The City of Windhoek (CoW) recently secured N.dollars 1.92 million from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to develop and boost agricultural food production of Farm Okukuna, the city’s urban agriculture project.
Farm Okukuna is situated in the Goreangab Dam informal settlement area, where the project aims to address food insecurity and unemployment among the city’s disadvantaged and vulnerable communities including the youth, women, people with disabilities and the homeless. The project has one permanent employee and seven volunteers from the community.
CoW’s Corporate Communications, Marketing and Public Participation manager Harold Akwenye in a recent media statement said the municipal council accepted a non-refundable grant of N.dollars 1.92 million from UNDP for the development of Farm Okukuna. Once ministerial approval is obtained for it, the donation will be used to fund activities at the project for a period of one year.
“Council has developed a sustainability work plan for Farm Okukuna for the next year and beyond,” he said.
Meanwhile, Akwenye further said, CoW has also approved an agreement to lease land to NamPower for the construction of a new substation for Windhoek called the Khomas Intake Substation, to be situated on a portion of Farm 508 in the Havana informal settlement.
In order for NamPower to take occupation of the identified site and start with the construction of the substation, they will pay the City a lease amount of N.dollar 1 per month until all legalities around the transfer of the site are concluded, he explained.
The ownership of the site, he continued saying, will eventually be transferred to NamPower at no cost, noting that the construction of the substation is necessitated by Windhoek’s electricity needs beyond 2024.
“The existing NamPower infrastructure through which Windhoek receives its electricity demand has reached its physical design capacity and cannot be upgraded to accommodate the anticipated electricity demand growth. CoW already paid NamPower N.dollars 72 500 million in 2017 as a first contribution towards the project and an additional of N.dollars 135 million still needs to be paid, which the City is currently attempting to secure from financial institutions,” Akwenye noted.
Source: Namibia Press Agency
