Africa-Press – Namibia. Speech delivered by Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, speaker of the National Assembly, at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN) Eastern Dioceses Omuhanga (Men and Women) Conference, on Friday 26 September 2025 at Hosiana Congregation, Windhoek.
I am delighted to partake together with you in this service commencing the Omuhanga (Men and Women) Conference of the Eastern Diocese of the Lutheran Church that is to take place here at Hosiana Congregation over the next few days.
I am informed that this is the first time that this conference is taking place in our capital since its inception in 2010. We who reside in the capital are pleased that Windhoek was chosen for this year’s conference, as it has granted us the opportunity to partake in some of the activities of the conference as I do now.
I wish to congratulate the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia Eastern Dioceses Men and Women Leagues on this special occasion of the conference, and the Lutheran Church for this innovation of encouraging its membership to come together to interact and ponder over societal issues affecting us as men and women.
The church is an important stakeholder in our society. Besides providing pastoral services, it has distinguished itself as a leading player in providing social services to our communities. With its wide network, it is able to reach the remotest parts of the country with critical social services, establishing itself as one of the key non-state development stakeholders in our country, providing reliable partnership to the government.
Its services have become more critical today as the country faces the toughest challenges to the moral fibre of our society, with increases in crime, including child and gender-based violence, and abuse of drugs and alcohol. More of our children also now grow up without both parents at home, with some growing up in child-headed households, while others roam the streets due to abusive conditions at home and lack of parental care.
The government has prioritised addressing these challenges in its development programmes, as this is important for our communities’ development. By promoting understanding and cooperation among men and women, the church is helping to strengthen the home and family as the foundation of society. When families are strong, they are capacitated to nurture children and mould them into responsible adults capable of safeguarding the future that their parents envision for our country, for them, and for the generations after them.
The scourge of substance abuse destroys the lives of many of our youth, many of whom lose their lives in violent crimes, while others are incarcerated for being perpetrators of crimes. Others still sustain injuries in motor vehicle accidents due to drunken driving, become teenage mothers, or acquire sexually transmitted diseases.
The government programmes for addressing these challenges include those administered by the gender ministry, which seeks to advocate for gender equality and gender equity, and coordinate the implementation of interventions that promote equal opportunities for men and women to ensure their empowerment and the mobilisation of their capabilities to advance our society.
I must emphasise that gender equity is about the empowerment of both women and men, boys and girls, not just that of women and girls. When any section of our society is excluded, be it men or women, our society is denied the benefits of what they could have contributed. So men and women should make use of the programmes under gender.
Men and women should also embrace the responsibility for our families, our children, and our communities as equal and mutually supporting partners. A boy child needs to learn from a caring and responsible father how to be a responsible partner to his spouse and father to his children, just as he needs the nurturing of the mother. A girl child needs the love and nurturing of both a father and mother to become a self-confident and nurturing future spouse and mother to her children.
The initiatives of the church, such as this conference of the women and men leagues, help to promote the understanding that will ensure peaceful homes that will mitigate against domestic violence, sustain relationships between parents, prevent child-headed households and the phenomenon of street children, and ensure optimal child development – all of which are important for community development.
We thus highly commend this initiative as a government, and we applaud all of you delegates for your high attendance which demonstrates your commitment to its objectives. We encourage the church to continue with these and other programmes that it undertakes to support the upliftment of our communities.
The government will continue to value and nurture the partnership that we share with the church.
You are wished successful deliberations at your conference and fruitful outcomes in all your endeavours.
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