Beyond Mukopano: Civil society, what should come next?

CIVIC+264 calls for a stronger, more coordinated relationship between corporate Namibia and organised civil society — and invites CSOs across the country to help shape what that relationship should look like.

The inaugural Namibia Corporate Social Investment (CSI) Mukopano brought together an extraordinary cross-section of corporate Namibia, civil society, government and development partners on 3 September 2026 around a deceptively simple idea: we can achieve more when we stop working in silos.

CIVIC+264 was proud to join Mukopano as a co-organiser and official partner, and we commend MTC and the wider Mukopano partnership for creating a space for a broader conversation between the private sector and civil society than we've seen yet. 

The message that CIVIC+264 brought to Mukopano was simple: "We need better coordination." Namibia does not lack capable civil-society organisations. What is still missing is enough of the connective infrastructure between civil society, Government, the private sector and funders.

CIVIC+264 already connects more than 130 civil-society organisations through its online directory and regularly serves as a bridge between CSOs and national institutions and policy processes. But the next opportunity is bigger: to understand not only who is doing what and where, but also who is funding what and where.

Why does that matter?

If ten companies are unknowingly supporting similar interventions while an entire region, community or issue receives little attention, Namibia needs information that allows us to see that. If a company wants to invest in a particular issue or region, it should be able to find credible civil-society organisations already doing the work. And smaller and regional organisations should not remain invisible simply because they are outside the usual networks.

CIVIC therefore put a simple proposition to Mukopano: Rather than creating parallel databases and platforms, CIVIC proposed exploring a shared national civil-society and CSI information architecture. What is especially encouraging is how closely this proposition now aligns with Mukopano's own emerging thinking.

Its post-conference working draft proposes, among other things, a CSI Marketplace Portal connecting corporates with credible NGO partners; a Namibia CSI Index; a national CSI Impact Dashboard; NGO capacity-building; funding and partnership matchmaking; year-round information sharing; and an initial "Namibia CSI 100" mapping 100 corporates and 100 NGOs.

The Mukopano Beyond the Conference strategy explicitly proposes NGO capacity-building and contributing to national policy discussions, but our observation at the conference was that this was not an identifiable focus area of any of the CSI strategies that were presented. If nothing built for civil society should exclude civil society, then surely we should be able to identify the core tenents of our work, in the focus areas of the efforts to support us. That is why we want to ensure that the needs of civil society are included as meaningfully and early as possible in this potentially vibrant collaborative project.

So please send us your input and we'll formulate a civil-society contribution to the next phase of Mukopano.We'd love to hear your perspective:

• What priority areas did you not see represented at the conference?
• What should corporates know before deciding which organisations or interventions to fund?
• How can funding become more accessible to small, rural and community-based organisations?
• And what should Mukopano do between now and its next annual gathering?

We will consolidate the input received and use it to inform CIVIC+264's engagement in the next phase of Mukopano.

The first Mukopano proved that there is an appetite for something bigger than another conference. Its emerging strategy explicitly describes the ambition as moving "from an Annual Conference to a Year-Round National CSI Movement" and recognises that the work between conferences is what ultimately changes lives.

CIVIC+264 wants organised civil society to help build that movement. Write to us: ethne.mudge@gmail.com