestations as to which ancestors the land

belongs because of the history of internal migration and of displacements by stronger nations (tribes).

Communal land is one of the land tenure systems in Namibia, the other being freehold land tenure system. At independence in 1990,Namibia resolved to retain communal land on the basis that majority of the population derived their livelihoods from communal land.Notwithstanding the increasing urban population in the country since independence, the majority of the Namibian population still lives in the communal areas, and many of the urban-based population continue to have close relations in rural areas.

The Flexible Land Tenure (FLT) system was developed by the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement and the discussions started in the period of 1992-1998. It was conceived as an alternative for the land tenure catering for low income groups. The act passed in 2012, and currently the regulations are being revised for approval.

This Working Paper, the first in the series to be published by ILMI, will briefly review progress in both land reform sectors and raise a few issues that continue to pose challenges to the programme.

Secure tenure and registered land rights are widely believed to be necessary for access to credit, well functioning land markets and economic development. As a result Namibia introduced long term leasehold rights over communal and commercial land for resettlement purposes in order to address preindependence imbalances in land holdings. The purpose is to bring the resettled beneficiaries into the mainstream of the economy, but this has not happened.

The initiative to investigate the housing situation of teachers in Namibia was triggered by teacher

Gertrude Mujoro, who discussed the matter with her fellow colleagues who brought the matter to the

attention of the leadership of the Teachers Union of Namibia (TUN). In 2014 the Trade Union Congress

of Namibia (TUCNA), the umbrella federation that TUN belongs to, developed a document titled

“TUCNA Development Policy Proposals” (TUCNA, 2014), which contains a section on housing. In line

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the Flexible Land Tenure System (FLTS) in

Namibia is in line with the Fit-For-Purpose (FFP) land administration approach which is

developed in order to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at national and

local level in developing countries by providing tenure security to poor people and creating

country-wide land recordation systems. The FFP approach is based on a Minimum Viable

Product focusing on the specific local tenure security needs, flexibility on survey accuracy,

This document provides the focus for an integrated approach to research in the land, livelihoods and housing sectors in Namibia. Its thematic approach seeks to facilitate multi-disciplinary research projects that will reflect the wide range of skills existing in the School of Natural Resources and Spatial Sciences (SNRSS) at the Polytechnic of Namibia (PoN). It is unique in that it has all land related disciplines in one School and is therefore well placed to become a leading research centre.