2 The author would like to acknowledge that much of the information for this background section was adapted from Women, Agriculture and Rural Development: National Sectoral Report for Namibia, written by Lori Ann Girvan, Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit for the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Rural Development; FAO, Rome 1995. For anyone interested in knowing more about the situation of rural women in Namibia, the report is highly recommended reading.
3 National Agricultural Policy, Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Rural Development, Windhoek, October 1995, pg.1.
6 The data gathered during the participatory rural appraisals carried out in the FAO supported projects support this hypothesis.
7 MAWRD was assisted in the process under the FAO project TCP/NAM/4454 "Assistance in Finalizing the National Agricultural Policy".
8 This information was obtained from the needs assessment to identify constraints within existing extension policies carried out at the beginning of the gender training project.
9 The new government of Namibia inherited an incomplete information base from the colonial government which focused all of its administrative support on the white population. Thus there was very little information about the reality of the situation in the communal areas when the government took over, much less gender disaggregated information.
10 The report was prepared in April-May of 1994, a full year and a half before the National Agricultural Policy was published.
11 The participatory research that took place under these projects used many of the tools that are more closely associated with participatory rural appraisal methods (i.e. it used a broader range of tools than are generally applied in what is termed rapid rural appraisal). For this reason, the author has used the term PRA to refer to the research methodology used within the framework of the two projects even if it may be more common practice to use the more limited bag of tools associated with rapid rural appraisal techniques to gather information to feed policy analysis processes.
12 It is important to note that the combined funding for these two projects was under US$250,000.
13 This framework was adapted by the international consultant who delivered the training course, Ms. Vicki Wilde, from the Field Level Framework of the Gender Analysis and Forestry training package she developed together with Arja Vainio-Mattila for FAO's Community Forestry unit.
14 Five case study write ups were completed during the second training course: Eenkalashe village (Omusati) and Okahitua village (Otjozondjupa) in the North Central Region; Lisikili village (Caprivi) in the North East region; Oruvanjai village (Kunene) in the Northwest region; and Klein-Aub (Hardap) in the South.
15 The two FAO trainers were Vicki Wilde, a Rome based consultant and Martin Byrum, Director of PEER Consultants in Botswana.
16 This was an extremely important
lesson for FAO and one which influenced the development of the field manual
for the Socio-economic and Gender Analysis training package which was prepared
by Vicki Wilde, the FAO training consultant for the Namibia projects. In
part based on the experience in Namibia, the integration of gender analysis
into participatory rural appraisal tools was made even more explicit in
the field manual.
