MCA Namibia - About MCA Namibia

The MCC guidelines for proposal formulation place strong emphasis on country-wide consultations in order to achieve a country-let proposal. The MCA core team under the guidance of the National Coordinator held consultations in all 13 regions from 12 June to 18 July 2006. At national level, consultations started in May 2006 and have been on-going since, especially in those sectors that the MCA Namibia Investment Program will focus on.

More than 62 meetings were held country-wide. Due to the fact that the Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPA) consultations had just been concluded in most regions, MCA Namibia decided not to hold consultations at village level as this would have sent a confusing signal to the community and may have created unfounded expectations. Stakeholders included GRN, offices and agencies at central and regional levels, local authority councillors and stakeholders, regional coordination committees, regional AIDS committees, regional emergency unit, Land Boards, farmers associations, and conservancy groups, women associations, church groups, youth groups, vulnerable members of society, non governmental organisations (NGOs), community based organisations (CBOs) and (organized) private sector.

Consolidating into themes.

MCA Namibia analyzed the information from the consultations and recorded the frequency with which issues of importance to economic growth as seen by the communities consulted were mentioned. This resulted in a matrix with 77 issues across 13 regions and one national level grouping.

MCA Namibia then clustered the issues and brought down the number of themes as they came from the regional and national consultations to 5 main initial themes and 4 cross cutting issues. These were shared at high GRN level and also with all the regional councillors who had gathered in Windhoek in July 2006 to discuss the implementation strategy for Vision 2030. Click here for Frequency Matrix (82kb pdf document)

Concrete proposals.

In a next step towards formulating the MCA Namibia Investment Program, the full team (core team plus experts) sought advice from the sectors as represented by stakeholders at national level from government, NGOs and private sector. MCA Namibia took a pragmatic approach towards the formulation process and communicated to the 5 sectors (as per the 5 initial themes) that MCA Namibia would only consider actions that have been conceptualized and detailed with sufficient data available for economic analysis (and monitoring and evaluation) and that MCA will focus on actions that have the highest potential impact on incomes at household and businesses level.

MCA Namibia further provided guidance to the sectors by indicating that investment will be made in public goods and equity participation by MCA Namibia in private sector ventures would not be possible yet equity support to community owned ventures (for example conservancies) could be considered. A main consideration would also be that the actions are sizable to unlock economic opportunities for the country’s economic performance to move into higher gear. MCA Namibia invited the sectors to pre-select those actions/investments on which the economic analysis could be performed. Final selection would then be determined by the economic rate of return analysis.

A large number of proposal for actions/investment to be considered for inclusion in the MCA Namibia Program were received since. Together with the various proposals received from the regions, these easily exceed 150 proposals. It was then up to the MCA full team to screen, analyze and validate these proposals and guide the sector on further narrowing down of possible interventions.

Selecting.

From the pool of concepts and ideas a number of actions were selected that met criteria such as national scope, technical viability including the probability that the investment can be made within the 5 year MCA timeframe, anticipated impacts at community level, and ultimately the Economic Rate of Return.

The MCA economists then together with dedicated staff from the sectors (government and non-government) collected all relevant data and with technical guidance from the MCC transaction team calculated the actual economic rate of return (ERR). These were shared with the sector in a validation meeting. Actions that had a low or negative ERR were rejected in consultation with the relevant sectors and agreement was reached on the drafting format for the MCA Namibia Program, as guided by the MCC transaction team.

Logical framework.

MCA Namibia shared the logical framework which presents the underlying rationale for the proposed investments with Namibia’s development partners and comments were solicited to inform the final program proposal. Click here for logical framework (153kb pdf document)

Further consultations at national level.

As the investment packages for sectors crystallized out, MCA Namibia entered into discussion with the relevant line ministry and other relevant drivers to agree on the program implementation and structures. Recurrent cost implications of the proposed investments were analyzed and commitments secured from relevant ministries and agencies. MCA Namibia together with NPCS, Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the Bank of Namibia (BoN) designed the overall implementation structure for the MCA Namibia Program.

MCA Namibia interacted with Cabinet at three occasions, firstly to approve the MCA Namibia management structure, then to share the outcome of the regional and national-level consultations and the five initial themes (all of which made it to the final MCA Namibia Program except on-land fish farming with marine and fresh water species) and most recently to seek approval on the MCA Namibia Program, including the budget. The National Council and National Assembly were also given a detailed briefing.

Conclusion.

The MCA Namibia Program formulation process has been interactive and well informed by stakeholders at local, regional and national level. While the media did not play an active role in the soliciting of views and proposals, this was offset by the relatively well organized social fabric of Namibia with most individual members belonging to one or another community-based group, be that the local church, a woman’s group, a youth group, traditional, local, regional or central authorities, non governmental organisations (NGOs), community based organisations (CBOs) and other, which eased the consultative process. MCA Namibia received numerous phone calls, fax messages, submissions, visits and entertained presentations by private and community interest groups at the MCA office. Responses to individual proposals were dispatched just after the submission of the MCA Namibia Program to MCC at the end of September 2006.

An important and noteworthy aspect of the consultative process was the absence of major divergence between the issues identified at national and regional levels. This appears to confirm that, in general, there is consensus within Namibia on priorities for economic growth – a consensus build on previous consultative processes for Vision 2030, the 5-year National Development Plans, Participatory Poverty Assessments and other sector-level consultations.

MCA Namibia – in close consultation and cooperation with the drivers for each of the components – will continue to consult and inform Namibians country-wide on the MCA Namibia Program to ensure broad-based understanding, appreciation, commitment and ownership of the MCA Namibia proposed investments.

Consultations