Keetmanshoop residents on Friday joined the town’s municipality in its two-day clean-up campaign.

The residents started cleaning extension 7 informal settlement and along the B1 road.

Speaking to the media here, Sherina Witbooi, a municipality employee and one of the organisers of the campaign, said the aim of cleaning up along the highway is to ensure that it is clean as it tarnishes the town's image if it is dirty.

“We will have other clean-up dates, we need to make it a regular event so that the community is aware of the importance of cleaning their surroundings and to have a healthy environment. We need to stay in a clean environment for us and our children to be healthy and we as residents have the responsibility to keep our environment clean,” she said.

A community member, Thusnelde ||Guruses who resides in one of the informal settlements in the town, said she decided to join the campaign to show her children the importance of keeping their surroundings clean.

“My children have to know while they are still young that their surroundings should be clean for hygiene purposes, that’s why I brought them to be part of this and as residents, we should do this on a daily basis to keep our homes clean,” she added.

Silvanus Kock, a student at the University of Namibia southern campus, said “We are currently having an environmental assignment at school on how the environment can be polluted and I deemed it necessary to participate. I am encouraging everybody not to litter because we have to keep the environment clean as there are a lot of things, we gain from the environment such as oxygen, so let us not pollute it.”

Members of the Namibian Defence Force, and employees of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism also joined the municipality and the residents in the clean-up campaign while businesses provided meals to the participants.

Source: The Namibian Press Agency