Demographic changes in several rural areas in the four northern regions of
Namibia were traced from 1991 to 2001 using national census data. On average, the
population growth rate of the surveyed area was 2.77% per year. Although this rate
approximated the country’s mean growth rate of 2.64%, the surveyed areas showed
signifi cant differences from the mean, ranging from 3.4% to 7.2% per year. A combination
of demographic and land use data collected from four representative villages in the study
region revealed that rural-to-urban migration on a micro-scale is a signifi cant process in the
control of the area’s ecology and economy, and that the percentage of cultivated land is
closely tied to population density.