OECD/DAC Donor Developing Country Dialogues on
National Strategies for Sustainable Development:

Parallel Learning Process in Namibia
Progress Report, September 2000

The OECD/DAC initiative is providing financial support to Namibia to cover the following:

1. Preparation of a paper (principal author: Brian Jones, the Namibian team leader on the DANCED Project) describing the process followed by the DANCED Project, and analysing how it has worked (successes and failures, what worked well or not, and the reasons).

2. Assistance to the screening of the draft chapters to National Development Plan II, i.e. for about 17 chapters on social, industry and infrastructure/institutions clusters and related cross-cutting topics. The screening work will take place in July-August 2000 and will be carried out within the framework of the Danced Project’s approach to the screening of NDPII draft chapters.

3. Preparation of a paper on the methods used for this screening analysis.

The original time-table for the screening of NDPII chapters for environment and Sustainable Development issues was between mid-July and mid-August. This depended upon Line Ministries submitting their chapters during this period for review. However, many ministries were slow in submitting their chapters. At the time of submitting the August project progress report to IIED, the screening and review process had been rescheduled by the NPCS to take place between August 28 and September 26 or soon after. The process has continued to be dogged by delays however, and during September several factors led to the screening and review of chapters being scheduled to continue into the first two weeks of October. These factors were:

• Ministries that still had not submitted their chapters for review

• Ministries requesting rescheduling of the dates for screening their chapters

• Ministry delegations not arriving on the scheduled date for their chapters to be reviewed

3. Progress on chapter screening

To date (02.10.2000) the following progress has been made:

4. Constraints to screening process

The same constraints reported in the August Progress Report remained in place during September. It has been difficult to co-ordinate the DANCED/DAC/OECD inputs with the NPCS because of these constraints. The slippage in the scheduling of screening meetings by more than a month has resulted in the unavailability of consultants at crucial times because they had other commitments. This was one of the causes of consultants being unavailable to attend screening meetings. Other causes of consultants missing screening meetings, were late notice of changes in the schedule and chapters not being received in time to be reviewed before the screening meeting. Some line ministries did not attend their scheduled screening meeting or requested changes to the schedule.

The screening meeting on the chapter on Gender and Democracy was not attended because the version reviewed by the sub-consultant was completely revised and replaced by a new version without the project being informed until the day of the screening meeting.

Progress on preparation of papers

The paper describing and analysing the progress of the DANCED Project (including OECD-DAC support) has been finalised and submitted to IIED ready for presentation at the OECD-DAC mid-term review workshop on Donor-Developing Country Dialogues on National Strategies for Sustainable Development in Thailand from October 9-14.

The paper describing the methodology for the screening process will be completed once it is clear when and how the screening process will be concluded.