On the 28 of February 2023, the NSFM-Project conducted a late morning talk event at the House of Democracy in Windhoek. The event was aimed at the mid-term review of the NSFM-Project with a presentation on activities and key achievements of the project. Various stakeholders from different organisations, NGOs and institutions attended the event which was officially opened by the Resident Representative of the Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF) Namibia, Dr Clemens von Doderer. He took the opportunity to give an overview of the NSFM-Project and its successful activities implemented over the past two years. This dialogue event is an important component of the ‘Promoting Sustainable Forest Management in the Kavango-Zambezi Region in Namibia’ (NSFM) Project, an EU-funded initiative jointly implemented by the Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF) Namibia together with the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia (DRFN).
A key presentation was done by Mr George Lyanabu, the former project assistant of the NSFM-Project and now a forestry research technician from the Directorate of Forestry at Ngoma research station in the Zambezi region. He elaborated on activities and key achievements of the project using photos and videos. He discussed the activities that were implemented by the project since 2020 such as, the launch of educational materials and videos, the 1st conference that was held in Windhoek, and numerous multiplier and Traditional Authority workshop that were successfully held etc. Moreover, he explained the pending activities that the NSFM-Project is yet to implement before the end of 2023. He concluded by presenting the challenges that the project faced as well as the outlook about the future of the NSFM-Project to extend its activities and regular dialogue facilitation to the O-regions to promote Sustainable Forest Management (SFM).
In addition, discussions that were held included issues of integrating community members to acquire more information on community forest knowledge to have more insights on sustainable forest management. Hon. Martin Lukato, the leader of the National Democratic Party (NDP) of the opposition, gave a proposal to the NSFM-Project to build huge green scheme factories in the Kavango and Zambezi regions that can benefit local people in their community forests. Mr Jorome Boys, chief forester from the National Botanical Research Institute in the Directorate of Forestry, thanked the NSFM-Project for the work they have done to assist the Namibian Government and said ‘awareness is the first and most important stage of conservation’. Moreover, he gave his inputs on major challenges faced when implementing SFM in Namibia i.e., few forests available in the country apart from the northern regions. More suggestions from participants were to encourage government involvement when implementing the project activities by strengthening the legal framework on SFM and the participation of the Environmental Information Service (EIS) in gazettement of community forests. Mr Jonas, a chief forester from the Directorate of Forestry informed on creating awareness to Namibian schools because they are the upcoming generations and he observed more issues on illegal charcoal production and timber harvesting; hence the government must give support to the project to successfully implement its activities.
The event was closed by Dr Clemens von Doderer who highlighted the need of extending the project because more work still needs to be done in the Northern regions.
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