Fact Sheet: Family Caregiving of Older Persons in Namibia

[Fact Sheet] The Family Caregiving of Older Persons in Namibia fact sheet examines family caregiving for older persons in Namibia, drawing on qualitative fieldwork with 80 older person households across five sites spanning urban, peri-urban, and rural settings: Khomasdal, Samora Machel, Windhoek Rural, Okatana, and Mashare. Conducted in 2023, the study documents how care is organised, experienced, and sustained within families, and at what social, economic, and emotional cost. The report advances three central claims. First, family caregiving in Namibia is structurally produced rather than freely chosen, emerging through migration, unemployment, poverty, disability, and climate stress. Second, care need is environmentally as well as medically constituted: identical health conditions generate markedly different demands depending on housing quality, water and sanitation access, distance to services, and exposure to drought and heat, with the most impaired older persons consistently living in the most under-resourced environments. Third, caregiving is demanding labour disproportionately absorbed by women, particularly daughters, granddaughters, wives, and sisters, within households already constrained by poverty and unemployment.The report further shows that Namibia's Old Age Grant, though central to household budgets, was designed as individual income support and cannot cover the combined costs of food, water, electricity, medication, transport, school fees, and funeral policies, leaving households reliant on debt, rationing, and informal coping strategies. Financial strain can extend beyond the household budget into relationships, generating conflict.The report concludes that family care acts as an invisible welfare system compensating for minimal formal long-term care provision, and calls for a national integrated long-term care strategy that recognises family caregivers as essential partners and coordinates social protection, health, housing, and climate adaptation policy to sustain caregiving at home.