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Writer's pictureJustine Braby

Katutura East (Namibia) discusses a Wellbeing Economy

Updated: Jun 15, 2023


With the new era of Sustainable Development Goals and our Harambee Prosperity Plan, Namibia needs to embark on a new and innovative way of measuring progress in Namibia. A well-being economy looks at a holistic way to measure progress than our current measurement which is through the Gross Domestic Product.


The For Progress Namibia Project has been working on developing indicators to measure well-being since 2012. We recently had a community meeting at Councillor Sheehama's office to discuss the results of the indicators in this community as well as key priority actions to take to improve these results for the community.


This meeting has been a result of a few years of engagement and community ownership to improve quality of life and unity within Katutura East. The aim of this engagement is two-fold (1) create a bottom-up approach to improve well-being within communities (Katutura East being the first pilot), and (2) evolve the data collection and indicators so that this approach can be used nationally and inform decision-making and development planning.


This work was built on a recent publication entitled 'Citizen wellbeing and GDP: Towards more appropriate measures of Namibia's success and progress' which was published at the beginning of 2016 in the Journal of Social Change. These results were taken back to the community of Shandumbala in Katutura in April 2016 where an action plan was then created to improve community well-being.


At the end of August, Councillor Sheehama had advocated to involve the whole of Katutura East, and during this meeting three key priorities were chosen for the community to improve, namely: (a) community trust, (b) education, and (c) safety within the community. Community committees were set up to further develop activities to improve these three priority areas within the community.

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