Countries

Overview

Namibia is a lower middle-income country with perennial food deficits, recurring droughts, high rates of malnutrition and the sixth-highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the world.

The income disparity is marked with a Gini coefficient of 0.604. More than half the population lives on less than US$2 per day. While the country’s economy depends on the mining sector, roughly half of Namibia ’s two million people rely on subsistence agriculture, characterized by low productivity and high variability due to water scarcity, erratic rainfall, poor soils and low capacity to support intensive agricultural methods.

Even in good years, access to adequate food for marginalized and vulnerable populations remains a constant challenge contributing to the current, unacceptable levels of malnutrition. In 2009, an FAO/WFP report estimated overall crop production at 139,000 tons - 45,000 tons more than the previous year. However, Namibia will still need to import around 150,000 mt.

The national HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is about 19.7 percent peaking at around 40 percent in the Caprivi region. The pandemic has contributed to a rapidly growing number of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC).

The current estimate is that Namibia has 140,000 orphans – 85,000 of them due to AIDS. In many areas where OVC live, chronic food insecurity is a fact of life. 24% of children under five are underweight, and 9% are wasted. Vulnerable households hosting OVC include those from marginalised communities, such as the San and Himba, and households headed by single women, grandmothers, children and people living with HIV/AIDS.

The country also hosts around 6,500 refugees and asylum seekers, most of whom fled the civil war in neighbouring Angola . As the situation in Angola improved the number of Angolan refugees did decrease sharply as many headed for home. However, in recent years, numbers have risen again due to asylum seekers arriving from the Democratic Republic of the Congo , Rwanda and Burundi . Refugees and asylum seekers are settled at the Osire camp in central Namibia.

WFP Activities

• Refugee Relief Since 1999, WFP has been providing food to Angolan and other refugees in Namibia to sustain their lives and maintain their health and nutritional status. WFP still provides monthly food rations to some 6,500 remaining Angolan refugees and asylum seekers from other countries, mainly in the Great Lakes region. The Angolan refugees claim it is premature to return to Angola prior to elections. All these beneficiaries are currently housed in the Osire refugee camp in central Namibia. WFP’s current operation will run until the end of December 2009.