WINDHOEK – The Namibia Women’s Health Network (NWHN) has acquired a three-hectare piece of land in the Dordabis village area of the Khomas Region to be used for projects aimed at youth employment creation.
In a statement made available yesterday, NWHN director Jennifer Gatsi-Mallet said the piece of land was donated by a local farmer, Gous Joubert, who owns Farm Autabeb, which borders Dordabis.The donation includes two outbuildings for storage, office space and a water tank stand.Joubert will also help supervise the renovations and construction of additional buildings and infrastructure.Gatsi-Mallet said the land would further be used to start poultry and vegetable farming projects.’Such kind of initiatives can contribute to creating youth competence, self-esteem and self-employment. Furthermore, the success of these endeavours will be reflected by the reduction in the levels of alcoholism and crime amongst the youth,’ she added.The primary beneficiaries of the new initiative will be the members of Youth Against Crime (YAC) group, a youth organisation started by the NWHN in 2008 at Dordabis.The group has recruited 16 members since its formation and aims to address the challenges of unemployment, alcoholism and gender-based violence facing the youth at the village.The official handing-over of the piece of land is slated for January 2011 but the construction of the chicken coops has commenced already while the delivery of the first batch of chicks ordered from South Africa will be made early next year.NWHN has operations in all of the country’s 13 regions providing information, education, skills, and capacity building to women living with HIV in order to improve their health and to empower them to become leaders at the local and national level.Gatsi-Mallet said the overall goal of the Dordabis project is to create partnership models, which would later be extended to all the other regions of the country.’Our objective is to create private-public partnerships supporting unemployed youths, both in urban and rural areas,’ she said.Dordabis is a village with about 1 500 residents situated some 80 kilometres east of Windhoek.Most of the people living in and around the village depend on the adjacent commercial farms for permanent and seasonal jobs. – Nampa
