The interlinked issues of poverty, unemployment and inequality (PUI) can be traced back to
Namibia’s colonial apartheid legacies and continue to haunt the country since its independence
in 1990. In the mid-90s, Namibia was regarded as the country with the highest levels of
inequality and a gini co-efficient of 0.70. These high levels of inequality were confirmed by a
government report released in 2008, but based on data obtained in 2004. It still rates Namibia as
the most unequal country in the world, although with a slightly reduced gini co-efficient of 0,63
(CBS 2008). The government report points to gender, race, regional, ethnic, educational and
class dimensions of inequality. Other studies, like the United Nations Human Development
Report of 2009, calculated a Namibian gini co-efficient of 0.743, ahead of Comoros (0.643),
Botswana (0.61), Haiti (0.595), Angola (0.586), Colombia (0.585), Bolivia (0.582) and South
Africa (0.578) (UNDP 2009). The most recent UNDP Human Development Report (HDR) of
2011 indicates that Namibia obtained a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.625 in 2011 but
lost 43.5% of that value when it was “inequality adjusted”. Consequently, Namibia dropped by
14 places in the global HDI ranking when inequality was taken into account. This was the
highest loss of any country in the HDI ranking ahead of Sierra Leone (loss of 41.6%), Guinea
Bissau (41,4%) and the Central African Republic (40,6%) (UNDP 2012).