Supporting a Planning Process Civic Participation in Northern Namibia

The following story is based on the experience of a grantmaker and his grantee partners as they worked together to build a new community institution and promote increased civic participation. Grantmakers working in other fields will appreciate insights on issues such as:

• How a grantmaker finds a promising idea to support
• How a study tour can help enable grantees to discover new ideas
• How a grantmaker’s involvement shifts to meet new circumstances

David Chiel
Assistant Representative, The Ford Foundation/Windhoek

When I got to Namibia I inherited a portfolio, an initiative that my predecessor had developed over five or more years. I think that it’s important to have as much dialogue with your predecessor as possible. We’re not obliged to follow their advice or their direction, but they can point you towards some very important areas. In some preliminary conversation, one thing that came up was the fact that the northern part of Namibia was still in some sense under served.

There were real opportunities to do programming in that region, not only because of the population size in the north, but also the potential for having a demonstration effect elsewhere in the country. It made sense to try and focus it in a geographic area. There were very few vibrant civil society organizations in the north. It struck me that the university would be a good entry point for a number of reasons.

Eliakim Prince Shiimi
UNAM Northern Campus Advisory Council, Director of ChemPaint

Let me tell you — we were deprived from education overall. Our children had to travel to other regions. Therefore, we decided to say "Now we must do something here in the north," in terms of the university coming here.

David Chiel

You can tell there was this tremendous expectation and that people were really willing to give time to make this thing work. Moreover, that they expected the university to listen to them.

I was looking for some key institutions — key partners — and that one possibility might be to do work with the university in the establishment of this campus. But I had some misgivings. Should I stick to NGOs, or solely to community-based organizations? Was this the way to go about programming on civil society — strengthening civil society? I actually really benefited from some comments my colleague based in Johannesburg made. He was very encouraging.

We felt that if we could work with communities to become much more actively engaged in it — if we could support that process — there was a better chance of government taking them seriously, of them coming up with solutions and ideas and interesting approaches that hadn’t been apparent up until that time. It was a brief conversation he and I had, but it seemed to validate what my instincts were telling me, and that was helpful.

I made two or three more visits to the north and I met with more people. Talking to them I became convinced this was the way to begin the initiative in the north. What I’ve observed and through my conversations, what I think is still missing in this process right now is a more formal planning function. It’s my view that it would be useful, if you and the community agree, to have a more formal participatory planning process that would bring everyone together, hire people, and design curricula and special programs the community had identified as essential to their needs.

Learning from Similar Experiences

David Chiel

I came to the states. I arranged with one of my colleagues who had been one of the prime movers in the RCCI (Rural Community College Initiative), to go on a very brief, "get acquainted" tour of RCCI and MDC, which has a sterling reputation in the United States.

We stayed overnight with the folks at Danville, in southern Virginia, and home of Danville Community College — one of the 24 community colleges that make up the initiative. It was an eye opener for me — just hearing them articulate the problems, the challenges, and seeing what they’ve done with their community college — how the community is so deeply involved in it now. It was spectacular. It was really very exciting! And again, it reinforced this idea that some of the problems that I was hearing articulated in northern Namibia were comparable to problems that Danville Community College was trying to address.

It convinced me that it was at least worth a try. Now what I had to do was go back to Namibia and sell the folks. I gave them a lot of information. I described it to them, and they raised the very legitimate concerns that while they might be doing wonderful work in the United States, what does that have to do with Namibia? These were the right questions to be asking. What I finally said is, “Look, there’s no strings attached — let’s just see what we see. Let’s take a leap of faith here. There’s no expectation that you need to do anything further with any of these people — that you need to work with them. We’re not asking you to adapt to their approach. Maybe it’ll just be an opportunity to think through the problems.” And it really is. It was a chance for folks from the University of Namibia and people from the northern community to be together in close quarters for two weeks. We sometimes joke about it, but there is this bonding function that’s really critical, where both sides are seeing things, asking questions, having fun, enduring long plane rides, train rides, bus rides.

About six people came over.

Haveshi Neconga Nielse
Director, Northern Campus, University of Namibia

New Mexico is similar to Namibia in physical terms because it’s mountainous and dry. It’s also the same in that you have different kinds of people trying to live together. We dry green vegetables in order to keep them for a long time, and they were doing the same thing, but they modernized by packaging it. It just shows you that you can take your tradition and develop it so that it can also benefit the community.

Biran Harlech
Professor, University of Namibia

I was able to talk with the people in New Mexico. That's a big state with a similar-sized population. Their experiences are very relevant so I was able to talk with them in every meaningful way about what they have experienced with technology and distance education — all of which I found very useful.

Robert Kirby-Harris
Pro Vice Chancellor, University of Namibia

We went to Mississippi and we saw some very interesting small-scale community-based programs. One of the things we were given was information about intermediate support organizations.

Bernadette Mojewkwu Mukutu
Regional Coordinator for Culture and Lifelong Learning, Ondangwa East

We went to Montana. I think it’s a project where people were making these earrings from beads and there were also some woodcarvings. So now our people could do something. What we want to do is only to see how other people have started — to at least make people realize that their culture is very important in their lives.

David Chiel

What validated it for me was that the folks from Namibia who are on this wanted to spend time — to make time — to talk amongst themselves about what they were learning — to think about it. There were these key moments along the way where we would sort of caucus. At the end of a long day we would find a conference room in some hotel we were staying at and start to talk about what we had learned so far, what seemed to be appropriate for Namibia — not just in terms of developing a relationship with the RCCI. That was making us think about what the campus in Namibia might look like — might offer. In other words, our discussions were putting flesh on the bones of some pretty vague notions that had been developing up until then, or had been circulating up until then. It really exceeded my expectations.

What they also saw, which was my ulterior motive, was how these community colleges — well established as they are — were bringing together and invigorating the community.

The answer somehow lay with people in the community getting together and trying to thrash out the problems and then drawing on the resources — financial, and in other ways. The community college was sort of the locust for these discussions — it was the convener and in some cases, obviously, it provided some of the services.

Bernadette Mojewkwu Mukut

The most important thing to them was to not only focus on academic programs, but also to focus on the programs — which was the need of their people. If the community is involved at least at the end of the day they will say, “This is ours and we were part of the decision making.”

Supporting a Planning Process

David Chiel

We finished the trip. It was a two week long trip. People went back to Namibia and then a couple of very positive things happened. The relationship had been established between the folks who had gone on this trip and the MDC and RCCI representatives that we had met with. So I felt that, like Casablanca, “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” This really was an opportunity.

I returned to the issue that had concerned me, which was the lack of sufficient planning. MDC has a particular model — it’s a version of a strategic planning process that they go through with the community colleges that are part of the RCCI. I had suggested to the University of Namibia and the northern community that maybe they would want to embark on such a process in some form or another — some adaptation. After having visited the United States, they saw the value and merit in doing that.

Brian Harlech Jones

We’ve been meeting people who are sensitive, interested, sympathetic, knowledgeable andexperienced — people we think could come to our situation and say, “Well, I know this. I’ve learned that. I see your situation,” and talk with us as partners in a dialogue.

David Chiel

So that process began. This whole process that MDC has developed for the United States takes place over a long period of time, a whole series of meetings. There are some prescribed steps and things that go first before the next thing, and then the next thing.

The university, especially, was keen to accelerate the process, and MDC was counseling, “No, go slow; let’s do this right. We can’t just rush.” There were real debates about that. But beyond that, there was this question of how. Who would be in charge? Who would be the lead facilitators? How closely would the university and the northern campus follow the pattern that MDC had developed? And there were some real tough conversations and international telephone calls around this issue. But I think it was healthy. It was very healthy tension — very creative tension.

I didn’t facilitate the conversations. What I did was I sat there as a kind of honest broker. I didn’t stop arguments or discussions — that I wanted them to have. If I thought things were getting derailed, though, I might. I stepped in on a couple of these conversations — and these were like conference calls between the United States and Namibia — and said, “Well, is this a possibility? Or, could we do this or is this an alternative?” I tried to get compromise on certain issues without undermining the process itself, or certainly undermining the wishes and needs of the Namibians. But it worked out! Everyone got through it.

I’ve just basically described the entry point for our northern initiative, which has been around the campus — people becoming enthusiastic about the campus, convening, coming up with new ideas, and working with new partners in their own community.

The northern campus is becoming quite an active place. It’s just off the main street in Oshikati, which is a busy commercial strip. It’s a place where you see tremendous activity. On a given day you might ride in there and see not only students studying and registering for courses, but you might also run into people who are meeting for one reason or another — attending a kind of brown bag lunch series. There might be a cultural event going on.

It’s in some ways a wonderful metaphor for a civil society.

In the mid 1990s, educators and community leaders in Namibia began planning for a new unit of the national university. This southern African country had achieved independence and established a democratic government only a few years before, and the proposal to create a campus in the rural northern region offered an opportunity for Namibians to explore ways private citizens, community organizations, and government might collaborate in a free society. David Chiel, a grantmaker, recognized an opportunity for civic education and saw similarities between the proposed campus activities and those developed in the United States as part of the Rural Community College Initiative. The preceding is the story of how he supported the Nambian planning process.