Chris Lawrence, PEP MANAGER, ANGOLA: The UK branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association was in Namibia on 19 February 2009, less than a week after the second PEP English language training course for the Namibian Police ended.
The MPs met Dr Peter Katjavivi, Director-General of the Namibian National Planning Commission, who had officially closed the course.  He told the MPs how much Namibia valued the training the police had received and praised the UK’s pre-eminent ability to deliver such training.  Dr Katjavivi reported to Cabinet, of which he is a member, which said it hoped there would be more of the same.
Some eyebrows were raised when it first became known that I was to run two courses for the Namibian Police Force (Nampol).  ‘But they speak English in Namibia!’ was the usual comment.  It seems a fair observation and technically it is true:  the official language has been English since Independence in 1990.  Visitors to the capital, Windhoek, will find that most people speak English alongside Afrikaans, German and other Namibian languages.  Outside the capital, English is less common.  
The adoption of English at independence was a political act demonstrating a break with the past German and then South African colonisation.  There was, however, and still is, a severe shortage of competent English language teachers apart from a few educated in exile.  
It is sometimes a surprise to find that Namibians who speak relatively fluent English often write it at a level that is barely literate.  For Nampol, English is of crucial importance for two main reasons:  the first relates to ensuring an effective justice system: the second to honouring Namibia’s commitments to UN Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs).
The Inspector General of Nampol explained that, despite effective policing, many cases that appear before the courts fail to reach conviction because of the poor quality of police reports.  Police officers worldwide have experiences of lawyers and even judges dismissing evidence and cases simply on the basis of faulty spelling and grammar in reports, allowing the accused to walk free.  |This is even more common in Namibia.
In spite of its relatively small population of two million, Namibia has a good record of sending police, military observers and troops in support of UN missions.  Nampol prides itself on its significant UNCIVPOL contributions to UN PKOs.  However, in the 2007 UN selection exercises, up to 75 per cent of candidates were rejected for not matching UN English language criteria.  The Namibian authorities feel this is a serious embarrassment.
English language training courses that focused on remedying these two concerns were, in the Inspector General’s view, a priority.
A draft proposal had been drawn up by the previous POP Global Peacekeeping English manager, Mark Crossey, in 2007, but was not implemented.  In May 2008 it was resurrected and modified to take advantage of my presence in neighbouring Angola. 

The non-resident Defence Attaché for Namibia provided the funding and Global peacekeeping English manager Esther Hay and my own Defence Attaché agreed to release em during identified periods when activity in Angola was predicted to be low.
For me it was a wonderful opportunity.  In the early 1980s I worked with a group of Namibian teachers at Bell College, Saffron Walden and, in 1986, I designed an English language course and set up a self-access centre at the UN Institute for Namibia in Lusaka.  The students there were all exiled members of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), the Namibian independence organisation – and many were from refugee camps in Angola.  It would be my first stay in the country I had played a minuscule role in helping to achieve viable independence.
The first course ran from 27 August to 12 September at the Israel Patrick Iyambo Police College, Windhoek, and was attended by Nampol officers from tall regions of Namibia plus Namibian Defence Force (NDF) officers.  The second course took place at the same location from 26 January to 13 February.
Although assured that the participants for Course 1 would have a pre-intermediate level of English, the reality was rather different:  there was a broad spectrum of English language levels.  The overall competence profile of the group revealed four distinct levels with only a small group having good pre-intermediate or lower intermediate level.
The participants had expected that the course would be a traditional English language improvement course.  They were delighted when the course addressed practical professional needs, making use of their knowledge and skills and allowing them to develop report writing and international communication skills.  It helped that the group contained some senior officer with direct experience of the difficulties of writing good reports.  We also had the benefit of three participants with first-hand experience on UN PKOs in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Darfur.
Given the range of English language skills in the group and that the officers came from different regions and branches of Nampol and included NDF personnel, the training approach encouraged a co-operative dynamic.  In addition to class and individual activities, pair and group work and a significant self-study element were important components.
Core materials used included selected units or parts of units from Campaign 1 and 2, English for Modern Policing and Painless Police Report Writing, supplemented by materials drawn from the Cambridge Skills for Fluency series and the Heinemann ELT English Grammar.  
The three short weeks of intensive training resulted in significant improvement in all language skills, and a unanimous desire for a follow-up course.
Nampol explained that they hoped participants would disseminate skills to other officers in their places of work.  We agreed that in order to try to ensure this, we should continue to foster their competencies by providing a higher-level course for the same group in January 2009.
Participants were given the books used on the first course, in the hope that they would maintain their improved level of English.  The pre-course test in January revealed that English competence had slipped only slightly even after a five-month gap.
Although Course 2 was at a higher level, the training approach was similar to Course 1, although more emphasis was given to the self-study component.  An important element of the new course was training in dictionary skills:  the three dictionaries used were the Longman Active Study Dictionary, Oxford’s Dictionary of Law Enforcement and the Campaign Dictionary of Military Terms.  
The results at the end of the course showed that definite improvement in English language competence had taken place.  Further such courses have been requested by Nampol and recently, by the Prison Service.