Namibia: The Human Resource Crisis in Health in Africa

Readers for whom the last few chapters have wafted away into stratospheric clouds of political and historical speculation will be relieved that our final case study brings us down with a bump to an intensely practical issue in the governance of developing countries: promoting the health of their citizens. In earlier chapters we explored the extent to which governments are practising ‘strategic’ HRM, which we defined in Chapter 1 as the integration of the activities of staff management with government’s overall strategic objectives (and also with each other). What could be more strategic than a national target for reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters? For that, along with ambitious targets for child mortality and disease reduction, is what Namibia and all the other governments of the world committed themselves to when they signed the United Nations’ Millennium Declaration in September 2000. Reducing child and maternal mortality by 2015, and also the deadly diseases of HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB, is the thrust of three of the eight ‘Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs). The Millennium Declaration represents a new direction for development thinking, departing from the ‘big private sector and small state’ model that was dominant in the 1980s and for most of the 1990s, and whose staffing expression was the ‘downsizing’ model of reform which we discussed in Chapter 2.