Mozambican Government Research Articles

China and Mozambique: from comrades to capitalists. Edited by Chris Alden and Sérgio Chichava

After a decade of mostly broad-brush books on China in Africa, this edited volume forms part of a new phase in China—Africa studies, of drilling deeper into country specifics. Mozambique is an interesting country to focus on as its relations with China are not like Angola's, Kenya's or Ethiopia's, and can be best characterized as ‘a relationship of caution, compromise and collaboration’ (p. 1). The ten chapters in this book attempt to chart the evolution of Chinese engagement in Mozambique, particularly over the last 40 years since independence. Some of the chapters are also revisionist of some of the literature of the last decade on Mozambique, for example Deborah Bräutigam's work on land grabs and on Chinese grand strategy (chapter four by Mikkel Bunkenborg and chapter six by Sigrid-Marianella Stensrud Ekman in particular). Chapter one by Chris Alden, Sergio Chicava and Paula Cristina Roque is a good summary of the state of play up to 2013. By 2008, China had become the second largest investor in Mozambique after South Africa, up from 26th place less than a decade ago. This is a significant jump, and the Mozambican government has actively encouraged deepening China—Mozambique relations. Chinese investment has focused on infrastructure, agriculture, aquaculture and forestry. Since 2008, Chinese companies have shown more interest in oil, gas and coal and in 2013, the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) acquired a piece of ENI East Africa, giving it a stake in Mozambique's future gas development. This book was written at the peak of commodity prices and it was notable then that Chinese engagement with the mineral sector remained small.

Between compliance and resistance: exploring discourses on family planning in Community Health Committees in Mozambique

ObjectivesAlthough the Mozambican government has implemented a community-based approach to family planning (FP), little is known about the appropriateness of this process. We explore how members of Community Health Committees...

Acceptability, feasibility and challenges of implementing an HIV prevention intervention for people living with HIV/AIDS among healthcare providers in Mozambique: Results of a qualitative study

Despite the Mozambique government's efforts to curb human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), national prevalence is 11.5% and support is needed to expand HIV-related services and improve program quality. Positive prevention (PP) programs, which prioritize HIV prevention with people living with HIV and AIDS (PLHIV), have been recognized as an important intervention for preventing new HIV infections. To address this, an evidence-based PP training intervention was implemented with HIV healthcare providers in Mozambique. This study focuses on the acceptability and feasibility of a PP intervention in HIV clinics from the healthcare provider perspective. In-depth interviews were conducted with 31 healthcare providers from three provinces who participated in PP trainings in Mozambique. Interview data were coded using content analysis. Study data suggest that healthcare providers found PP acceptable, feasible to implement in their HIV work in clinic settings, and valued this strategy to improve HIV prevention. The PP training also led providers to feel more comfortable counseling their patients about prevention, with a more holistic approach that included HIV testing, treatment and encouraging PLHIV to live positively. While overall acceptance of the PP training was positive, several barriers to feasibility surfaced in the data. Patient-level barriers included resistance to disclosing HIV status due to fear of stigma and discrimination, difficulty negotiating for condom use, difficulty engaging men in testing and treatment, and the effects of poverty on accessing care. Providers also identified work environment barriers including high patient load, time constraints, and frequent staff turnover. Recognizing PP as an important intervention, healthcare providers should be trained to provide comprehensive prevention, care and treatment for PLHIV. Further work is needed to explore the complex social dynamics and cultural challenges such as gender inequalities, stigma and discrimination which hinder the full impact of PP interventions in this context.

On the margins of aid orthodoxy: the Brazil-Mozambique collaboration to produce essential medicines in Africa.

BackgroundOn the back of its recent economic development and domestic success in the fight against HIV/AIDS, Brazil is helping the Government of Mozambique to set up a pharmaceutical factory as part of its South-South cooperation programme. Until recently, a consensus existed that pharmaceutical production in Africa was not viable or sustainable. This paper looks into practicalities and evolution of this collaboration to illustrate the characteristics of Brazilian development cooperation in health, with the aim of drawing lessons for the wider debate on aid and local production of pharmaceuticals in Africa.DiscussionWe show that the project process has been very long and complex, has involved multiple public and private partners, and cost in excess of USD34 million. There have also been setbacks in the process, and although production has already started, it is unclear whether all the project’s original objectives will be met.SummaryThe Brazil-Mozambique’s pharmaceutical factory experience illustrates positives as well as limitations of Brazil’s unorthodox approach to health development cooperation, highlighting its contribution to pushing the boundaries of the debate on local production of pharmaceuticals in resource-poor settings.

Using baseline surveys to inform interventions and follow-up surveys: a case-study using the Nampula Province Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Program

The Nampula Province Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Program is a partnership among the Government of Mozambique, UNICEF, and the Australian Government focused on achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals for water and sanitation in Mozambique and concentrated on five small towns in Nampula Province. Before implementation of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) interventions in these towns, a baseline survey was carried out in 2012. We show how such a survey can be used to characterize the state of the three WASH sub-themes (water, sanitation, hygiene) pre-intervention, suggest possible new emphases of or modifications to proposed interventions, and inform the design of follow-up surveys to best gauge the impact of the interventions.

Sustainability check: five-year annual sustainability audits of the water supply and open defecation free status in the ‘One Million Initiative’, Mozambique

UNICEF, the Government of Mozambique and the Government of the Netherlands co-financed a USD 48 million rural water supply and sanitation intervention termed the One Million Initiative between 2007 and 2013. This paper presents the methods applied and the results obtained from the annual audits carried out in the programme using a Sustainability Check (SC) tool. The SC was applied by external audit company and was designed to ensure ongoing sustainability of investments beyond the programme lifespan. It grades the status of rural water supplies and ‘open defecation free’ (ODF) communities based on a multivariate composite index comprising institutional, social, technical and financial indicators. The SC uses three data collection instruments: a semi-structured focus group with the district authorities, a facility audit of water points, and an audit of ODF villages with a semi-structured household survey. The paper notes a trend towards increased sustainability of both ODF communities and rural water supplies during the course of the five-year period. The study concluded that an 80% sustainability score provides the greatest statistical probability of achieving >90% of functioning water supplies. The paper notes that when the sustainability score is <80%, the probability of the water supply functioning drastically reduces to 50%.

HIV scale-up in Mozambique: Exceptionalism, normalisation and global health

The large-scale introduction of HIV and AIDS services in Mozambique from 2000 onwards occurred in the context of deep political commitment to sovereign nation-building and an important transition in the nation's health system. Simultaneously, the international community encountered a willing state partner that recognised the need to take action against the HIV epidemic. This article examines two critical policy shifts: sustained international funding and public health system integration (the move from parallel to integrated HIV services). The Mozambican government struggles to support its national health system against privatisation, NGO competition and internal brain drain. This is a sovereignty issue. However, the dominant discourse on self-determination shows a contradictory twist: it is part of the political rhetoric to keep the sovereignty discourse alive, while the real challenge is coordination, not partnerships. Nevertheless, we need more anthropological studies to understand the political implications of global health funding and governance. Other studies need to examine the consequences of public health system integration for the quality of access to health care.

Development of a Mobile Mapping Solution for Spatial Data Collection Using Open-Source Technologies

Abstract Information technologies and sport resources aid the potential to transform governmental organizations services, and play an important role in contributing to sustainable communities, respectively. Low-cost tools combining a user-friendly and customized data interaction (forms, mapping, media support) are still in an early stage. Recognizing benefits – efficiency, effectiveness, proximity to citizens – that Mozambican Minister of Youth and Sports (MJD) can achieve employing a low-cost data collection solution, this paper describes the development and implementation of a Geospatial Information System (GIS) mapping application (app) – m-SportGIS – under Open-Source (OS) technologies, customizing an evolutionary and incremental methodology. The app development embraced the combination of mobile web technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (e.g. Sencha Touch (ST), Apache Cordova) to deploy a native-to-the-device (Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 running Android OS 4.0) app, taking advantage of device capabilities (e.g. File system, Geolocation, Camera). In addition to the integrated Web Map Service (WMS), a tile caching procedure was carried out to produce a network-communication-independent (offline) Tile Map Service (TMS) regarding IT infrastructures limitations in several Mozambican areas. m-SportGIS is currently being exploited by Mozambican Government staff to inventory all kind of sport facilities, which feeds a WebGIS platform to manage Mozambican sport resources.

Preliminary Assessment of CO2 Storage Potential in the Rovuma Sedimentary Basin, Mozambique

Abstract Vast natural gas discoveries have been reported in recent years in the offshore sector of the Rovuma sedimentary basin, Mozambique. Subsequently the Mozambique Government approved a natural gas development plan contemplating, amongst other scenarios, the construction of natural gas processing plants in the Municipalities of Palma and Pemba. The work presented in this article is a preliminary assessment of the CO2 storage potential in the onshore Rovuma Basin, which for that purpose was subdivided into four sectors. Only the Palma - Mocimboa da Praia and Macomia - North Pemba sectors are conditions suitable for safe CO2 storage. In the Palma - Mocimboa da Praia sector, situated in the NE part of the Rovuma basin, where the potential reservoirs are the Alto Jingone/Quissanga Formation and the Mikindani Formation, the prospective storage capacity is estimated to range from 150 Mt to 300 Mt. In the Macomia - North Pemba sector, the reservoir consists of the lower units of the Pemba Formation, dating from the Upper Jurassic/Lower Cretaceous, with an estimated storage capacity varying from 85 Mt to 170 Mt. Mozambique seems to present an interesting case in favour of developing CCS projects under in the Clean Development Mechanism. This article aims to raise awareness between national authorities and research institutions about the relevance of initiating a detailed assessment of the CO2 storage in Mozambique, namely in the Rovuma basin.

Strengthening research capacity through the medical education partnership initiative: the Mozambique experience

BackgroundSince Mozambique’s independence, the major emphasis of its higher educational institutions has been on didactic education. Because of fiscal and human resource constraints, basic and applied research activities have been relatively modest in scope, and priorities have often been set primarily by external collaborators. These factors have compromised the scope and the relevance of locally conducted research and have limited the impact of Mozambique’s universities as major catalysts for national development.Case descriptionWe developed a multi-institutional partnership to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the research environment at Mozambique’s major public universities to identify factors that have served as barriers to the development of a robust research enterprise. Based on this analysis, we developed a multifaceted plan to reduce the impact of these barriers and to enhance research capacity within Mozambique.InterventionsOn the basis of our needs assessment, we have implemented a number of major initiatives within participating institutions to facilitate basic and applied research activities. These have included specialized training programmes, a reorganization of the research administration infrastructure, the development of multiple collaborative research projects that have emphasized local research priorities and a substantial investment in bioinformatics. We have established a research support centre that provides grant development and management services to Mozambique’s public universities and have developed an independent Institutional Review Board for the review of research involving human research subjects. Multiple research projects involving both communicable and non-communicable diseases have been developed and substantial external research support has been obtained to undertake these projects. A sizable investment in biomedical informatics has enhanced both connectivity and access to digital reference material. Active engagement with relevant entities within the Government of Mozambique has aligned institutional development with national priorities.ConclusionsAlthough multiple challenges remain, over the past 3 years significant progress has been made towards establishing conditions within which a broad range of basic, translational and clinical and public health research can be undertaken. Ongoing development of this research enterprise will enhance capacity to address critical locally relevant research questions and will leverage resources to accelerate the development of Mozambique’s national universities.

Revisiting Sino-Mozambican Cooperation: China’s Inroads into the Agriculture and Forestry Sectors

Introduction Since Mozambique became an independent state in 1975, its development trajectory has been shaped by international and internal events (Alden, 2001:8). In the first decade after independence, the Government of Mozambique (GoM) implemented a Marxist-oriented programme, which did not produce the expected outcomes (Latham, 1981:69; Abrahamsson and Nilsson, 1995: 28-30). In addition, Mozambique‟s colonial past, governance inexperience, insufficient capital, poor infrastructure and unskilled population have limited the state‟s capacity to develop strong governmental institutions, a solid national economy, and a cohesive national identity. Also, the internal conflict started by the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) rebel movement against the Liberation Front of Mozambique government (Frelimo) lasted for sixteen years and destroyed much of the infrastructure left from the colonial period ( Hall and Young, 1997: 115-137).To support a declining economic, political and social structure, the government was left with no alternative but to turn to Western states and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) for support by the mid-1980s ( Manning, 2002: 55-6; Pitcher, 2002:103-114; Hanlon, 1991: 28-9; Hanlon, 1996: 16).The transition from a phase in which Mozambique had relative autonomy to one in which international organisations became deeply involved in the state‟s development has had innumerable implications (Ottaway, 1988: 222; Manning, 2002: 123-132).

Strengthening integrated primary health care in Sofala, Mozambique

BackgroundLarge increases in health sector investment and policies favoring upgrading and expanding the public sector health network have prioritized maternal and child health in Mozambique and, over the past decade, Mozambique has achieved substantial improvements in maternal and child health indicators. Over this same period, the government of Mozambique has continued to decentralize the management of public sector resources to the district level, including in the health sector, with the aim of bringing decision-making and resources closer to service beneficiaries. Weak district level management capacity has hindered the decentralization process, and building this capacity is an important link to ensure that resources translate to improved service delivery and further improvements in population health. A consortium of the Ministry of Health, Health Alliance International, Eduardo Mondlane University, and the University of Washington are implementing a health systems strengthening model in Sofala Province, central Mozambique.Description of implementationThe Mozambique Population Health Implementation and Training (PHIT) Partnership focuses on improving the quality of routine data and its use through appropriate tools to facilitate decision making by health system managers; strengthening management and planning capacity and funding district health plans; and building capacity for operations research to guide system-strengthening efforts. This seven-year effort covers all 13 districts and 146 health facilities in Sofala Province.Evaluation designA quasi-experimental controlled time-series design will be used to assess the overall impact of the partnership strategy on under-5 mortality by examining changes in mortality pre- and post-implementation in Sofala Province compared with neighboring Manica Province. The evaluation will compare a broad range of input, process, output, and outcome variables to strengthen the plausibility that the partnership strategy led to health system improvements and subsequent population health impact.DiscussionThe Mozambique PHIT Partnership expects to provide evidence on the effect of efforts to improve data quality coupled with the introduction of tools, training, and supervision to improve evidence-based decision making. This contribution to the knowledge base on what works to enhance health systems is highly replicable for rapid scale-up to other provinces in Mozambique, as well as other sub-Saharan African countries with limited resources and a commitment to comprehensive primary health care.

The Supply of Inorganic Fertilizers to Smallholder Farmers in Tanzania: Evidence for Fertilizer Policy Development

Inorganic fertilizer is one of a handful of agricultural technologies that have immense potential for raising the productivity of poor smallholders, enabling them to increase income, accumulate assets, and set themselves economically on a pathway out of poverty. The very low prevalence of fertilizer use by Mozambican farmers — below five percent — is evidence that farmers find it difficult to access fertilizers for their crops at a price that will allow them to obtain sufficient and reliable returns from their investment in fertilizer.This paper presents the results of a broad study of fertilizer supply to smallholder farmers in Mozambique that was done to assess whether the taxes (explicit or implicit) that are applied at various points along the fertilizer importation and marketing chain, or the absence of key public goods and services, reduces the access that smallholder farmers have to fertilizer. The study involved a review of the literature of fertilizer supply, demand, and use; interviews with key participants in fertilizer importation and marketing in Mozambique; and two surveys — one with farmers and the other with input suppliers — in two farming areas where more fertilizer is used than is the norm for the country as a whole.The government of Mozambique has adopted a generally hands-off approach in engaging with efforts to improve farmer access to fertilizer. Private-sector investment decisions drive the development of input markets, with government primarily having somewhat distant oversight. Fertilizer costs are high in Mozambique relative to costs in other coastal countries in Africa. Efforts are being started to strengthen the retail sector of agricultural inputs by better understanding the information and management needs of agricultural input retailers, but much work is still required in this regard.However, given the problematic economics of fertilizer use by smallholders in Mozambique, the prospects for sharp increases in fertilizer use in the future are certainly much murkier there than elsewhere in Africa. Nonetheless, government can take two fertilizer-specific initiatives to accelerate use of fertilizer in Mozambique by smallholders: 1. Overcoming information constraints that smallholder farmers who might use fertilizer face. This includes both information on the proper agronomic use of the appropriate types of fertilizer on specific crops under specific agroecological conditions and information on the proper economic use of fertilizer under changing input and output market conditions so that farmers can derive reliable profits from their use of the technology. 2. Regulatory reform. The fertilizer regulations currently being proposed for Mozambique, if comprehensively implemented, would be a poor fit for the public benefits sought through the regulations. A considerably lighter regulatory regime would allow more fertilizer into Mozambique, resulting in lower costs for farmers. The Ministry of Agriculture should be judicious in its implementation of this legislation. Efforts to assure the quality of fertilizers in open and competitive markets are best achieved through self-regulation processes tied to sufficient information on product quality for farmers and ample choice in suppliers, rather than through heavy regulation and costly enforcement.

The Forgotten Sons of the State: The Social and Political Positions of Former Government Soldiers in Post-War Mozambique

Este articulo muestra que despues de veintiun anos de la firma de los acuerdos de paz en Mozambique el Estado de ese pais sigue luchando contra el nicho social y politico de los mas de 90.000 soldados desmovilizados. El articulo parte de la observacion de que la construccion de memoria sobre la anterior guerra civil y de liberacion, realizada por el gobierno del Frente de Liberacion de Mozambique -FRELIMO-, fue altamente influyente en la creacion y agudizacion de categorias de los veteranos, determinando que de veteranos tiene acceso a recursos privilegiados y cual tipo resulta excluido de ellos. Este trabajo explora la problematica relacion entre los excombatientes del ejercito gubernamental y el gobierno de Mozambique con base en un trabajo de campo etnografico. Para los veteranos esta relacion se caracteriza por la frustracion, la esperanza, el patrimonialismo y el uso de la amenaza de violencia. Lo anterior se despliega en negociaciones que involucran aspectos materiales (en particular las pensiones), pero tambien aspectos simbolicos relacionados con su reconocimiento como veteranos valiosos

Wartime Violence and Post-Conflict Political Mobilization in Mozambique

AbstractMozambique’s post-conflict development has recently focused on the promise of biofuels production, and the Government of Mozambique has accordingly made hundreds of agricultural concessions to foreign and domestic corporations since 2006. In response, local groups have sought community land grants to protect livelihoods. We seek to understand whether the magnitude and recentness of violent events during Mozambique’s 16-year civil war determined the success of communities’ efforts to secure lands. We hypothesize that violence weakens the ability of communities to protect their traditional land uses from concessions by lobbying for community land grants. This hypothesis - dubbed the “weak institutions hypothesis” - is contrasted with the idea that violence galvanizes political participation. We test the hypothesis using GIS-generated data at the district level on recognized community landholdings and civil war events. Controlling for factors such as market access, road distance to grain warehouses, and spatial auto-correlation, we find that more intense violence is possibly (but not significantly) associated with more land grants, and that districts experiencing more recent violence are actually more likely to lobby successfully for land grants - lending support to the idea that violence boosts community use of riskpooling institutions.

Land Acquisitions and Rural Poverty: Unveiling Ambiguities in the District of Caia (Mozambique)

In the fight against rural poverty, the government of Mozambique fosters land acquisitions as a rapid economic development catalyzer assuming that investors increase the productivity of marginal and unused lands and negotiate long-term benefits with local communities abiding to legal prescriptions. This study aimed at unveiling the ambiguities of these policy assumptions in the district of Caia. Questionnaires were used to investigate families’ risk perception and marginal lands use in local communities, while in-depth interviews with traditional community authorities addressed land access mechanisms, legal knowledge and information flows. This study showed that what is superficially considered by the government unused and marginal lands is in fact the land that allows people to sustain their complex livelihoods. Conversely, there is evidence that communities are largely unprepared to undertake a negotiation process with land investors.

Climate Change and Roads: A Dynamic Stressor–Response Model

AbstractDecision‐makers who are responsible for determining when and where infrastructure should be developed and/or enhanced are facing a new challenge with the emerging topic of climate change. The paper introduces a stressor–response methodology where engineering‐based models are used as a basis to estimate the impact of individual climate stressors on road infrastructure in Mozambique. Through these models, stressor–response functions are introduced that quantify the cost impact of a specific stressor based on the intensity of the stressor and the type of infrastructure it is affecting. Utilizing four climate projection scenarios, the paper details how climate change response decisions may cost the Mozambican government in terms of maintenance costs and long‐term roadstock inventory reduction. Through this approach the paper details how a 14% reduction in inventory loss can be achieved through the adoption of a proactive, design standard evolution approach to climate change.

Social capital, community-based governance and resilience in an African artisanal river fishery

This is a study of a community-based fishery on the Rovuma River that forms the border between Mozambique and Tanzania. We postulate a relationship between social capital and community-based governance over access to and the use of the fish resource. In historical times social capital was high and community-based governance regulated access to and use of the fishery as a common property resource. Transforming forces particularly colonial administration, advocating Christianity, war and an emerging market economy undermined social capital, which in turn affected community-based governance. The deconstruction of social capital has resulted in attitudes and behaviours that challenge governance processes with dire consequences for sustainable resource utilisation. Harvesting of fish stocks occurs at levels that are no longer sustainable and inappropriate practices are being adopted. While the Mozambique government policy promotes community-based fisheries management in artisanal fisheries, we argue that under current conditions of ineffective community-based governance, a strong focus on reconstruction of social capital will be required before a community-based resource management process can be effectively implemented. The findings are discussed in the context of resilience in social ecological systems. We suggest that given the historical context in which community-based natural resource management is promoted within southern Africa such a focus may have wide relevance.

The White Gold: The Role of Government and State in Rehabilitating the Sugar Industry in Mozambique

This article examines the rehabilitation of the sugar industry in Mozambique after the General Peace Accord in 1992, engaging primarily and critically with certain aspects of the business-state literature. It explains why the sugar sector was rehabilitated from the perspectives of Mozambican state, government and industry actors. The article argues that support for the industry cannot be identified in singular and one-dimensional terms, but must include a variety of attributes of support that emerged from a post-independence fusion of industry, state and government officials' historical experiences of success and failure in the industry, and pragmatic as well as longer-term ideological stances. This, it is argued, created a ‘mediating bureaucracy’ that could broker between the diverse interests and aspirations of state/government and industry.

Two perspectives on Zimbabwe's National Democratic Revolution: Thabo Mbeki and Wilfred Mhanda

The concept of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ (NDR) is often used by left-leaning scholars and political actors in attempts to explain or justify the lack of socialism in third-world societies governed by rulers who consider themselves ‘scientific socialists’. It has been invoked in analyses of Zimbabwe by both the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, in 2001 as he was embarking on his ‘quiet diplomacy’, and Wilfred Mhanda, a Zimbabwean guerrilla leader imprisoned by the Mozambican government in the late-1970s for posing problems to the leadership aspirations of Robert Mugabe, who later became president of the country posing problems for Thabo Mbeki among others. Analysis of both these political intellectuals’ writing sheds light on the concept of the NDR (evoked often in contemporary South African politics and Zimbabwean discourse about the current crisis) as well as the theoretical and practical aspects of the authors’ careers.