Minister of Education, Arts, and Culture officially handed over some functions of her ministry to the 14 regional councils in the country. The functions which were officially decentralized are those of arts and culture as the education directorates already report to the 14 regional councils. The two decentralized functions were also officially received by the Minister of Urban and Rural Development, Erastus Uutoni at a ceremony that took place at Otjiwarongo. Uutoni said arts and culture are important and help shape the lives of school children. The two ministries expressed satisfaction in seeing the regional councils being empowered by the government’s decentralization programme, which started in 1997. They expressed hope that other ministries will speed up their transitional decentralization processes so that people at grassroots and settlement levels can start to access their services more easily through the constituency and regional council government bodies. Ministries that have already decentralized some functions are those of works, information, land, labour, social welfare, and health, said Uutoni.
