MAPUTO
As Mozambique tries to recover from the worst flooding here since 2000, experts have called for a national discussion on water management and how to maximise its usage in favour of long-term sustainable development.
Mozambican farmers’ unions believe that soon land will become very scarce for locals as the government leases more and more of it to foreign agribusinesses – thus displacing thousands of rural communities and smallholder farmers with no official title deeds to their land.
A nurse working in a remote clinic in Mueda, a small town in northern Mozambique’s Makonde Plateau, receives a shipment of vaccines from the national health department. Using special software on her mobile phone, she sends out a mass text message to alert mothers in the area about the availability of immunisations.
It is a tried and tested truth that when women come together in groups they can address their issues more powerfully than they can as individuals.
Carolina Poalo strikes the dry earth over and over with her hoe, her frail body bent almost double. She is determined to begin planting. During the long, dry season in Mozambique, she and her two young grandchildren have eaten little but cassava leaves.
Every Wednesday at 11.00am José Alfredo Cossa unfurls his East German flag and leads a march of around 150 men and women down the main streets of Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. In a struggle for justice that has been going on for more than 20 years this group, known as the “Magermans”, represent the 16,000 to 20,000 Mozambicans who were sent to the former East Germany in the early 1980s to work and serve their country.
When you board Mozambique’s national carrier, Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique, you will most likely be given small blue packets of peanuts to munch as the jet whisks you from the country’s capital, Maputo, to as far afield as Europe. Sugar, salt or chilli flavour. Take your pick.
Along a dirt road in Mozambique’s Sofala province, a long line of men on bicycles stretches into the distance, each carrying an impossibly big bag of charcoal strapped to his bike.
The Brazilian government is stepping up South-South aid, to strengthen the South American giant’s status as a donor country and its international clout. It now provides assistance to 65 countries, and its financial aid has grown threefold in the last seven years.
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