Willem Konjore strode around the huge conference table in the Cabinet Office, in Windhoek, naming the people (including himself) in the framed photos covering the walls. These were the members of the Constituent Assembly that drew up the Constitution for a free Namibia. Willem was elected an MP in 1989 and then became Deputy Speaker in the National Assembly. It was a long way, literally and figuratively, from his days as headmaster of the church school at Koichas, a farming area in the south-east of Namibia, where he taught, was hounded and harassed by the police and barely scraped a living with his wife, Elsie, in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the couple remained dedicated to the ideal of bringing quality education to the most remote parts of the country.

Elsie retired in 1998, after 33 years of teaching, mostly at Koichas, but she and Willem retained their strong commitment to Koichas, in the hope it could remain autonomous. The school, supported by the Norwegian churches, was one of only four church-based community schools remaining in the country1 10 years after independence, with teachers trained by the NCE. Interviewed at parliament, in November 2000, Willem was happy that the government had begun to subsidise Koichas because the communal peasant farmers could not maintain it without financial support. Many donors initially supported educational development in independent Namibia. By December 1989, it was thought unlikely that the NCE would be involved in further teacher training but funders soon started to withdraw, expecting the government to take full responsibility for social development despite the gross inequality and privation caused by more than a century of colonial and apartheid rule.

The CCN and NCE also expected ECD to be taken over by government and supported both through the budget and international aid. While its value was recognised in principle, neither ECD nor adult literacy was guaranteed in the Namibian constitution. Free, compulsory education started at year one of primary school and the British ODA started funding teacher-training programmes at this level, alongside the Swedes, Danes and Peace Corps.