Demographic changes in several rural areas in the four northern regions of Namibia were traced from 1991 to 2001 using national census data. On average, the population growth rate of the surveyed area was 2.77% per year. Although this rate approximated the country's mean growth rate of 2.64%, the surveyed areas showed signifi cant differences from the mean, ranging from -3.4% to 7.2% per year. A combination of demographic and land use data collected from four representative villages in the study region revealed that rural-to-urban migration on a micro-scale is a significant process in the control of the area's ecology and economy, and that the percentage of cultivated land is closely tied to population density.