Namibia
Consolidation of postcolonial state control over territorial borders and borderlands through birth registration
In 2024 the CRC recommended that Namibia strengthen efforts to ensure all children have access to birth registration and identity documents. This included children in rural areas, children belonging to minority groups, asylum-seeking and refugee children, children whose place of birth cannot be determined and children without identity documents.
Promising Practices
From 2010 to 2011 UNHCR worked with the government of Namibia, on an identification exercise among undocumented populations living in border areas. In Namibia, 900 people were to be naturalized or recognized as Namibian. Included were 200 of Nama and Damara heritage, Indigenous people who are part of the Khoekhoe ethnic group. Historically, they have been subjected to violent displacement, including a genocide by German military forces from 1907 to 1907 and apartheid-era South Africa’s 1960 displacement of the Damara. Descendants of refugees who fled from Angola to Namibia during the Angolan civil war also benefited from this identification exercise.
