Baseline survey for ECN kicks off

The National Electoral and Democratic Procesess baseline survey for the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) commenced on 21 May 2012 in all 13 regions. The purpose of the survey is to assess the level of understanding of the public on electoral and democratic processes and the effectiveness of ECN’s implementation of programmes and projects to reach institutional aims and objectives within its mandate.
The survey will be conducted by the Polytechnic of Namibia’s Centre for Entrepreneurial Development (CED), which won the tender to conduct the survey. The survey will be conducted from 21 May to 7 July.
In a telephonic interview, Hilda Nakakuwa, deputy director of Voter Education at the ECN, says that the electoral body decided to conduct such a survey for various reasons.
“We want to assess the opinion of the public and how they perceive the work done by the ECN. We want to find out the level of confidence and what they think about the democratic procesesses of voting in Namibia,” Nakakuwa says.
The survey will also look at the level of youth participation in voting activities as well as who elects who and who gets elected by whom in terms of gender.
Nakakuwa says that the survey also wants to find out wether the public thinks that ECN includes minority groups in its voting processess.
“We will then use the iformation gathered from the survey to develop strategies in order to address the issues that have arised from the findings,” she said.
The results of the survey will likely be available at the end of August 2012.
The research assistants for the survey include Polytechnic of Namibia 4th year students as well as  CED full-time and part-time staff members. They are identifiable by ECN T-shirts, caps and identification cards.