SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT OF NAMIBIA’S FORESTED LANDS (NAFOLA) FINAL EVALUATION

Evaluation Number: 20201814 Report Approval: April 30, 2020
Published Date: April 30, 2020 Initiated By: UNDP
Undertaken By: Unspecified Evaluation Area:
NDP Thematic Area:
  • Conservation and Sustainable use of Natural Resources
Geographical Scope: National
Evaluation Type: End-Term Evaluation Period: 2014-2019
Object of Evaluation: Project

In Namibia, in the communal areas, small-hold farming systems are integrated with livestock and crops, and as such, forest management solutions alone, can’t meet the criteria for climate-smart approaches. This is in part due to the fact that community forests (CFs) encompass farming plots and free-ranging livestock. Thus Nafola, was designed as a cross-sector project with land use planning (LUP) and sustainable land management (SLM) aspects. The Nafola design was based on the GEF-3 project – ‘Country Pilot Partnership (CPP) for Sustainable Land Management’, especially concerning rangeland management. CPP was said to influence the National Development Plan (NDP4) in terms of mainstreaming SLM into national development policies. The project was also based on the lessons learnt from the KfW Government of Namibia (GoN) Community Forest Programme (CFP), which indicated bottlenecks, such as the difficulty in attaining gazetted status. The project goal was to ‘Maintain dry forests and their ecosystem goods & services in 13 CFs covering 5,000 km2 (i.e. 0.5 million ha) of land, through the adoption of sustainable land management (SLM) and sustainable forest management (SFM)’. The project objective was to ‘Reduce pressure on forest resources by through policy and capacity building to improve practices within agriculture, livestock and forestry in the community forest (CF) areas.’

Overall, the MTR was responsible for reducing the 13 CF Liaison Officers down to seven. It was not appreciated by the MTR and UNDP, that these ‘staff’ would otherwise have needed to be hired as consultants. By the end of the project, their number was reduced to just three. The 13 hired officers had a range of experience from recent graduate upwards, with most learning an extended range of new skills on-the-job from CF boundary consultation and CF forest inventory, through to CFMP preparation and CF constitution establishment. Their value to the project was high, even if their ‘contractual’ positioning was argued about by UNDP. There is an opportunity for climate-smart approaches to be demonstrated at the local level (as well at the landscape level), under a new UNDP project ‘Integrated Landscape Approach for enhancing Livelihoods & Environmental Governance.’

Supporting Documents

Evaluation Report: Click Here To Download
Terms of Refrence:Not Available Yet
Management Response:Not Available Yet
Improvement Plan:Not Available Yet