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DIALOGUE

In this section:
Mission of the Month: Namibia
Notes from Natsios

Mission of the Month: Namibia

Namibia is home to the world’s largest population of cheetahs—about 2,500. Their numbers have been increasing with the help of conservancies. G. Holberman

Challenge
Namibia is an arid country in southwestern Africa and is half the size of Alaska. It has a democratic government, good infrastructure, and abundant natural resources. Mining, fishing, and tourism fuel the economy, but most people eke out their living from subsistence agriculture.

Namibia was the world’s first country to incorporate environmental protection in its constitution. Today, some 14 percent of the country is covered by protected areas that are full of wildlife. As more land is protected, it becomes increasingly important to help rural communities living within and near conservation areas to profit from protecting the land and its resources.

USAID Innovative Approach
Since 1992, the Agency has supported the development of community structures to conserve but also profit from the biologically rich environment. Working through the Namibian government, the World Wildlife Fund, and a network of local NGOs, USAID helped to form communal conservancies that have the authority to manage wildlife.

Members from each conservancy elect a committee to oversee the development and management of communal resources. This process gives a voice to women and men who otherwise might have little impact on local governance decisions.

Conservancies earn significant income by entering into joint ventures with private investors to establish safari lodges or by negotiating trophy hunting concession agreements. Individuals also earn money from making and selling local arts and crafts. Except for such personal income, earnings at conservancies are pooled. A portion of the income goes toward community projects like schools, clinics, or roads. The rest may be distributed to the individual residents as a dividend of conservancy membership.

“Given their structural organization, conservancies are great avenues through which we can get out the word on HIV/AIDS awareness or civic education in rural areas,” said Tina Dooley-Jones, USAID/Namibia’s director of technical programs.

Under its 2004–2010 strategy for Namibia, USAID is expanding from conservancy wildlife management to community oversight of a broader set of natural resources, including forests, fisheries, and grazing land. The Agency is also emphasizing business development skills and training projects for income-earning activities.

Since 1992, USAID has invested $35.5 million in this program, which has been matched by a larger sum from private investors and other donors through 2004.

Game guards on the job at Nyae Nyae Conservancy. The third man is holding a global positioning system, used to count and track wildlife. USAID/Namibia

Results
The 31 registered conservancies earned $2.35 million last year. Four of them are now financially self-sustaining, while six more are expected to earn lofty profits by 2006.

Almost 100,000 Namibians reside in conservancies, and some 3,800 people are employed as game guards, hunters, artisans, or customer service personnel at lodges and campsites.

The registered conservancies protect some 20 million acres of communal land, which is in addition to 28 million acres already protected by the government.

USAID/Namibia Mission Director Gary Newton said that “by the end of our support to Namibia’s conservancies in 2010, some 15,000,000 hectares, or 18 percent of Namibia’s land mass, will be under a sustainable system of natural resource management, and biodiversity will have been greatly enhanced.”

Torra Conservancy, the first to become self-sufficient, distributed about $75 to every conservancy member in 2003, an amount equal to half their annual incomes. The following year, the conservancy was one of six winners of an international prize from the United Nations Development Program. This year, the Damaraland Camp, a safari lodge located within the conservancy, won the Tourism for Tomorrow Conservation Award 2005 at a global tourism summit, an award recognizing the world’s best practices in responsible tourism.

Wildlife, which suffered heavy losses from poaching until the mid 1990s, is coming back. There are now more elephants, oryx, buffalo, Hartmann’s zebra, springbok, and lions than ever before. Namibia also has the world’s largest free-roaming population of black rhinos, and their numbers have doubled in the northern Kunene region over the last 12 years. The country is also home to 2,500 cheetahs, the world’s largest population of the big cats.

Game donations, primarily from private farms and government, have helped conservancies increase wildlife populations, reflecting a growing confidence in the ability of the conservancies to be good shepherds of the environment, said Dooley-Jones.

The project is successful, she said, because “it hits the governance aspect. We’re working with rural people who politically could be extremely strong when it comes to their local governance and the use of their resources.

“It also touches upon biodiversity and conservation. People won’t conserve or sustainably use natural resources unless they can see the benefit of conservation. And, of course, there’s the livelihoods aspect. There, people may have absolutely no other source of income or very few other alternative sources of income. So this is a very tangible poverty alleviation program.”

Notes from Natsios

Andrew Natsios

Fragile States: From Vision to Action
Fragile states pose a difficult development challenge. They are either in crisis or vulnerable to crisis. Many are beset by conflict and insecurity, governance and economic crisis, or famine. There are no quick fixes to strengthen governance or build a country’s ability to improve the lives of its citizens.

But we have learned a great deal from working in these settings over the past two decades. From these lessons, USAID is developing a Fragile States Business Model. This model will set a course for working in fragile states to ensure a rapid and flexible response.

One of the central lessons is the need for such an approach, so that USAID can respond quickly to opportunities and challenges on the ground. The model will touch on all core functions of the Agency, including monitoring, planning, budget, program, personnel, and procurement.

I hope that it will translate the vision of our Fragile States Strategy into long-term action.

Accurate and timely information is key to an effective response to state fragility. USAID is developing an alert and tracking system managed in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA), which will identify crises and feed into the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. DCHA is also developing and pilot testing a tool for country-level analysis of fragility.

Streamlined strategic planning processes are vital to this business model. For severe crisis countries, operational plans of 12–18 months will be allowed instead of the standard three-year plan.

Budgetary flexibility is another important tool. When a country is identified as needing assistance to remedy fragility, regional bureaus and missions will assess whether current programs and resources are well suited to respond.

We need to improve how we identify our objectives and measures of success in fragile states. In many cases, USAID-supported programs cannot accomplish the same goals in fragile states as in more stable settings.

Procurement and implementation instruments also must become more flexible when dealing with fragile states.

We are considering a variety of steps to more effectively respond to crisis situations, including the development of scenarios and scopes of work to provide quickly on-the-ground resources and various implementing options—similar in some respects to what the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance uses with humanitarian aid to provide immediate personnel and technical services.

The Office of Acquisition and Assistance has already begun training a cadre of specialists in the special authorities frequently used in crises situations in order for them to be readily called upon to implement and modify instruments as needed.

The ultimate resource of effective development assistance is the skilled, professional personnel of USAID and our partners. Our fragile states business model will establish new ways to deploy personnel support for missions in fragile states. We are hiring new foreign service officers to deal with crisis, stabilization, and governance. And we are expanding how we draw on the talents, insights, and skills of our talented foreign service national staff.

Finally, the business model calls for strong collaboration with the State Department and the military. USAID is also leading an effort at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development to examine lessons from service delivery in fragile states, particularly postconflict settings.

Getting effective assistance to the citizens and institutions of fragile states is an appropriate challenge for USAID. Our ultimate success will depend upon each one of our talented staff working with local partners and adapting the model so we can better address fragility and advance transformational development worldwide.

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