Communal land is one of the land tenure systems in Namibia, the other being freehold land tenure system. At independence in 1990,Namibia resolved to retain communal land on the basis that majority of the population derived their livelihoods from communal land.Notwithstanding the increasing urban population in the country since independence, the majority of the Namibian population still lives in the communal areas, and many of the urban-based population continue to have close relations in rural areas.

The Flexible Land Tenure (FLT) system was developed by the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement and the discussions started in the period of 1992-1998. It was conceived as an alternative for the land tenure catering for low income groups. The act passed in 2012, and currently the regulations are being revised for approval.

This Working Paper, the first in the series to be published by ILMI, will briefly review progress in both land reform sectors and raise a few issues that continue to pose challenges to the programme.

Secure tenure and registered land rights are widely believed to be necessary for access to credit, well functioning land markets and economic development. As a result Namibia introduced long term leasehold rights over communal and commercial land for resettlement purposes in order to address preindependence imbalances in land holdings. The purpose is to bring the resettled beneficiaries into the mainstream of the economy, but this has not happened.

The initiative to investigate the housing situation of teachers in Namibia was triggered by teacher

Gertrude Mujoro, who discussed the matter with her fellow colleagues who brought the matter to the

attention of the leadership of the Teachers Union of Namibia (TUN). In 2014 the Trade Union Congress

of Namibia (TUCNA), the umbrella federation that TUN belongs to, developed a document titled

“TUCNA Development Policy Proposals” (TUCNA, 2014), which contains a section on housing. In line

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the Flexible Land Tenure System (FLTS) in

Namibia is in line with the Fit-For-Purpose (FFP) land administration approach which is

developed in order to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at national and

local level in developing countries by providing tenure security to poor people and creating

country-wide land recordation systems. The FFP approach is based on a Minimum Viable

Product focusing on the specific local tenure security needs, flexibility on survey accuracy,

This document provides the focus for an integrated approach to research in the land, livelihoods and housing sectors in Namibia. Its thematic approach seeks to facilitate multi-disciplinary research projects that will reflect the wide range of skills existing in the School of Natural Resources and Spatial Sciences (SNRSS) at the Polytechnic of Namibia (PoN). It is unique in that it has all land related disciplines in one School and is therefore well placed to become a leading research centre.

The Bill aimed at overriding old ordinances that dated back to the 1950s and 60s. The main objective of the Bill is that of decentralisation, and has three main points: the establishment of "authorized planning authorities" (APA); the consolidation of Townships Board and the Namibia Planning Advisory Board (NAMPAB) into one Urban and Regional Planning Board; and long term spatial development frameworks by means of a structure plan at all levels: national, regional, and urban.

The project took place in Katima Mulilo and Rundu during 2007-11. The project consisted of 66 township extensions, and resulted in 18,500 plots developed in a period of 5 years. The project was funded by LUX Development, the cooperation agency from Luxemburg, which poured significant funds to make the project possible. One of the innovation aspects was to do the topographic and cadastral mapping in parallel with the layout and design. This was done by teams consisting of a town planner, a surveyor , and community facilitators selected by the inhabitants of the settlement in question.

The current paper derives from work conducted in the context of the Revision of the Mass Housing Development

Programme (MHDP) that the Ministry of Urban and Rural Development (MURD) commissioned to the Integrated

Land Management Institute (ILMI) at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST). The paper contains

only publicly-available information and was prepared for public dissemination of issues related to the work

undertaken for the Ministry in the context of this project. More information about this project can be found on

Land tenure in Namibia is regulated by a variety of Acts, some of which date back to as far as 1937, and some of which are

yet to be approved by Cabinet. This variety of Acts makes it difficult to evaluate the performance of land administration as a

whole, and the appropriateness of coercive instruments with regards to urban land tenure in particular. In this article we

evaluate how urban land tenure regularization practices are conducted in Namibia, and to compare new formal procedures,

How does one build up an analysis? And how does one create the link between the individual partial-analyses

in a problem-oriented project work? These are the two main issues that this booklet gives an overview of.

This document is a presentation of a way in which an analysis, a sub-project and a project can be structured.