Ina Wilkie
Kambashu Institute – Windhoek, Khomas, Namibia & Germany
Ina Wilkie set out to address food insecurity in Namibia’s biggest informal settlement. Here, on the outskirts of the capital city of Windhoek, women find themselves unemployed and vulnerable, yet empowered to create a secure life for themselves and their families. Ina is now the Director of Kambashu Institute, which trains and designs with shack dwellers for shack dwellers. This organization believes everyone should get a chance to improve their lives as there is a gap between people who want to improve their lives and their access to designing and creating. This is the gap they are addressing. They invite people living in informal settlements to be part of the process of developing new ideas and solutions that can improve their lives.
“My experience over the years taught me to reduce complexity. If you take permaculture, for example, it has design principles and concepts that can be overwhelming. So, my idea was to reduce complexity with the Kambashu Institute, a small design and training initiative.”
Namibia has 2.6 million inhabitants. It is estimated that 900,000 of them live in informal settlements. Our thinking centres around a family living in a zinc shack in Windhoek.
Ina is passionate about telling stories of complex issues that reach people’s hearts and minds. She produces a wide range of communication measures including films, articles, brochures, and books.
She has been working in the field of environmental policy across Africa since 2011 as a freelance consultant for the World Future Council, a foundation based in Hamburg, Germany. She leads the foundation’s projects on sustainable ecosystems and food security in Africa.
In 2013, Namibia experienced the worst drought in 30 years of the country’s history, calling on the government to declare a national state of emergency. Seven dry years later and two more states of emergencies in 2016 and 2019 left more than 650,000 people and 26 percent of the population facing high levels of acute food insecurity. This number is expected to increase to 750,000 because the severe aftereffects of the prolonged drought will linger on.
Although the agriculture sector faced the bigger brunt of the drought, cities like Windhoek faced water cuts, business closures and job losses. By the end of 2018, at least 438,000 Namibians were unemployed with more than 56 per cent of them being women.
During this period, and after, the government, the private sector and communities embarked on various drought and food insecurity relief initiatives, some of which are still ongoing today. On the steering end of many of these initiatives is Ina Wilkie, consultant for sustainable land management at the World Future Council (WFC) and various other development projects.
“One thing that everybody has is greywater and they have a lot of it from washing themselves, their children, vegetables and dishes. So, we asked ourselves what can we do with that? This initiated our food circle design.
Some of her most recent projects focus on improving food and nutrition security. One of them being the Farm Okakuna project. Since 2018. her organisation, alongside The City of Windhoek (CoW) and permaculture experts, have been providing permaculture training to shack dwellers in Windhoek. It is an experimentation and training site on how to grow food in informal settlements, fostering urban subsistence farming as well as entrepreneurship, especially for women.
They developed their first solution, a permaculture food circle, last year in August. The design has a pit in the middle for greywater and different biomass. On the berm around the pit is a diversity of vegetables and fruit trees. Ultimately, the trees will tap down their roots and absorb the water from the pit through the soil while there is a cold composting process going on. So people are not only producing their food, but also organic fertiliser.
As nature-based solutions climb up the priority ladder, Namibians also find the answers to their problems in soil and roots. In 2015 the city government of Windhoek (CoW) signed the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, acknowledging they have to prioritise developing sustainable food systems like permaculture cycles.
Ina says what drives her most is seeing how her trainers have developed. Bearing witness to that growth taught her the importance of working with people over a long period.
“You can see and feel the self-confidence that comes from a person that had no job, to a person that is now an educated trainer who has a place to go to and teach other people. That is the change that inspires me.”
Website: Kambashu
