Fishermen in the LNG rich Afungi Peninsula in the Palma District of Cabo Delgado Province, northern Mozambique. The area is the site of major LNG projects, including the Mozambique LNG project. Credit: Justica Ambential

By Maina Waruru
NAIROBI, Aug 19 2025 (IPS)

Environmental campaign groups are confident that a suit filed in the United States, seeking to stop the country’s Export-Import Bank (EXIM) from the ‘unlawful’ lending of nearly USD 5 billion to the controversial Mozambique Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project, will succeed.

The groups, including Friends of the Earth U.S. and Justiça Ambiental/Friends of the Earth Mozambique, with representation from EarthRights International, filed a lawsuit and believe the financial transaction in March in a deal with the project owners, TotalEnergies, was rushed through to avoid going through requisite requirements.

It alleges that EXIM rushed through approval without conducting required “environmental reviews, economic assessments, and the required input by the public and US Congress.

“EXIM failed to follow its own Charter and federal law, setting a dangerous precedent for future decisions,” they said in papers filed on 14 July.

They allege that in February, President Donald Trump ‘illegally’ constituted EXIM’s acting Board of Directors without the US Senate’s consent, and weeks later, in March, EXIM’s improperly constituted “acting” board of directors announced final approval of the massive USD 4.7 billion loan.

The bank, they charged, entered the transaction despite the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis in Mozambique and the fact that the project operator, TotalEnergies, declared force majeure more than four years ago after a violent uprising.

The French oil giant has been unable to resume operations since.

“EXIM’s Board charged ahead with subsidizing the project, without considering the conflict and the harms the project will inflict on the environment and local communities, and despite multiple nations’ open investigations into allegations of serious human rights violations at the project site,” they added.

An EXIM spokesperson would not comment on the ongoing legal proceedings.

“The Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) is aware of recent reports, letters, and inquiries regarding ongoing legal proceedings. As a matter of longstanding policy, EXIM does not comment on pending litigation,” the spokesperson said in an email. “EXIM remains committed to its mission of supporting American jobs by facilitating the export of U.S. goods and services. The Bank continues to operate in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations.”

According to Hallie Templeton, Legal Director of Friends of the Earth, EXIM is bound by a number of different federal laws that govern its actions and financing, including the Export-Import Bank Act, which is its charter.

“The US Congress placed a number of important limitations and procedural protections on EXIM’s activities, given the sensitive foreign policy, economic, and human rights issues that lending to foreign corporations for foreign projects can entail,” he explained.

“Among other things, this includes numerous notice and comment procedures, particular economic considerations to ensure EXIM isn’t harming the US economy, limitations on over-subsidization, the requirement that a quorum of Senate-confirmed members of the Board approve major transactions, and consideration of environmental and social impacts,” he told IPS News.

At the direction of Congress, EXIM also has put in place a number of important policies and procedures that govern the projects it finances and the conditions on which it does so. These include compliance with a number of important environmental and social standards and other safeguards.

“The acting board lacked legal authority to approve this loan. EXIM also failed to conduct mandated procedures and analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act and overall acted contrary to multiple provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirements on process and sound decision-making in the federal government,” Templeton explained.

Exim’s Act is clear as to how members of the Board are to be appointed. Those procedures weren’t followed in appointing the acting board, he said, adding that it was not clear whether President Trump’s intention for the appointments was so as to approve the loan.

“We cannot speak to the intent behind the way the President proceeded or the individuals he selected, but it was unlawful to bypass the Senate and appoint ‘acting’ members to the Board,” he noted.

He observed, “Likewise, rushing through the loan without federally mandated notice and comment or complying with the other legal requirements for final approval of a loan of this size was unlawful. EXIM should have taken these steps in any scenario.”

The financier’s “disregard of the law,” he said, is worsened by the ongoing conflict, allegations of grave human rights violations, and the numerous pending investigations, some of which specifically concern forces providing security to the project and the role of the project operator itself.

Friends of the Earth-US has the utmost confidence in the case’s success, especially given that EXIM has “violated multiple federal laws, with the board acting contrary to the ‘plain text’ of its Charter and other federal laws, ‘acting as if they are above the law.’”

“We are confident that they will be held accountable,” he added.

Through the US’s Freedom of Information Acts, it has been revealed that EXIM ignored the risks of Mozambique LNG when they approved the project in 2019/2020, and in 2025, they have not only ignored the risks but have also failed to follow the proper process, Kate DeAngelis, Economic Policy Deputy Director for Friends of the Earth US told IPS News.

Exim bank, she complained, did not want to provide the Congress or the public the time to comment because they know that this is a bad deal for American taxpayers.

“There are legal procedures and processes in place to ensure the U.S. Export-Import Bank does not waste taxpayer dollars on risky projects plagued by violent insurgencies.”

“Yet Exim—like the rest of the Trump administration—believes that it can operate outside the law. We will not stand by while it cuts health care and disaster aid so that it can give handouts to fossil fuel companies,” the official added.

“Exim’s Board’s illegal decision to subsidize this project, without even considering the risks to local people, let alone the serious allegations that project security committed a massacre at the project site, is beyond reckless. EXIM needs to do its job and actually consider the harms this project will inflict on local people,” said Richard Herz of EarthRights International

An Islamist insurgency in the Cabo Delgado province in northern Mozambique since 2017 has led to thousands of deaths and displacement of the civilian population in one of the bloodiest conflicts in Africa in the recent past.

While the Jihadist violence has diminished after intervention by regional forces, an attack was reported in the Meluco district of the gas region last March, indicating a province that is far from safe.

TotalEnergies suspended operations in the Mozambique LNG project in April 2021 due to the insecurity, leading to the withdrawal of personnel and a halt to construction, a decision directly linked to the escalating attacks by the militants in the province.

Last December, climate and environmental activists from Japan criticized the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) for financing the LNG project to the tune of USD 3 billion in a loan signed in July 2024.

The groups, in a report, revealed that the bank supports the Mozambique LNG project directly with a USD 3 billion loan and through a loan of USD 536 million to Mitsui, a Japanese corporate group that is involved in the development.

“The Mozambique LNG Project is linked to violent conflict, has resulted in social injustices among Mozambican citizens, and is a potential source of massive carbon emissions,” the report noted.

It concluded that if it proceeded, despite becoming the biggest gas project in Africa, it would deliver low revenues to its host country and place the country at risk of liability if it failed.

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A field of maize spoiled by drought in Zambia, one of the countries that has declared an emergency as it grapples with the effects of El Niño. Credit: WFP/Gabriela Vivacqua

By Kevin Humphrey
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Jul 23 2024 (IPS)

Heading into the traditional dry period of winter in southern Africa, there was significant consternation due to the drastically below average rainfall the region has been experiencing since January 2024.

Countries, including Botswana, Mozambique, Angola, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia, have only received less than 20 percent of the rainfall that they usually receive in the month of February. The driest January/February period in 40 years, according to a report issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Agriculture in these large areas of southern Africa has been seriously affected, as farming is rainfall-dependent with no access to irrigation systems.

Edward Phiri cooking mealies (maize) on an open fire at his vegetable stall in a busy street in Windsor West, Johannesburg. Edward, mentioned how expensive mealies had become in the last few months and that he was the only vegetable stall selling cooked maize. All the other stalls (at least 15 in a small but densely populated area) had closed down due to high costs. Credit: Kevin Humphrey/IPS

Machinda Marongwe, programme director of Oxfam Southern Africa, said the region is “in crisis” and called on donors to “immediately release resources” to prevent an “unimaginable humanitarian situation.”

“With all these countries facing multiple crises simultaneously, the urgency cannot be overstated,” Marongwe said.

In southern Africa, a region Oxfam describes as a “climate disaster hotspot,” El Nino, the climate pattern that originates along the equator in the Pacific Ocean, has severely influenced the weather in the region. A feature of El Nino is that it brings high temperatures and low rainfall to southern Africa. This dries out the ground, causing floods when it does rain.

Professor Jasper Knight of the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at Wits University spoke to IPS about the current extreme weather conditions.

A prolonged dry spell in southern Africa in early 2024 scorched crops and threatened food security for millions of people. The ongoing El Nino, which altered rainfall patterns during the growing season, has played a significant role in fueling the drought. Credit: NASA

“We are in an oscillating period of El Nino, and this causes variability in regional rainfall across southern Africa. Some parts of the region are very dry and have experienced heat waves; parts of southern Lesotho are currently in a crisis state of drought, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFRC),” says Knight.

“But this water crisis isn’t just about rainfall; it is also about managing water more effectively when it is already scarce. The water infrastructure in southern Africa is not fit for purpose and this makes the situation worse. Developing more resilient infrastructure will help buffer some of the negative effects of rainfall variability. This in turn will help society cope with drought events.”

In addition to the problem of raising crops, which has led to very real risks of food insecurity, a lack of water has ushered in widespread outbreaks of cholera. The rainy season misfired and became a drought and the fact that the next wet season is months away increases fears for the region as a whole in terms of the provision of food and the effects on people’s lives economically and in terms of dangerous health threats.

According to the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), southern Africa is in the grip of an urgent crisis.

FANRPAN stated in a recent media briefing that “the situation is dire and demands immediate attention. Widespread crop failure looms in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Livestock are dying at alarming rates due to a lack of water and vegetation.

“The movement of desperate people and animals is spreading diseases, including those transmissible to humans.”

A drought disaster was declared in Zambia on February 29 and Malawi’s president followed suit on March 23—for the fourth year in a row that weather conditions have led the country to do this. 

The World Food Programme (WFP) said El Niño was “exacerbating the devastating effects of the climate crisis in Malawi.” Zimbabwe joined them in early April.

Reuters reported Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa as saying, “More than 2.7 million people in the country will go hungry this year and more than USD 2 billion in aid is required for the country’s national response.”

Joe Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), spoke to IPS.

“This year’s El Nino-related production shortfalls are partially offset by larger carrying stocks following large maize crops in 2022 and 2023.  Poor crops have already resulted in increased imports in countries like Zimbabwe. Exports are expected to fall as stocks tighten in the region. The coming La Niña will hopefully bring needed precipitation to the region later this year, which should mean that the drought-related shortages are relatively short-lived.”

After heating up the eastern Pacific Ocean for about a year, El Niño finally died out in May 2024. As of July 2024, the eastern Pacific was in a neutral phase, but the reprieve may be short-lived. Credit: NASA

This hopeful forecast is also mentioned in a blog published, on April 10, 2024, by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Entitled “Southern Africa drought: Impacts on maize Production,” Joseph Glauber and Weston Anderson wrote: “Unlike 2014 to 2016, when key producer-exporter South Africa suffered back-to-back droughts, this year’s drought follows a year of good harvest and stock building. Larger beginning stocks will help buffer the impact of the current drought. However, supplies from outside the region will be necessary to meet consumption needs, and exports will likely decline, particularly to markets outside of Southern Africa.”

Drought and the attendant extreme hardships that it causes are undoubtedly creating havoc in the region. Hopefully, food stocks from countries like South Africa will go some way to alleviating this crisis and that this coming spring, there will be ample rain and bumper crops.

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Two years after the major attacks by non-state armed groups, a considerable number of forcibly displaced people have returned to Palma. Credit: UNHCR

By Kevin Humphrey
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 17 2024 (IPS)

There is cautious optimism regarding the conflict that has been raging in northern Mozambique, largely in the province of Cabo Delgado, since 2017. There are encouraging indications that the Islamic State (IS)-driven insurgency has significantly decreased thanks to the deployment of the Mozambique Defense Armed Forces (FADM), Southern African Development Community (SAMIM) forces, and a contingent of Rwandan troops (RSF).

Leleti Maluleki, a researcher at Good Governance Africa, told IPS: “With regards to the current state of the conflict, people are slowly moving back or returning to their villages and communities. It’s a sign of progress being made by the troops, and we hope it’s a sign of peace.”

There had been a decrease in the number of attacks by insurgents. 

“That’s a good thing as well, but it does not mean that the insurgency is over. We need to remember that there were stories of insurgents infiltrating the communities, so they are still among the people; they might have radicalized certain individuals, and they might have recruited some citizens. But we are seeing fewer and fewer attacks on a daily basis.”

The insurgency has claimed over 4,000 lives and displaced 946,000 since it started. According to a report from the United Nations Security Council published in February 2023, the number of IS fighters in the field has decreased from a peak of 2,500 (prior to SAMIM and the RSF joining the fight) to roughly 280.

Last year, Vladimir Voronkov, Under-Secretary-General of the Office of Counter-Terrorism, said in August 2023 that counter-terrorism initiatives in Egypt, Mozambique, and Yemen had significantly limited the insurgents ability to conduct operations.

He warned, though, that “force alone cannot lead to changes in the conditions conducive to terrorism,” noting that it can fuel more violence and aggravate grievances exploited by terrorists.

At the same meeting, Domingos Estêvão Fernandes, Deputy Permanent Representative of Mozambique to the UN, pointed to the rising spread of terrorism in Africa, where fatalities linked to Al-Qaeda and Da’esh reached more than 22,000 over the past year—representing a 48 percent increase over 2022.

Fernandes it was important to address poverty, inequality, social exclusion, and discrimination based on religion and culture to address insurgency and recognize the risk of the misuse of emerging technologies.

He pointed to the achievements of the deployment of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) mission in Mozambique.

Amanzi Amade Bacar is a fisherman who has fled and returned several times from and to his house in Bagala, Mozambique. The 39-year-old husband and father hopes to return to his home and his original livelihood. Credit: UNHCR

“We must ensure predictable, flexible, and sustained funding for African Union peacekeeping operations,” Fernandes said, adding that government agencies and defense and security forces must partner with local communities to provide early warning systems.

Maluleki added that a new challenge is the insurgent’s use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), a tactic that works when the insurgents numbers are dwindling, which means decreasing the likelihood of insurgents getting up close to security forces. The use of these causes panic among civilians, which leads to further destabilization of the region regarding displaced persons and refugees.

When security forces reportedly killed Ibn Omar, the purported IS leader, and two of his followers, the anti-insurgency campaign also gained momentum. Mozambique’s president, Filipe Nyusi, recently made an announcement to this effect.

In terms of the future, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) heads of state at a summit in July 2023 laid plans for SADC forces to begin to leave northern Mozambique by December 15, 2024, and to complete the withdrawal by July 15, 2025. It was also noted that for this to happen, there was an urgent need for Mozambique’s defense forces to be capacitated to a degree where the removal of SADC troops would not compromise the gains of the past few years. Training and other help coming from the European Union and the United States to beef up the Mozambican forces were also mentioned at the summit.

Two years after the major attacks by non-state armed groups, a considerable number of forcibly displaced people have returned to Palma. Credit: UNHCR

Since the beginning of the insurgency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that one million people had been displaced in the region. More recently, the International Organization for Migrants (IOM) reported that in September and October 2023, about 8,000 Cabo Delgado residents had become displaced.

“When it comes to the issue of displaced individuals, a lot of people lost their homes and ran away for safety. People displaced by the conflict went to neighboring, safer communities. Host communities are faced with overcrowding, and basic services are under severe pressure so the security situation needs to improve so that more people can return to their villages and relieve the burden on these host communities,” said Maluleki

This increase in displaced persons occurred in the run-up to local government elections in the area and also when the €20 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) project, put on hold due to the conflict in the region, was being considered for being given the go-ahead. Fortunately, the October 11, 2023, municipal elections in Mocimboa da Praia went ahead, with four political parties taking part.

Nyusi has said it is safe to restart the Cabo Delgado liquefied natural gas (LNG) project that was halted in April 2021 after rebel attacks on civilians.

“The working environment and security in northern Mozambique make it possible for TotalEnergies to resume its activities at any time,” Nyusi said. TotalEnergies confirmed it was working on restarting the project.

There are, however, still concerns, especially for the civilian population.

“The deployment of troops was primarily in two districts, and this is concerning because these are the districts where the government has its own interests because they are where the LNG project is. Only two of the five or six districts that the insurgents heavily targeted have received adequate security. All districts affected by the conflict need to be secured so that we can reach a true level of peace and stability and address the root causes of the conflict,” said Maluleki.

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Several Southern African countries have or are in the process of enacting legislation that limits the civil society space, with implications for human rights. Credit: CIVICUS Monitor

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jul 31 2023 (IPS)

Freedom of expression is under threat as governments in Southern Africa have enacted laws restricting civil society organizations, says global rights advocacy organisation, CIVICUS, warning that human rights violations are on the increase globally.

“The state of civil society is unfortunately not improving; civil restrictions continue across the world,” said David Kode, the advocacy Lead at CIVICUS.

“More than 2 billion people live in countries that are rated as closed, which is the worst rating any country can have – this means that 28 percent of the world’s population are not able to speak out when there is corruption or human rights violations restrictions or cannot write articles as journalists without facing appraisals,” Kode told IPS in an interview, noting that the organization’s human rights tool is indicating growing suppression of civil space across the world.

The CIVICUS Monitor, a tool accessing the state of civic space in more than 190 countries, provides evidence of restrictions on human rights by governments. The CIVICUS Monitor rates the state of civil space ‘open, ‘repressed’, and ‘closed’ according to each country.

Kode notes that human rights violations are increasing globally with more restrictions on civil society in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The picture is not different in the Southern Africa region where restrictions on civil space have been continuing, and these have included censorship, violent response to protests, and restrictive laws as seen in Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe

Closing Civil Society Space

Zimbabwe remains on the CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist as attacks on civic space continue ahead of the scheduled 2023 national elections.

Last November, Zimbabwe approved the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Amendment Bill, 2022, known as the Patriotic Act. The law seeks to create the offence of “wilfully damaging the sovereignty and national interest of Zimbabwe” and will essentially criminalise the lobbying of foreign governments to extend or implement sanctions against Zimbabwe or its officials.

Furthermore, the Zimbabwe government gazetted the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Bill in November 2021, amending the Private Voluntary Organisations Act, which governs non-profit organizations. The main aim of the Bill is to comply with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations to strengthen the country’s legal framework to combat money laundering, financing terrorism and proliferation.

Civil society organizations warn that the Bill could hinder their activities and financing with potential adverse impacts on economic development. Besides, NGOs argue that they are a low-risk sector with no precedence of financing terrorism and money laundering.

Musa Kika, Executive Director of Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, says the PVO will affect the operations of NGOs, including deterring donors from funding PVOs, fearing the money could end up under the grip of the government. Besides, the Bill has a provision giving the Minister of Justice unfettered powers to place under supervision or surveillance, using subjective discretion, those PVOs the Minister deems to be high risk.

“Continued hostility and harassment on the part of the government towards the work of CSOs in the country will thus only result in a hugely detrimental effect on their efforts in advancing the protection of and respect for the basic human rights and freedoms of ordinary Zimbabwean civilians as espoused under Zimbabwe’s Constitution,” Kika said. He noted that civil society organisations were operating in a tough environment in Zimbabwe where the government does not trust them, especially those working in the fields of governance and human rights.

“We have a government that does not want to account,” said Kika. “We have had many human rights activists who have been arrested on flimsy charges…Terrorism finance is being used as a cover, but the motive is to close the democratic space because the government and accountability in human rights and governance are sworn enemies.”

In Zimbabwe, NGOs have, in partnership with the government, supported development, providing a range of services in health, education, social protection, humanitarian assistance, environmental management, emergency response and democracy building.  A research report commissioned by the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum in collaboration with the Southern Defenders and Accountability Lab has warned of huge job and financial losses if the Bill is passed into law.

United Nations experts have urged Zimbabwe’s President Emerson Mnangagwa to reject enacting a bill that would severely restrict civic space and the right to freedom of association in the country.

However, President Mnangagwa has defended the passage of the PVO Bill, vowing to speedily “sign it into law once it reaches my desk”. In a commentary in his weekly column published by the government-owned Sunday Mail, Mnangagwa said signing the bill into law will usher Zimbabwe into a “new era of genuine philanthropic and advocacy work, unsullied by ulterior political or financial motives.”

Mnangagwa said the law was meant to defend the country from foreign infiltration.

Engendering Patriotism but Endangering Democracy

Zimbabwe has also recently approved another repressive law known as the ‘Patriot Act’.

“The Patriotic Act is an extremely repressive and unconstitutional piece of legislation that has serious ramifications for citizens’ rights, particularly the rights of freedom of expression in the lead up to the elections,” human rights lawyer, Dough Coltart, tells IPS in an interview.

“There is a very real need to educate the citizens on what the ramifications of this Act are for people’s lives because the Act has far-reaching consequences for the entire country and will essentially stifle any public dialogue around the challenges we are facing as a country.”

“The Patriot law is a bad piece of legislation which is an affront to the practice of ethical journalism in Zimbabwe,” Njabulo Ncube, Coordinator of the Zimbabwe National Editors’ Forum (ZINEF), told IPS. “It stinks to the highest skies as it criminalizes the practice of good journalism. It is anti-media freedom and free expression…civil society organisations have also been caught in the mix; they cannot effectively make government account for its actions.”

Democracy Dimming

The situation in Zimbabwe is echoed in some countries across Southern Africa, where governments are cracking down on CSOs in the name of protecting national sovereignty and the threats of money laundering and terrorism financing.

In Angola, the country’s National Assembly, on May 25 2023, passed a draft NGO Statute, which CSOs have criticized for limiting freedom of association by giving the state excessive powers to interfere with civil society activities.

According to the Movimento de Defensores de Direitos Humanos de Angola (Movement of Human Rights Defenders of Angola, KUTAKESA), the government has targeted civil society with legislation that is meant for terrorists and money launderers, though it has never been proven in any court that a CSO has committed an act of terrorism in Angola.

On the contrary, the rationale of this legislation constitutes institutional terrorism, the target of which are CSOs, said Godinho Cristóvão, a jurist, human rights defender and executive director of KUTEKA in an interview with the CIVICUS Monitor.

“The Angolan authorities should have aligned themselves with the democratic rule of law and respected the work of CSOs and HRDs,” Cristóvão is quoted as saying.

“Instead, there has been an increase in threats, harassment and illegal arrests of human rights defenders who denounce or hold peaceful demonstrations against acts of bad governance and violations of citizens’ rights and freedoms. There have been clear setbacks with regard to the guarantee of fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the constitution, as well as the rights set out in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and other human rights treaties Angola has ratified.”

In Mozambique, a new NGO on Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Act, which overregulates CSOs, is seen as the death knell for the civic movement in the country. The Act was approved in October 2022 under the pretext of fighting terrorism. It has further curtailed freedoms of expression, information, press, assembly and public participation.

Paula Monjane, Executive Director of the Civil Society Learning and Capacity Building Centre (CESC), a Mozambican non-profit civil society organisation, said currently, the legislation was being proposed to silence dissenting voices and people fighting for better governance of public affairs and the protection of human rights in the country.

The draft Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Act law establishes a legal regime for the creation, organisation and functioning of CSOs, and Monjane highlighted that it contains several norms that violate freedom of association despite this right being safeguarded by the constitution and international human rights treaties.

“It gives the government absolute and discretionary powers to ‘create’, control the functioning of, suspend and extinguish CSOs,” said Monjane, adding, “If the bill is approved, it will legitimise already existing practices restricting civic space, allowing the persecution of dissenting voices and organisations critical of the government, up to banning them from continuing to operate.”

Monjane said if the bill is passed into law CSOs in Mozambique will push for it to be declared unconstitutional and will ask the African Union, through the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the United Nations, through the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association to urgently condemn it.

On actions to foster human rights and human rights defenders, Kode said civil society organisations must be supported to hold governments accountable for upholding national and international human rights conventions that they have subscribed to.

The Universal Periodic Review, an assessment of the state of civic and human rights of a country over a four-year period, provides recommendations to governments enabling them to open civic space and remove restrictive laws.

“Governments need to implement the recommendations of the UPR and not treat them as a formality for them to be seen by the international community as respecting human rights when they are not,” said Kode, adding that encouraging governments to implement the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development was also a way of getting them to see development alongside human rights.

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Tima Assane, 60, was forcibly displaced with daughter Maria, 26, and her two granddaughters Claudia, 4, and Tima, 9 in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique due to violence. Some 735,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were recorded in the provinces of Cabo Delgado, Nampula, Niassa and Zambezia as of November 2021. Cabo Delgado Province has more than 663,000 IDPs, while Nampula hosts 69,000 IDPs. Credit: UNHCR

By Kevin Humphrey
Johannesburg, South Africa, Feb 7 2022 (IPS)

Ongoing insecurity and an unfolding humanitarian crisis in northern Mozambique need a strategically planned response to deal decisively with the insurgency that has plagued the area since October 2017.

The insurgents, known both as Al Sunnah wa Jama’ah (ASWJ) and the Islamic State Central Africa Province, have displaced more than 745 000 people.

“In northern Mozambique, there needs to be a commitment to the long haul for counter-insurgency forces to deal with the insurgents. There also has to be a real commitment to dealing with local issues that, in many ways, set the scene for the conflict,” Piers Pigou, Project Director Southern Africa International Crisis Group. He adds that a tough security response must be linked to an effective development agenda.

Internally displaced women collecting water in Marrupa IDP site, Chiure district, Cabo Delgado, Northern Mozambique. Credit: UNHCR

By August 2020, insurgents had taken control of the port city of Mocimboa da Praia in Cabo Delgado province, with devastating impact.

“As of November 2021, over 745,000 people were displaced in northern Mozambique. Among those displaced, 59 per cent are children, 19 per cent are women, 17 per cent are men, and 5 per cent are the elderly,” Juliana Ghazi of the United Nation Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) says.

Save the Children said in March 2021, militants beheaded children, some as young as 11. In the same month, they seized Palma, murdering dozens of civilians and displacing more than 35,000 of the town’s 75,000 residents. Many fled to the provincial capital, Pemba.

Ghazi said the agency was concerned “over the regional consequences of the ongoing displacement and protection crisis in Mozambique for Southern Africa, particularly the spillover of violence and refugees to neighbouring countries.”

She says the situation had “seemingly improved in Cabo Delgado since the intervention of regional allied forces in July 2021. It remains volatile with attacks taking place in some districts”.

“In the past months, the neighbouring province of Niassa also experienced attacks, and additional financial support is needed to assist the new displaced. UNHCR stresses the need for the security situation to continue to improve in hard to reach and partially accessible areas in Cabo Delgado to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to those in need.”

At the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit, held in Lilongwe, Malawi, on January 12, it was agreed that SADC troops would stay in Mozambique for at least another three months. While it indicated a commitment to peace and security, besides ‘welcoming’ an initiative to support economic and social development in the Cabo Delgado Province – it was vague on long-term strategy and support.

Pigou says the security response needs to be linked to an “effective development agenda. The counter-insurgency efforts also need to be beefed up. Currently, there is not enough support for the forces fighting the insurgents. The SADC troops, drawn from special forces units, must be commended for their success, but they need far more support if their successes are to be sustained. There can be no counter-insurgency on the cheap.”

According to the website Cabo Ligado – a conflict observatory launched by ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project) Zitamar News and Mediafax – between October 1, 2017, and January 7, 2022, there have been:

• 1111 organised political violence events
• 3627 reported fatalities from organised political violence
• 1587 reported fatalities from civilian targeting

In response to the insurgency, Dyck Advisory Group, a private company specialising in demining and anti-poaching activities, initially aided the Mozambican forces. This relationship was terminated in early 2021 for many reasons, including allegations of indiscriminate use of firepower and discrimination regarding evacuating or protecting people in favour of whites over black people.

Since then, soldiers from SADC have, together with Mozambican forces, established SAMIM (SADC Mission in Mozambique). Rwandan troops have also been deployed. Recent efforts, while successful, are far from delivering a coup de grace to the insurgency.

Money is a factor in continuing, refining, and escalating the counter-insurgency effort. SAMIM’s special force capabilities have helped to mute the insurgents, but the problems of limited support for these troops have to be addressed. Currently, SAMIM is only being supported by two Oryx helicopters and troops are hampered logistically.

Omar Mahindra is a 46-year-old carpenter from Mocimboa da Praia who fled the violence with his wife, children and grandchildren and is living at the Nicuapa site for internally displaced persons in the Montepuez district, Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique. Omar has hearing difficulties but works alongside his 26-year-old son, Massesi, making furniture to sell to other displaced families and the host community. Since October 2017, Cabo Delgado Province faces an ongoing conflict with extreme violence perpetrated by non-state armed groups. Credit: UNHCR

Mozambique’s government has stated that the Rwandan army has established a safety zone for the Liquid Natural Gas project run by Total Energies, a French company. This zone is 50-km-long (31-mile-long including strategic centres of Mocimboa da Praia and Palma, vital for the Total Energies project.

“This approach was probably negotiated at the highest political level between Mozambique, France and Rwanda,” says Elisio Macamo, an expert on African politics at the University of Basel.

“Paris was even prepared to send troops, but the French military was not welcome. Rwandan troops filled the void and will be paid handsomely from both a financial and political perspective.”

While the UNHCR is working with the Mozambique government and partners, there was a need for assistance in the humanitarian crisis.

“The most urgent protection needs are the provision of assistance to vulnerable groups, particularly unaccompanied and separated children, separated families, gender-based violence survivors, people with disabilities and older people, as well as the provision of civil documentation, Core Relief Items (CRIs) and shelter materials to displaced families,” says Ghazi.

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While some countries have been able to rely on healthy pre-crisis stocks to keep the price of staples such as maize and rice relatively stable, more time-sensitive supply chains are fraying and legions of independent traders are taking the hit. Credit: Charles Mangwiro/IPS

By Charles Mangwiro
CHOKWE, Mozambique, Sep 15 2020 (IPS)

Like many Mozambicans in the agricultural sector, 39-year-old Fatima Matavele, a commercial farmer in the district of Chokwe, some 213 kilometres north of the capital, Maputo, has had a tough year. Although the last few years have been hard, 2020 has proven to be the most difficult of all.

Trading within Mozambique, with its rutted roads and bribe-hungry police, has never been easy, but restrictions imposed by President Filipe Nyusi’s government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have worsened an already bad situation. Last week on Sept. 6, the country emerged from a second set of COVID-19 restrictions, which lasted 30 days.

In ordinary times, Matavele can transport her produce to the Zimpeto vegetable market — the country’s fresh farm produce bazaar on the outskirts of Maputo — in less than four hours. But since the coronavirus restrictions came in, some shipments were taking much longer to reach the market, that is if they are lucky to reach it at all.

On those unlucky days when the produce cannot be transported, Matavele and her workers ended up dumping sacks and boxes of fresh vegetables on the roadside.

“I employ a total of 45 people at my farm and if the trucks are delayed or turned away altogether, the produce spoils,” said Matavele, whose traders’ collective slashed the number of trucks it runs to Maputo from up to eight a day to only one or two a day.

“This is an outright loss but I must pay my workers at the end of the month,” the farmer of 15 years told IPS.

In sub-Saharan Africa 40 precent of staple foods fail to reach markets because of poor roads and market access limitations, according to the Food Sustainability Index (FSI) developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN).

The breakdowns in the food supply chain here are contributing to fears of a spiralling food crisis. The coronavirus-induced lockdowns, the first of which occurred in March, have pushed commodities and food prices up in Mozambique while people are racing to stock food. According to the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network, “maize grain prices in monitored markets increased by 7-13 percent in July compared to June 2020, 11-50 percent above last year’s prices, and 18-55 percent above the five-year average”.

The United Nations says the pandemic could cause the number of Africans living in food insecurity to double to 43 million in the next six months.

Some countries have been able to rely on pre-crisis stocks, thereby keeping the price of staples like as maize and rice relatively stable. But supply chains are no longer stable and small traders are impacted.

Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries – ranking 178 out of 187 nations on the U.N.’s Human Development Index – which also means it cannot afford the luxury of importing food for its population.

At the same time nearly half a million people need food aid in Mozambique and food prices are soaring in the aftermath of poor rains that hit most crops in the just-ended farming season, the government said recently. (The Mozambican agriculture season runs from October to April, with harvesting from May to July.) The Ministry of Agriculture said 450,000 people need food assistance and 150,000 face a critical situation in the southern and central areas of the country.

The central and southern provinces are still recovering from devastating floods and cyclones that smashed the regions early last year, leaving a trail of extensive damage and hundreds of people dead.

Agriculture is the backbone of the economy in Mozambique, providing employment for over 75 percent of the workforce. The Open Society Foundation in a 2019 report estimated that 70 percent of people under 35 years of age, who form the majority of Mozambique’s population of 30 million, cannot find stable employment.

“We (farmers) are the solution to this [food crisis] but we are struggling alone without any assistance and we are forced to spend our own money to keep the farming sector afloat and we have started using all sorts of media such as Facebook and What’s app to engage with our clients just to keep them informed of what is going on,” said Matavele.

“With support from an agricultural bank we will be able to feed the whole nation and cut all food imports in Mozambique,” she added.

In the 2020 financial year, the agriculture sector was allocated 10 percent of the country’s total budget of $5.1 billion to help purchase and improve the quality of seeds, as well as to introduce irrigated and mechanised farming.

According to Matavele, high fuel prices and transportation costs isolated farmers from one of their biggest markets while the country’s growing debt and economic crisis strained the budgets of many.

Added to this are extreme weather conditions, that often seems to alternate between flooding and drought, which has dashed hopes of decent harvests.

Producers in the Chokwe district also complain about the lack of resellers to purchase their product. Chokwe district is located in southern Gaza province’s agriculture heartland and shares a border with the South African province of Mpumalanga.

Matavele, a single mother of five, is totally dependent on her farming where she produces potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and cabbages. Tomatoes, however, remain the most popular produce among urban consumers.

“Agriculture is my childhood dream come true, but I never imagined that things could quickly come to standstill… the future is looking very bleak hence we are forced to find new ways to remain afloat as an industry,” she said adding, “now we are producing more and we sell our products cheaply to recover our investments as the solution, it’s better than doing nothing.”

The subsistence farmers of Chokwe, hardened by years of poverty, are already replanting what they can, using cuttings from the uprooted cassava plants that now litter the village.
Matavele watched as her tractor tilled the land in preparation for the next season.

Planting now will result in a harvest in 8 months time.

To increase food production, “firstly, all cities had to cope with the need to ensure access to food and sustainable diets for the most vulnerable and deprived groups of the population (e.g. poor, unemployed, elderly, children, migrants, etc.) and the government should invest in local farmers, many of whom still use the most basic hoes to till their fields and lack access to the best seeds,” said Marta Antonelli, head of research at the Italy-based BCFN in an emailed response to IPS.

Excerpt:

There is currently a grave pattern of detention or unsubstantiated allegations against journalists in Mozambique. Last month unknown attackers set on fire the office of a weekly newspaper Canal de Moçambique that had recently published investigations exposing corruption in the government. Courtesy: CC by 2.0/The Commonwealth

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 4 2020 (IPS)

While Mozambique was recently rattled by an arson attack on a local media organisation, experts say that it’s only a part of a worrying pattern of continuous attacks on the media in the country.

• On Aug. 23, unknown attackers set on fire the office of a weekly newspaper Canal de Moçambique that had recently published investigations exposing corruption in the government. 
• The attack not only destroyed equipment and furniture, but also the files at the office.

Angela Quintal, the Africa programme coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), told IPS that while they had never before witnessed an attack of this magnitude or nature, there is currently a grave pattern of detention or unsubstantiated allegations against journalists in the country. CPJ, a non-profit focused on press freedom, also monitors such attacks on the media around the world.

Quintal pointed some of the recent cases: arbitrary arrest and detention of radio journalist Amade Abubacar; the arrest of investigative journalist Estacio Valoi; the detention of Amnesty International researcher David Matsinhe, and driver, Girafe Saide Tufane, who were held for two days before being released without charge; and the repeated harassment of Canal’s executive editor Matias Guente.

Then there are the other cases, such as the enforced disappearance of Ibraimo Mbaruco, a community radio journalist and newscaster in Palma district in Cabo Delgado province.

On the same day as the arson attack, journalist Armando Nenane was arrested for not fully complying with regulations surrounding COVID-19, according to Quintal. Nenane published a story about how he managed to deposit funds in a former Defence Minister’s bank account in order to verify an exposé that Canal had published.

These arbitrary arrests are part of a pattern, says Matsinhe, the Mozambique researcher for Amnesty International. He told IPS that under the pandemic, there’s been an increase in harassment, intimidation, arbitrary arrests and detentions of journalists often under the guise of allegations that they were “violating COVID-19 regulations”.

“The police have used COVID-19 state of emergency to practice extortion on people,” he told IPS. “Some journalists have been exposing this practice and the police have taken a retaliatory approach against the journalists.”

The country’s increasingly deteriorating press freedom is also an attack on human rights, he said.  

“People’s right to information depends on the journalists’ ability to do their work, which in turn depends on respect, protection, promotion and fulfilment of press freedom by the government,” Matsinhe said. But in taking that away, the government of Mozambique “relies on people’s ignorance, lack of information, to exercise its power and practice corruption unchecked.”

“Under the current economic, social and political conditions in Mozambique, access to information – which is only possible where press freedom is guaranteed – enables Mozambicans to participate in their country’s political life, to hold their government accountable, to exercise their civil and political rights,” he added.

While the lack of this right is worrisome, Quintal said the reaction by Canal’s staff members – by continuing to work and publish – shows they’re not bowing to this pressure. Staff had set up a makeshift office and published a front-page editorial vowing not to back down from their investigative journalism. “Obviously such an attack might have a chilling effect on the media and could well result in some self-censorship by journalists. However, it has been heartening to see how Canal de Moçambique and its online daily publication continued to publish,” she said.

“In terms of solidarity, the fact that a rival media group and its journalists rallied to assist and even offered their premises so that Canal journalists could produce that week’s edition of the newspaper, was also great to see,” Quintal added.

Still, a lot of work remains to be done. 

“In my opinion [the government] has simply ignored the attempts to reach out and to engage,” Quintal said.

Matsinhe said the government can take some “concrete steps” to improve and ensure freedom of press in the country.

“The government must refrain from seeing the press as the state enemy and investigate the cases of injustices committed against various journalists and bring those found responsible to justice.”

Echoing similar demands, Quintal acknowledged the positive efforts by the Media Institute of South Africa-Mozambique, “to form a reference group with the government to review and consolidate the legal framework for cybersecurity and digital rights, and to ensure that it does not undermine access to information”.

The government must also conduct a review of legislation that is hostile towards press freedom, such as “overly broad” sections of the Penal Code that are often used to crack down on journalists.

Cyclone Idai made landfall on Mar. 14 and 15, in Mozambique’s Sofala, Manica and Zambézia provinces. It was followed by Cyclone Kenneth on Apr. 25 which affected the northern province of Cabo Delgado. Recent data from the World Food Programme (WFP) indicates that more than 2.1 million of the country’s 31 million people were affected. This, coupled with the country’s economic downturn, could affect the elections planned for later this year. Credit: Andre Catuera/IPS

By Amos Zacarias
MAPUTO, May 20 2019 (IPS)

Mozambique, which was affected by an unprecedented two tropical cyclones over a matter of weeks, is still reeling from the impact a month after the latest disaster. But resultant devastation caused by the cyclones could impact the country’s elections as concerns are raised over whether the southern African nation can properly hold the ballot scheduled for later this year.

Currently, Mozambique does not have sufficient funds to go to the polls on Oct. 15, with the national electoral body only having 44 percent of the required 235 million dollars needed to hold the election.

Cyclone Idai made landfall on Mar. 14 and 15, in Mozambique’s Sofala, Manica and Zambézia provinces. It was followed by Cyclone Kenneth on Apr. 25 which affected the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

The cyclones have also made it difficult for the National Commission of Elections (CNE) to complete the process of voter registration. Apr. 15 to May 30 was set aside for this but in the regions affected by Cyclone Idai the census have not yet begun and in Cabo Delgado voter registration was interrupted.

The damage caused by the two cyclones is enormous. Recent data from the World Food Programme (WFP) indicates that more than 2.1 million of the country’s 31 million people were affected. Of these, at least 60,000 people in the country’s central and northern regions are still living in makeshift housing centres created by the government and aid partners. While 1,67 million people are still receiving food assistance, health care and water from the government and NGOs, according to WFP.

Official data points to the death of more than 1,000 people and schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and many public buildings were destroyed.

Many have lost everything, including their proof of identity, as researcher and social activist Jessemusse Cacinda explains to IPS: “Many people have lost their documents, and the possibility of being registered to vote is greatly reduced.”

Originally the CNE had aimed to register some 14 million voters this year, up 3 million from the country’s previous national elections. This year will be first time that Mozambicans will vote for provincial governors.

But CNE president Abdul Carimo has acknowledged that the electoral body is far from registering 14 million voters.

Though Mozambique’s Minister of Economy and Finance Adriano Maleiane said in an interview with STV (Mozambican private television channel) that the government and the CNE would find ways to make the elections possible.

“If the solution is reorientation of the expenses within the limit that has been fixed, we probably don’t have to go to make an international [appeal],” said Maleiane.

Economist Manuel Victorino recognises that the difficulties in spending money on the elections and on relief efforts. He tells IPS that the country’s public accounts should also not be ignored.

At the beginning of May, the World Bank announced 545 million dollars in support for those affected by Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Of this, 350 million dollars is allocated to Mozambique.

According to World Bank President David Malpass the money will be used to re-establish water supply, for disease prevention and reconstruction, among other things. It is also intended to ensure food security, provide social protection and provide early warning systems in the communities affected by the cyclones.

Rebuilding will not be easy.

Cyclones Idai and Kenneth made landfall amid an economic downturn that has affected the country since 2015 when the government’s programme partners decided to withdraw their support for the state budget, due to the discovery of hidden debts.

The World Bank stated before the cyclones that, “Mozambique continues to be in default of its Eurobond and the two previously undisclosed loans.”

Mozambique has a “real gross domestic product (GDP) growth estimated at 3.3 percent in 2018, down from 3.7 percent in 2017 and 3.8 percent in 2016. This is well below the 7 percent GDP growth achieved on average between 2011 and 2015,” according to the World Bank.

In addition, the Mozambique Tributary Authority says that between 2016 and 2017, more than 2,900 companies closed their doors due to the economic crisis and unemployment has risen. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the rate of unemployment in Mozambique is around 21 percent. But since the cyclones a number of private business have also closed.

Despite the sharp rise in debt, the Mozambican economy was expected to rise around 4 percent this year, against 3,3 percent of 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund. The country expects to generate 95 billion dollars of natural gas revenue over the next quarter of a century.

Until then, however, ordinary people are struggling.

“The situation of the country is bad. The cost of living is too high, and the purchasing power of the citizens is dropping a lot. And it has become worse due the cyclones Idai and Kenneth,” António Sabonete, a trader who sells clothes in Tete, central Mozambique, tells IPS.

Sabonete has three children and says he decided to become trader because he lost his job in 2016.

Cacinda says that the economic situation could impact the ruling party’s reputation in the next general elections

The Mozambique Liberation Front, known by it’s Portuguese acronym, FRELIMO, has dominated the polls since the first multi-party elections in 1994.

“From this high cost of living and the purchasing capacity of people has lowered. It can weaken and penalise FRELIMO [in the elections],” says Cacinda, underlining that, “the opposition parties will use all these elements linked to the crisis to build their own speech to try to convince the voters. And it’s obviously going to reduce the number of votes for FRELIMO.”

Cacinda adds that the economic crisis should create opportunities for Mozambican opposition parties to have a stronger showing in the upcoming polls, “Because for this year’s elections we feel that there is some balance.”

But FRELIMO recently publicly condemned corruption and accusations of such from within the party, appealing to justice authorities to continue investigating these cases.

But in addition to clamping down on corruption, Cabinda says that it is time for Mozambican politicians to prioritise the impact of climate change on the country.

“Mozambique and many of the Africans countries are not prepared to deal with climate change.”

“Our politicians must have a clear view of the kind of country they intend to govern and they want to leave for the future generations. Because locals development plans should be made that include issues of climate change as a priority approach,” Cabinda tells IPS.

In the meantime, others worry how they will start again from scratch.

Beira, the capital city Sofala province, was razed by Cyclone Idai. But people have started to return to the devastated city and are picking up the pieces of their lives.

Gervasio John is one of them.

In a telephonic interview with IPS, John says that he and his family returned to his home in Manga Mascarenha, a neighbourhood in Beira.

John is rebuilding his house. He is one of many who are doing so at their own cost as the government does not have the resources to directly support the reconstruction of homes.

“It’s not easy, but I need to do something to restart life after Idai, despite the fact that there is no money,” John says.

**Writing with Nalisha Adams in Johannesburg

Tropical Cyclone Idai made landfall on Mar. 14 and 15, destroying some 90 percent of Beria, the capital of Sofala province, according to reports. A majority of those affected are living in makeshift camps as they try to rebuild. Credit: Andre Catuera/IPS

By Amos Zacarias
MAPUTO, Mar 29 2019 (IPS)

The city of Dondo, about 30 kilometres from Beira, central Mozambique, didn’t escape the strong winds of Cyclone Idai. It is estimated that more than 17,000 families were displaced and more than a dozen schools were destroyed in the city.

While the world has rallied around Mozambique and countries in Southern Africa affected by Cyclone Idai in order to provide aid, the smaller city of Dondo, which requires food and medical assistance, says it is not receiving enough.

Currently the Mozambique National Institute of Disaster Management (INGC), supported by international agencies, is providing aid to the area.
But in an interview with IPS, the mayor of Dondo, Manuel Chaparica, says that “the efforts have done until now is very little to the city of Dondo,” adding that “right now the support is directed to people who are in accommodation centres [schools or other buildings where people who lost their homes are being housed], but there are a lot of people in their homes with nothing to eat.”

Over 6,000 people are currently being housed in schools around Dondo. And Chaparica points out that “there is an effort to relocate all people housed at schools to resettlement centres in the Samora Machel and Macharote neighbourhoods, to allow for the resumption of classes in these schools.”

Across Mozambique more than 168,000 families (about 600,000 people) have been affected, the majority of whom are now living in makeshift camps in Sofala province. Of this number, more than 100,000 families are estimated to be from Beira where they have lost their homes and all their possessions. In addition, at least one million children and women require urgent assistance. Credit: Andre Catuera/IPS

Tropical Cyclone Idai made landfall on Mar. 14 and 15, destroying some 90 percent of Beria, the capital of Sofala province, according to reports. Idai produced torrential rains and strong winds of around 180 to 200 kilometres per hour, wreaking havoc in central Mozambique as well as in Malawi and Zimbabwe.

It’s caused catastrophic flooding in Mozambique with local authorities estimating that an area of about 3,000 square kilometres was destroyed.

Officially, the last numbers of the country’s death toll amounted to 493, with 1,523 people injured. The death toll for the region is estimated to be over 750.

Across Mozambique more than 168,000 families (about 600,000 people) have been affected, the majority of whom are now living in makeshift camps in Sofala province. Of this number, more than 100,000 families are estimated to be from Beira where they have lost their homes and all their possessions. In addition, at least one million children and women require urgent assistance.

“There are not exact numbers. They can change while new locals that were affected by flood are discovered,” said Celso Correia, the minister of Land and Environment of Mozambique, who coordinated the assistance team in Beira.

Around 15,000 people are still missing or unaccounted for largely from Dombe in Manica province and from Buzi and Nhamatanda in Sofala province. But the number could rise. Buzi village, which lies some 200 km from Beira, was badly affected by Cyclone Idai and 100s of people were seen hanging onto trees and the top of houses for 3 to 5 days, awaiting assistance and rescue. But it is suspected that many have since been swept away by the flooding caused by the rivers Buzi and Pungue.

According to the INGC, 3,140 classrooms were damaged, affecting more than 90,000 students. Also 45 health facilities were destroyed in the provinces of Sofala, Manica and Zambezia, center of the country.

Graca Machel (right), Chair of the FDC (Foundation for Community Development), speaks to Davis Simango (left), Mayor of Beira, at a government facility that was damaged during Cyclone Idai. Credit: UNICEF

Solidarity and aid for those affected

Meanwhile, national and international organisations have gathered in Beira to help rescue and relief operations. More than 100 search and rescue specialists were deployed to assist people in Buzi and Nhamatanda, aided by 35 boats, 18 helicopters, 4 planes, 8 trucks and 30 satellite phones.
In the field, rescuers continue to find survivors. However, the Council of Ministers announced in Maputo, on Tuesday, Mar. 26, that soon the rescue operations will be closed as the rivers Búzi and Púngue are receding.

In Mozambique many solidarity movements were collecting donations for those affected in Beira.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen an intense movement of solidarity among Mozambicans,” says Joaquim Chissano, the former President of Mozambique, on Monday Mar. 25, after visiting the affected areas in the Sofala province.

The world has also joined Mozambique to help those affected by Cyclone Idai.
Internationally, various charities and NGOs have been providing support for food, money and the means to rebuild the city of Beira.

In addition, on Monday, the United Nations launched an international campaign to raise more than 282 million dollars to support the victims of Cyclone Idai and floods in Mozambique.

Beira is already trying to rebuild. But much of the infrastructure has been damaged, with the high winds downing electricity cables and telecommunications lines. The city was in the dark without electricity, water and communication after the cyclone made landfall. The national road Nº6 was also badly damaged. Beira was literally cut off from the rest of the world.

Former Mozambican first lady Graça Machel said at a press briefing this week that Beira would be the first city to go on record as being devastated by climate change.

“It is painful to say that my country and [Beira] will go down in history as having been the first city to be completely devastated by climate change,” said Machel.

Electricity is being provided to Beira via generators in some neighbourhoods. Some classes have resumed in schools that were not damaged by the cyclone. And the water supply has returned to some neighbourhoods.

But Davis Simango, the mayor of Beira, told the media on Tuesday Mar. 26 that still much remains to be done.

“Beira is destroyed,” reported Simango when interviewed by the Mozambican press.
“We need to do something, because there are many affected, living without food, who are homeless, penniless and without prospects to rebuild,” said Simango.

José Bacar, who lives in Beira, told IPS that “many people don’t have food”.
“There are people in the accommodations centres without food,” Bacar reported.
He said that the support given by the Government through the INGC wasn’t enough.

Diarrhea and Cholera in Beira and Buzi
While the water levels are receding in many areas, poor sanitation conditions are prevalent and fears are growing of the spread of cholera. Many families in Buzi are drinking directly from the river Buzi. In Beira and Buzi there have been reported cases of diarrhoea and cholera. In Beira, the municipal authorities confirmed the registration of deaths caused by cholera, according Simango.

“There are people who are dying by the cholera. We have the record of 5 deaths,” said Simango. This Thursday, Mar. 28, Beira’s health authorities confirmed 139 cases of cholera.

Simango appealed to people to be careful with the water and to treat it before consuming it. “If we have survived the cyclone Idai, it doesn’t make sense that we will die by cholera,” concluded Simango.
But Margarida Jone, a resident in Buzi village, told IPS in telephone interview this Wednesday, that they were trying to use chlorine to purify water, but even so, it remained unfit for human consumption.

Meanwhile authorities are advising communities about good hygiene practices, to prevent that the spread of the disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced that will promote a massive vaccination campaign against cholera in Beira and other vulnerable areas affected by the floods.
Mozambican health authorities are also worried about the possibility of increased cases of malaria in the areas affected by Cyclone Idai.

Marcia Julio Vilanculos brought her baby to the digital literacy training at Ideario innovation hub, Maputo, Mozambique. Women’s caregiving responsibilities must be factored in by training programmes. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, Sep 14 2018 (IPS)

‘Think Bigger’, urge the colourful posters on the walls of Ideario, an innovation hub in Chamanculo, a modest neighbourhood in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. The message is right on target for the new female trainees, eager eyes glued to laptop screens as they learn internet and computer skills.

Three times a year Ideario runs a free, three-month-long course on digital literacy for 60 poor young women, selected among 500 candidates from Chamanculo.“Our survey highlights the gendered barriers to internet access and use in particular contexts - urban, peri-urban and rural women, with low income levels.” -- Chenai Chair, evaluations adviser at ICT Research Africa.

Ideario’s operations manager, Jessica Manhiça, tells IPS many girls initially fear using computers. Nine in 10 do not have one at home.

“I was afraid of erasing other people’s documents,” Marcia Julio Vilanculos, 25, tells IPS. In high school she paid a classmate to type her handwritten assignments.

“Overcoming fear opens the door to thinking bigger,” says Manhiça. “Girls are raised to be afraid of technology, of making mistakes, of being ill-judged as different, unconventional or masculine.”

The course starts by reinforcing self-esteem and unpacking the myth that tech is for men.

“Many parents discourage the girls from the course, worrying they will become independent, delay marriage, or exchange sex for jobs,” says Manhiça. “The young women internalise their families’ negativity.”

Not surprisingly, less than three percent of jobs in Mozambique’s booming tech sector are filled by women, reports a market survey by Ideario’s partner, MUVA Tech. MUVA Tech is a programme that works for the economic empowerment of young urban girls.

Among Mozambique’s 28 million people, less than 10 percent are internet users and only less than one in 10 users are women, according to a recent After Access survey by Research ICT Africa.

According to Research ICT Africa:

• 30 percent of all women own cellphones,
• 15 percent of these women own a smartphone (but not all use it for internet for a number of factors),
• and 6.8  percent of all Mozambican women, with or without owning a cellphone, use the internet. 

Of the seven African countries surveyed, only Rwanda has lower internet penetration and greater gender disparity.

“Our survey highlights the gendered barriers to internet access and use in particular contexts – urban, peri-urban and rural women, with low income levels,” says Chenai Chair, researcher at Research ICT Africa. “The findings reflect the gendered power dynamics that people live with daily.”

The digital gender gap is widening in Africa, warns the International Telecommunications Union.

Even Kenya, celebrated for its digital innovation and a relatively low overall digital gender gap of 10 percent, shows vast disparity among the urban poor. A digital gender audit in the slums of Nairobi by the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) in 2015 found that 57 percent of men are connected to the internet but only 20 percent of women are.

In poor areas of Kampala, Uganda, 61 percent of men and 21 percent of women use the internet, and 44 percent of men and 18 percent of women use a computer.

When women go online, they may find harassment. In Uganda, 45 percent of female internet users reported online threats, as did one in five in Kenya. The gender stereotypes and abusive behaviour found in daily life continue online.

“It is still believed in many cultures in Uganda that women should not speak at the same table as men and that includes discussions on social media,” Susan Atim, of Women of Uganda Network, tells IPS.

The WWWF research identifies the root causes of the digital gender divide: high costs, lack of know-how, scarcity of content that is relevant and empowering for women, and barriers to women speaking freely and privately online.

Systemic inequalities based on gender, race, income and geography are mirrored in the digital realm and leave many women, especially the poor and the rural, trailing behind Africa’s tech transformation. Without digital literacy, women cannot get the digital dividends – the access to jobs, information and services essential to secure a good livelihood.

Simple steps like reducing the cost to connect, teaching digital literacy in schools, and expanding public access facilities can bring quick progress, says WWWF.

Tarisai Nyamweda, media manager with Gender Links, a regional advocacy group, points out the scarcity of women role models in tech for schoolgirls. The percentage of female high school teachers ranges from fewer than two in 10 in Mozambique and Malawi to just over half in South Africa.

“We need to change the narrative so girls can identify new ways to do things,” says Nyamweda.

Digital literacy training must consider women’s domestic responsibilities.

To be at Ideario at 8 am, Vilanculos would wake up at 5 am, to make a fire and heat water. She prepared breakfast for her husband (a car painter) and their two children. She then dropped her eldest at school at 7am and brought her baby with her to the training. During lunch she picked up her oldest and took both her children to stay with an aunt, and returned to Ideario.

“I was tired, my feet hurt,” she recalls. But the effort paid off: today she is a microworker with Tekla, an online job platform.

The use of information and communication technologies is now required in all but two occupations, dishwashing and food preparation, in the American workplace, notes a policy brief on the future of work by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Considering that 90 percent of jobs in the Fourth Industrial Revolution will require digital skills, according to a World Economic Forum study,  there is no time to lose in closing Africa’s digital gender gap.

Mozambique is open for business. A new suspension bridge rises on Maputo Bay. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
MAPUTO, Aug 17 2017 (IPS)

The rising Maputo-Catembe Bridge is a hard-to-miss addition to Mozambique’s shoreline.

The 725-million-dollar bridge – billed to be the largest suspension bridge in Africa on its completion in 2018 – represents Mozambique’s new investment portfolio and a show of its policy commitment to boosting international trade.“African governments have identified policy incoherence as the elephant in the room." --Wadzanai Katsande of FAO

But the country can improve on its trade and investment if it can effectively align its national trade and agricultural policies to ensure sufficient coordination between trade and agricultural policymakers, experts say.

Initiatives to improve agricultural productivity, value chain development, employment creation, and food security are often constrained by market and trade-related bottlenecks which are a result of the misalignment between agricultural and trade policies.

This was part of findings discussed at a meeting convened by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in the Mozambican capital earlier this month. The high-level meeting attracted decision makers from the ministries of agriculture, finance, trade, industry and commerce, private sector representatives and donor groups.

To help address this challenge, FAO, in collaboration with Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) at the World Trade Organisation and the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), has piloted a regional project to help countries coordinate policy making processing, starting with agriculture and trade.

Mozambique is one of four countries in East and Southern Africa targeted in the pilot project aimed at developing a model for best practices in policy development and harmonization in enhancing economic development.

An assessment of the agriculture and trade policy framework and policymaking processes in Mozambique has been done to understand decision making in setting objectives and priorities for the country’s agriculture and trade sector.

The assessment also sought to contribute to the development of a coherent national policy framework on agricultural trade in Mozambique, said Wadzanai Katsande, Outcome Coordinator for the Food Systems Programme of the FAO.

Though listed as one of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) in the world, Mozambique is rich in natural and mineral resources including gas. The country is a bright investment destination in Africa.

Policy alignment is the key

“On paper, policies sound well and good, but in practice the story is different. There are still coordination and consistency issues in the policy formulation and implementation processes within and between agriculture and trade and these need to be addressed,” says Samuel Zita, an International Trade and Development Consultant, who recently led on an analytical study commissioned by the FAO on “Coordination between agriculture and trade policy making in Mozambique.”

“When agriculture and trade policies speak the same language that creates some predictability to investors, any disconnect between the two can have a negative effect on foreign direct investment,” Zita told IPS.

The study which focused on the country’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) and Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) processes also looked at the policy documents from these processes such as the CAADP National Agricultural Investment Plan (PNISA)] and the Diagnostic Trade Integration Strategy (DTIS). It recommended that Mozambique should improve the dissemination of policies, plans and strategies to stakeholders through various media. In addition, there should be an improvement in the description and publication of agricultural production and trade data.

Agriculture – defined by the national constitution as the basis of the country’s economic development – contributes 25 percent to Mozambique’s GDP of nearly 14 billion dollars. Raw aluminium, electricity, prawns, cotton, cashew nuts, sugar, citrus, coconuts and timber are major exports.

Policy cohesion can help facilitate trade development by simplifying the regulatory and policy environment for small businesses, so countries can attract private sector investment at local and international levels, says Jonathan Werner, Country Coordinator, Executive Secretariat of the Enhanced Integrated Framework at the WTO.

“We are facing many challenges for regional trade integration in Africa,” Werner Told IPS. “Our findings have shown that aligned policy processes can help create an enabling environment for trade and development.”

Policy cementing the SDGs

African governments have committed themselves to a multitude of agreements, protocols and declarations meant to promote greater agriculture productivity and trade which are major drivers of economic growth, but something is still missing in getting it all together: effective policies both at national and regional levels. Until the well-meaning policies trade and agriculture are aligned, Africa will continue to miss out on attracting the level of investment it should.

Mozambique has taken the first steps towards aligning its national agriculture and trade sector policies to boost economic development.

“African governments have identified policy incoherence as the elephant in the room and getting the policies in trade and agriculture to speak to each other is key to turning policies into action,” Katsande said noting that agriculture and trade development form the basis of key initiatives such as the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), the Malabo Declaration and African Union’s Agenda 2063.

A boost for Inter-Africa trade

Africa has no less than 14 regional trading blocs but inter-Africa trade is low at 12 percent of the continent’s trade, according to statistics from the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). However, Africa’s trade with Europe and Asia is at nearly 60 percent. Some of the bottlenecks to Africa trading with Africa include trade policy harmonization, reducing export/import duties low production capacity, differing production quality standards and poor infrastructure.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) set to be signed into operation by December 2017 will help double inter African trade. In 2012 African head of state endorsed the establishment of the free trade area by 2017. Trade is one of the pathways to unlocking economic growth in Africa to boost employment and foster innovation in a continent replete with opportunities.

Gerhard Erasmus, an associate at the Trade Law Centre, a trade law capacity building institution based in Cape Town, South Africa, said low inter-Africa trade was a real issue which has been blamed by some economists on the fact that African nations often produce the same goods (mostly agriculture and basic commodities) for which the intra-African export opportunities are limited.

“Unless we move up the ladder of value addition, industrialization and services we will remain stuck,” Erasmus said. “Thus domestic development plans need adjustment and targeted investments are necessary. There are many trade facilitation challenges, from long queues at border posts, corruption, uncoordinated technical standards and requirements, to red tape and inadequate infrastructure.”

Eramus said regional economic communities and even the African Union had policies and plans to address the many trade challenges, but implementation often encountered problems at national levels regarding political buy-in, lack of resources, technical capacity problems, and plain bad governance.

An unidentified woman from Zimbabwe's Mashonaland Central Province at Manzou Farm packs her tobacco with the help of her children as they prepare to leave following an eviction order. “Land grabs in Africa have helped to perpetuate economic inequalities similar to the colonial era economic imbalances” – Terry Mutsvanga, Zimbabwean rights activist. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

There is a new scramble for Africa, with ordinary people facing displacement by the affluent and the powerful as huge tracts of land on the continent are grabbed by a minority, rights activists here say.

“Our forefathers cried foul during colonialism when their land was grabbed by colonialists more than a century ago, but today history repeats itself, with our own political leaders and wealthy countrymen looting land,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development (PYD), a democracy lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Civil society activist Owen Dliwayo, who is programme officer for the Youth Dialogue Action Network, another lobby group here, said multinational companies were to blame in most African countries for land seizures.“Our forefathers cried foul during colonialism when their land was grabbed by colonialists more than a century ago, but today history repeats itself, with our own political leaders and wealthy countrymen looting land” - Claris Madhuku, Zimbabwe’s Platform for Youth Development (PYD)

“I can give you an example of the Chisumbanje ethanol fuel project here in Chipinge. The project resulted in thousands of villagers being displaced to pave way for a sugar plantation so that thousands of hectares of land space could be created for the ethanol-producing project, consequently displacing poor villagers,” Dliwayo told IPS.

The 40,000 hectare sugar cane plantation which started in 2008 left more than 1,754 households displaced, according to PYD.

Fifteen years ago, Zimbabwe embarked on a controversial land reform programme to address colonial land-ownership imbalances, but activists have dismissed the move as disastrous for this Southern African nation.

“To say African nations like Zimbabwe addressed the land problem is untrue because land which African governments like Zimbabwe grabbed from white farmers was parcelled out to political elites at the expense of hordes of peasants here,” Terry Mutsvanga, an award-winning Zimbabwean rights activist, told IPS.

“Land grabs in Africa have helped to perpetuate economic inequalities similar to the colonial era economic imbalances,” he added.

In 2010, ZimOnline, a Zimbabwean news service, reported that about 2,200 well-connected black Zimbabwean elites controlled nearly 40 percent of the 14 million hectares of land seized from white farmers, with each farm ranging in size from 250 to 4,000 hectares, with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his family said to own 14 farms spanning at least 16,000 hectares.

Further up in East Africa, according to a 2011 presentation by Uganda’s Joshua Zake titled ‘Land Grabbing; silent pain for smallholder farmers in Uganda’, key characters of land grabbing in that country are also a few wealthy or powerful individuals against many vulnerable individuals or communities.

Zake is Senior Programme Officer Environment and Natural Resources and Coordinator of the Uganda Forestry Working Group at Environmental Alert.

According to Zake, land grabbing in Africa, particularly in Uganda, is promoted by the suspected presence of oil and other mineral resources beneath the land, such as in Uganda’s Amuru and Bulisa districts.

Zake’s remarks fit well with Zimbabwe’s situation, where more than 800 families were displaced by government from Chiadzwa in Manicaland Province after the discovery of diamonds there in 2005.

But land grabs in Africa may also be rampant in towns and cities, according to private land developers here.

“There is high demand of land for the construction of homes in towns and cities across Africa owing to the sharp rural-to-urban migration,” Etuna Nujoma, a private land developer based in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, told IPS.

“The wealthy and the powerful as well as the corrupt politicians are taking advantage of the land demand and therefore often parcelling out urban land amongst themselves for resale at exorbitant prices at the expense of the poor.”

Last year, irked by corrupt local authorities appearing to be dishing out land among themselves for resale, a group of informal settlement dwellers outside Namibia’s coastal holiday town of Swakopmund occupied municipal land with the intention of settling there.

With land grabs at their peak in Zimbabwe, members of the ruling Zanu-PF party are measuring out land pieces which they then give to people who pay in the range of 10 to 20 dollars for 30 to 50 square metres, depending on the areas in which they want to obtain housing stands, according to Andrew Nyanyadzi of Zanu-PF.

“We don’t need permission from local authorities for us to have access to the land which our liberation war leaders fought for. It’s our land and we are therefore selling at affordable prices to ruling party loyalists,” Nyanyadzi told IPS.

Houses that once sheltered farmworkers stand empty as lands are reallocated for commercial farming and other profit-making purposes in Africa. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

Consequently, lobby groups in Zimbabwe say havoc rules supreme in the country’s towns and cities.

“In Harare, land belonging to the city has been taken over by known militant groups of people with links to Zanu-PF, whom police here are even afraid to apprehend,” Precious Shumba, the director of Harare Residents Trust, told IPS.

“This is exactly what happened to Harare’s urban land in Hatcliff high density area, where housing cooperatives belonging to the ruling Zanu-PF leaders have grabbed council land using their political power,” Shumba said.

However, like other countries across Africa, Zimbabwe’s local authority by-laws prohibit individuals or organisations from selling land that does not legally belong to them.

Meanwhile, in Mozambique, the poor are losing out to foreign investors on land rights there despite the state being the sole owner of land.

Under the country’s constitution, there is no private land ownership – land and its associated resources are the property of the state – although the country’s Land Law grants private persons the right to use and benefit from the land whether or not they have a formal title. However, loopholes have emerged in the law.

A survey last year by Mozambique’s National Farmers’ Union showed that there was a colonial-era style land grab there, with politically-connected companies in the former Portuguese colony seizing hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland from peasants.

According to GRAIN, a non-profit organisation supporting small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, peasants in northern Mozambique have difficulties keeping their lands as foreign companies set up large-scale agribusinesses there.

The NGO says Mozambicans are being told that these projects will bring them benefits, but this is not how Caesar Guebuza and other Mozambican peasants see it.

“Agricultural investments by foreign companies have not benefitted us, but rather we have lost land to these companies investing here and we are being treated as aliens in our own land,” Guebuza told IPS.

Economists blame the Mozambican government for favouring foreign investors, who now possess large swathes of state land.

“The Mozambican government is known for siding with foreign investors who now occupy huge tracts of land for their own use as local peasants lose out on land, which is their birth right,” Kingston Nyakurukwa, a Zimbabwean independent economist, told IPS.

With foreign investors acquiring huge tracts of land ahead of locals in Africa, ActionAid Tanzania earlier this year said that through the European Union, United States and several European countries, the European Union’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition plans to invest 7.57 billion euros in agricultural development and food security across Africa.

However, said Nyakurukwa, these will be business ventures that will strip Africans of their hard-earned money as they buy agricultural produce.

Similarly, in Nigeria, Mozambique and Tanzania, smallholder farmers are being moved off their land, paving the way for sugarcane, rice and other export crop-growing projects backed by New Alliance money, according to ActionAid Tanzania’s findings.

For Africans in Tanzania, big money might be gradually rendering them landless.

“Money from investors seem to be elbowing us out of our native lands here in Tanzania as no one has been offered the choice of whether to be resettled or not as we are being forcibly offered money or land for resettlement,” Moses Malunguja, a disgruntled peasant from Tanzania, told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

As billions pour into Mozambique from foreign investors scooping up fields of coal and natural gas, the signs of newfound wealth are impossible to miss.

Expensive European-style bars and restaurants line the streets of central Maputo. The latest Toyota Pradas, Range Rovers and Jaguars drive down streets named Julius Nyerere, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung, former socialist leaders who might have heart failure at the wealth gap found here today.

The World Bank called Mozambique’s transition from a post-conflict country to one of Africa’s “frontier economies” nothing short of impressive. “The country has become a world-class destination for mining and natural gas development,” the Bank wrote.

Yet, according to the Bank, this rapid expansion over the past 20 years barely moved the needle for the poor. “The geographical distribution of poverty remains largely unchanged,” the Bank wrote in October last year. Per capita income is 593 dollars, less than one-third of the sub-Saharan average.

In 2014, Mozambique ranked near the bottom – 178 out of 187 countries – in the U.N.’s Human Development index.

Malnutrition has worsened significantly; life expectancy at birth is just 50 years. Malaria remains the most common cause of death, especially among children.

With signs of great wealth amidst nationwide poverty, resentment has been growing in backwater regions that have not shared in the bounty.

This week, a prominent lawyer exploring the case to decentralise power and create autonomy for those peripheral regions was cut down in cold blood on the streets of the capital, Maputo. Gilles Cistac, 54, was shot by four men in a car while riding a cab to work, police said.

A spokesman for the former rebel group Renamo said Cistac had been killed because of his views on decentralisation.

“He was killed for having expressed his opinions regarding the most contentious political issues in the country,” Renamo spokesman António Muchanga told Reuters Tuesday.

Cistac, a professor of law at the national Eduardo Mondlane University, recently told local media that the creation of autonomous regions would be allowed under the constitution. Renamo, similarly, has proposed that Mozambique be divided into two countries.

But Frelimo, the ruling party, has repeatedly rejected calls for regional autonomy, although President Filipe Nyusi agreed to debate decentralisation in parliament after Renamo parliamentarians refused to take up their seats following elections in October 2014.

Regarding the murder of Cistec, Presidential Spokesman Antonio Gaspar said, “We condemn the attack and demand that the perpetrators are caught and brought to justice. The government has instructed the interior ministry to hunt and arrest those who assassinated Cistac so that they can be severely punished.”

Meanwhile, U.S. oil major Anadarko and Italy’s Eni are developing some of the world’s biggest untapped natural gas reserves in the north of the country – a Renamo stronghold, which the group has proposed to rename the Republic of Central and Northern Mozambique.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A woman watches helplessly as a flood submerges her thatched-roof home containing all her possessions on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar city in India’s eastern state of Odisha in 2008. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Feb 19 2015 (IPS)

So much information about climate change now abounds that it is hard to differentiate fact from fiction. Scientific reports appear alongside conspiracy theories, data is interspersed with drastic predictions about the future, and everywhere one turns, the bad news just seems to be getting worse.

Corporate lobby groups urge governments not to act, while concerned citizens push for immediate action. The little progress that is made to curb carbon emissions and contain global warming often pales in comparison to the scale of natural disasters that continue to unfold at an unprecedented rate, from record-level snowstorms, to massive floods, to prolonged droughts.

The year 2011 saw 350 billion dollars in economic damages globally, the highest since 1975 -- The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)
Attempting to sift through all the information is a gargantuan task, but it has been made easier with the release of a new report by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think-tank based in New Delhi that has, perhaps for the first time ever, compiled an exhaustive assessment of the whole world’s progress on climate mitigation and adaptation.

The assessment also provides detailed forecasts of what each country can expect in the coming years, effectively providing a blueprint for action at a moment when many scientists fear that time is running out for saving the planet from catastrophic climate change.

Trends, risks and damages

The Global Sustainability Report 2015 released earlier this month at the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, ranks the top 20 countries (out of 193) most at risk from climate change based on the actual impacts of extreme climate events documented over a 34-year period from 1980 to 2013.

The TERI report cites data compiled by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) based at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, which maintains a global database of natural disasters dating back over 100 years.

The study found a 10-fold increase to 525 natural disasters in 2002 from around 50 in 1975. By 2011, 95 percent of deaths from this consistent trend of increasing natural disasters were from developing countries.

In preparing its rankings, TERI took into account everything from heat and cold waves, drought, floods, flash floods, cloudburst, landslides, avalanches, forest fires, cyclone and hurricanes.

Mozambique was found to be most at risk globally, followed by Sudan and North Korea. In both Mozambique and Sudan, extreme climate events caused more than six deaths per 100,000 people, the highest among all countries ranked, while North Korea suffered the highest economic losses annually, amounting to 1.65 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

The year 2011 saw 350 billion dollars in economic damages globally, the highest since 1975.

The situation is particularly bleak in Asia, where countries like Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Philippines, with a combined total population of over 300 million people, are extremely vulnerable to climate-related disasters.

China, despite high economic growth, has not been able to reduce the disaster risks to its population that is expected to touch 1.4 billion people by the end of 2015: it ranked sixth among the countries in Asia most susceptible to climate change.

Sustained effort at the national level has enabled Bangladesh to strengthen its defenses against sea-level rise, its biggest climate challenge, but it still ranked third on the list.

India, the second most populous country – expected to have 1.26 billion people by end 2015 – came in at 10^th place, while Sri Lanka and Nepal figured at 14^th and 15^th place respectively.

In Africa, Ethiopia and Somalia are also considered extremely vulnerable, while the European nations of Albania, Moldova, Spain and France appeared high on the list of at-risk countries in that region, followed by Russia in sixth place.

In the Americas, the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia ranked first, followed by Grenada and Honduras. The most populous country in the region, Brazil, home to 200 million people, was ranked 20^th.

More disasters, higher costs

In the 110 years spanning 1900 and 2009, hydro-meteorological disasters have increased from 25 to 3,526. Hydro-meteorological, geological and biological extreme events together increased from 72 to 11,571 during that same period, the report says.

In the 60-year period between 1970 and 2030, Asia will shoulder the lion’s share of floods, cyclones and sea-level rise, with the latter projected to affect 83 million people annually compared to 16.5 million in Europe, nine million in North America and six million in Africa.

The U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) estimates that global economic losses by the end of the current century will touch 25 trillion dollars, unless strong measures for climate change mitigation, adaptation and disaster risk reduction are taken immediately.

As adaptation moves from theory to practice, it is becoming clear that the costs of adaptation will surpass previous estimates.

Developing countries, for instance, will require two to three times the previous estimates of 70-100 billion dollars per year by 2050, with a significant funding gap after 2020, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Adaptation Gap Report released last December.

Indicators such as access to water, food security, health, and socio-economic capability were considered in assessing each country’s adaptive capacity.

According to these broad criteria, Liberia ranks lowest, with a quarter of its population lacking access to water, 56 percent of its urban population living in slums, and a high incidence of malaria compounded by a miserable physician-patient ratio of one doctor to every 70,000 people.

On the other end of the adaptive capacity scale, Monaco ranks first, with 100 percent water access, no urban slums, zero malnutrition, 100 percent literacy, 71 doctors for every 10,000 people, and not a single person living below one dollar a day.

Cuba, Norway, Switzerland and the Netherlands also feature among the top five countries with the highest adaptive capacity; the United States is ranked 8^th, the United Kingdom 25^th, China 98^th and India 146^th.

The study also ranks countries on responsibilities for climate change, taking account of their historical versus current carbon emission levels.

The UK takes the most historic responsibility with 940 tonnes of CO₂ per capita emitted during the industrialisation boom of 1850-1989, while the U.S. occupies the fifth slot consistently on counts of historical responsibility, cumulative CO₂ emissions over the 1990-2011 period, as well as greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity per unit of GDP in 2011, the same year it clocked 6,135 million tonnes of GHG emissions.

China was the highest GHG emitter in 2011 with 10,260 million tonnes, and India ranked 3^rd with 2,358 million tonnes. However, when emission intensity per one unit of GDP is additionally considered for current responsibility, both Asian countries move lower on the scale while the oil economies of Qatar and Kuwait move up to into the ranks of the top five countries bearing the highest responsibility for climate change.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Flooding in Malawi. Courtesy of the Malawi Red Cross Society

By Julitta Onabanjo and Michael Charles
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 2 2015 (IPS)

The flooding of the Zambezi River has had devastating consequences for three countries in Southern Africa. The three worst affected countries are Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. 

Livestock has drowned, crops have been submerged or washed away and infrastructure has been badly damaged.Imagine being a pregnant woman airlifted from the floodplains and placed in a camp with no midwives, no sterilised equipment nor medical supplies to ensure a safe delivery.

Worse still, hundreds of lives have been lost – and the dignity of women and girls is on the line.

In Malawi, an estimated 638,000 people have been affected and the president has declared a state of disaster. About 174,000 people have been displaced in three of the worst affected districts out of 15 districts hit by floods.

A total of 79 deaths have been reported and about 153 people are still missing. Data disaggregated by age and sex are not readily available, however, it is estimated that about 330,000 of the 638,000 displaced people in the camps are women and close to 108,000 are young people.

The situation is also critical in Zimbabwe. According to preliminary assessments, approximately 6,000 people (1,200 households) have been affected, of which 2,500 people from 500 households are in urgent need of assistance. An estimated 40-50 per cent will be women or girls. More than ten people have drowned while many more have been injured, displaced and left homeless.

In Mozambique, almost all 11 provinces have experienced extensive rainfall. The central province of Zambézia was the worst hit – a bridge connecting central and northern Mozambique was destroyed by the floods in Mocuba district. Niassa and Nampula provinces were also seriously affected.

These three provinces are already among the poorest in the country, and for the most vulnerable – women, girls and children – the impact of flooding can be devastating.

Around 120,000 people from 24,000 families have been affected. The death toll due to flooding, lightning and houses collapsing has risen to 64, while more than 50,000 people from 12,000 families are in need of shelter. Others have fled to neighbouring Malawi. At least 700 out of an estimated 2500 people have been repatriated to date.

Mozambique has a recent history of recurrent floods. UNFPA is supporting the government and other partners to scale up efforts to safeguard the dignity of women and girls. This includes the positioning of reproductive health kits, hygiene kits and promoting gender-based violence prevention.

Flooding in Mozambique. Courtesy of UNFPA

Health and reproductive health needs

As with most humanitarian situations, women, girls and children are usually the worst affected. In Mozambique, for example, close to 1,000 orphans and over 100 pregnant women and girls require urgent attention.

Imagine being a pregnant woman airlifted from the floodplains and placed in a camp with no midwives, no sterilised equipment nor medical supplies to ensure a safe delivery. This is a scenario that countless pregnant women are facing.

In addition to efforts by partners to address the food and infrastructural security needs of the people, women and girls are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and erosion of dignity, and deserve adequate attention.

In Malawi, about 315 visibly pregnant women were identified in the three worst affected districts. Between Jan. 10 and 24, 88 deliveries were recorded by 62 camps in the worst affected districts. Twenty-four of these deliveries were among adolescents aged between 15 and 19 years, as reported from Phalombe, where fertility rates and teenage pregnancies are generally high.

Malawi floods. Some of the pregnant women receiving dignity kits at Somba camp in T A Bwananyambi, Mangochi. Courtesy of UNFPA

Women living in camps for displaced people are fearful of gender-based violence, including rape and other types of sexual abuse. Several cases of gender-based violence have already been reported. In one of the districts, a total of 124 cases were brought to the attention of authorities.

The design of the camps and the positioning of toilets are said to be contributing to these cases. A woman from Bangula camp said: “The toilets are far away from where we are sleeping. We are afraid to walk to the toilets at night for fear of being raped. If the toilets could be located close by, this could assist us.”

Personal dignity and hygiene is a major challenge for women and young people, especially for adolescent girls. A teenager from Tchereni camp in Malawi said: “I lost everything during the floods. My biggest challenge is how to manage my menstrual cycle.”

It has been reported that women and girls are sharing sanitary materials, which seriously compromises their health and dignity.

Urgent action

In order to address the  sexual and reproductive health needs of affected populations, UNFPA Malawi has recruited and deployed full time Reproductive Health and Gender Coordinators to support the authorities with the management of SRH/HIV and gender-based violence (GBV) issues in the camps.

UNFPA has also distributed pre-positioned Reproductive Health kits as well as drugs and medical equipment to cater for clean deliveries, including by Caesarean section, and related complications of pregnancy and child birth in six districts and two central hospitals in the flood-affected areas.

Over 300 prepositioned dignity kits were distributed and 2,000 more have been procured, over half of which have already been distributed to women of child-bearing age in some of the most affected districts to allow the women to continue to live with dignity in their state of crisis.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has launched an emergency appeal for CHF 2,7 million to assist Malawi Red Cross to step up emergency response activities, including a detailed needs assessment of the affected regions, the procurement of non-food items, the procurement and distribution of shelter materials, and the provision of water and sanitation services.

A similar process was applied for Mozambique and Zimbabwe, with the aim of saving more lives by providing immediate assistance to those in need.

But as partners working together to address the numerous problems that confront the affected populations – and warnings of more risks of flooding – we cannot neglect the plight of women and girls.

In humanitarian situations especially, the dignity and reproductive health and rights of women and girls deserves our full attention.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

By Lyndal Rowlands and Mercedes Sayagues
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 29 2014 (IPS)

In rural Zambia and Malawi, new mums face long delays finding out if they have passed HIV on to their babies.

Without treatment, a third of babies born with HIV will die before their first birthday and half before their second. Starting treatment within the first 12 weeks of life vastly improves their chances of survival.

But testing babies is not easy in poor countries.

Because mothers pass antibodies to their babies in the womb, the usual adult antibody tests during the first months of life can be inaccurate.

A virological test is needed. But only a handful of central labs can do these in Zambia and Malawi. On the long journey to and from the lab on the back of a motorbike or truck, the blood sample or the result often gets lost.

Some studies suggest that nearly half of tests never reach the clinics or the mothers.

Meanwhile, the new mum returns to her village and she and the baby likely drop out from the clinic’s radar.

Malawi and Zambia each has an estimated one million people living with HIV. In 2012, new HIV infections among children numbered 9,400 in Zambia and 11,000 in Malawi. Just over one third of babies were tested.

The old system couldn’t cope. New ideas and technologies were needed.

Enter UNICEF Innovation with an open source, code-based RapidSMS software: as soon as the lab result is in, the rural clinic’s nurse receives it by SMS on a cell phone or looks it up on the website. In remote villages, a community health worker receives the SMS and alerts the parents.

All information is encoded to ensure privacy and the software includes a web dashboard for reporting and administration.

In Zambia, the turnaround was cut from two or three months down to one month, said Shadrack Omol, deputy representative of UNICEF in Lusaka.

The SMS relaying is part of an antenatal system, Project Mwana (KiSwahili for child), that brings other benefits for all new mums as well.

At the first antenatal visit, the mother’s details are entered in Mwana’s SMS reminder system for alerts on checkups, immunizations, baby weighing and drug refills.

Bundling the HIV component with regular mother and baby care helps avoid stigma and fear of being identified as HIV positive.

In 2011, a Mozambican charity with 22,000 people on ARV treatment tried to build a cellphone database to remind patients of appointments: fearing loss of privacy and stigma, only half gave their cellphone numbers.

In Zambia, Mwana covers 484 clinics in 10 provinces. In Malawi, it has delivered more than 20,000 tests.

The next step, says Emanuel Saka, HIV specialist with UNICEF in Malawi, will be “expanding the geographical coverage and scope of the technology” and targeting adolescents with HIV.

New solutions to old problems

The best solution would be to test babies at the point of care in the rural clinic without any delays. In Mozambique, health workers are trying out a new viral load testing machine that can diagnose young babies in less than one hour.

“This is a great breakthrough,” said Bindiya Meggi, a pharmacist working on this project with the National Institute of Health.

Made by the German company ALERE, the machine is being tried in four sites with the help of the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

“It’s very simple to use,” said Ocean Tobaiwa, a Zimbabwean technician at the trial clinic in Maputo

As the machine is tested, it is adapted to local conditions, such as irregular electricity, black outs, power surges, heat and humidity. German technicians visit regularly to tweak the machines.

At present, babies are tested at one-month of age. A dry blood sample is collected through a heel or finger prick and sent to a central lab for viral load analysis.

Mozambique has only four such labs for a population of 24 million, with some 900,000 HIV positive women, and thousands of kilometers of roads impassable in the rainy season.

Although in theory results should be returned in two weeks, the reality is one month or more. Meanwhile, as in Zambia and Malawi, mother and baby are lost to follow-up.

In Zambia, RapidSMS is the backbone of U-Report, a booming HIV hotline service for young people, which garnered 71,000 users in two years. (see sidebar)

UNICEF Innovation Labs work with universities and the public and private sector to find new solutions to old problems in health, education, and water and sanitation.

“There is so much to do in the area of technology and real time information that hasn’t yet been explored,” Kochi said.

Every day, eleven Mozambican women die of cervical cancer. That is 4,000 every year. It is the most frequent cancer among women aged 15-44 and the biggest killer of women among all cancers. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, Oct 31 2014 (IPS)

Mozambique is reeling under the twin burden of HIV and cervical cancer. Eleven women die of cervical cancer every day, or 4,000 a year. Yet this cancer is preventable and treatable, if caught early.

Among African countries, Mozambique vies neck and neck with Malawi for the saddest statistics.

Mozambique has the highest cervical cancer cumulative risk and mortality – seven out of 100 newborn girls will develop this cancer and five will die from it.

Malawi is first in incidence (new cases per year), with Mozambique tailing second.

Cervical cancer is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a common virus with 40 types. Many people carry it dormant and often it goes away by itself. But two types of HPV cause cervical cancer.

HIV and HPV are deadly allies. HPV infection doubles the risk of acquiring HIV while HIV hastens progression of cervical cancer.

Some numbers will give an idea of Mozambique’s burden:

• 7.3 million women over age 15, who can potentially acquire HPV through sex.
• 820,000 women over age 15 living with HIV. Cervical cancer advances quickly with a weak immune system.
• 4,000 deaths of cervical cancer a year, not counting those who die at home, undiagnosed, untreated and unreported

Step by step, health authorities are tackling the problem with a three-pronged strategy: information for prevention, routine screening for detection, and better treatment.

There is even talk of bringing radio therapy equipment and training technicians. In terminal stages, radio therapy shrinks cancer and reducing excruciating pain.

Routine screening for this cancer is now offered with family planning services. Diagnosis and treatment via cryotherapy (freezing) can be done in one visit. The Ministry of Health hopes to cover all districts by 2017.

The mass media campaign had a tireless advocate in the former First Lady, Maria da Luz Guebuza. The Association for the Fight against Cancer, a volunteer group, has multiplied its outreach and helps patients at the oncology wards of main hospitals.

Information is dispelling the perception of cervical cancer as “the neighbour’s disease”, brought upon women by a neighbour’s curse or by witchcraft.

The situation is still dire; needs outpace resources, both human and financial. But it is a great improvement over just three years ago, when only a handful of clinics offered screening, and millions of women had never heard about HPV and cervical cancer at all.

By Busani Bafana
CHIMOIO, Mozambique, Sep 25 2014 (IPS)

Eherculano Thomas Rice, is pleased to have harvested 40 bags of white maize from his eight-hectare field in Chimoio, in Mozambique’s Manica Province. But he knows that his productivity and yield would be higher if he had been able to afford to buy fertiliser to add to his crop.

Rice grows cowpea to boost soil fertility in his field and improve his productivity, only buying fertiliser when he can afford it.

According to local NGO Farm Inputs Promotions Africa (FIPS), which works with about 38,000 farmers in five districts in Manica Province, a 50kg bag of fertiliser costs about 33 dollars. And a farmer will need three bags per hectare of land.

Africa is paying the price of low productivity because of limited use of commercial fertilisers by smallholder farmers who produce the bulk of the continent’s food.

“For now I intercrop my maize with pigeon pea, to increase soil fertility and it works. But fertiliser could boost my productivity,” Rice tells IPS, during a walk around his farm as he points to the mature pigeon pea plants.

“Farmers need awareness on how fertiliser can improve their production for them so that they can save and buy it easily. Farmers are discouraged by having to travel long distances to buy inputs, often a high cost.”

Low fertiliser use by smallholder farmers like Rice is a common narrative in sub-Saharan Africa — a continent which currently uses about eight kg/ha of fertiliser. It is a figure that pales against the global average of 93kg/ha and 100-200kg/ha in Asia, according to the Montpelier Panel’s 2013 report, Sustainable Intensification: A New Paradigm for African Agriculture.

Rice, who was trained by FIPS as a village inputs promotion agent, runs demonstration plots teaching farmers how to use improved inputs. Farmers are given input kits of improved seed and fertilisers as an incentive for them to buy them themselves.

Agriculture currently contributes about 25 percent of Mozambique’s GDP and a 2004 Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development evaluation report indicates that improved seeds, fertilisers and pesticides are capable of raising productivity by up to 576 percent.

Charles Ogang, the president of the Uganda National Farmers Federation, tells IPS via email that food security in Africa is compromised because farmers are not using enough agricultural inputs, in particular fertilisers.

“There are many reasons why farmers in Africa are still hardly making a living of agriculture. One of them is the lack of access to key tools and knowledge,” Ogang says.

“Fertilisers are often not even available for purchase for farmers who live remotely. I believe that the lack of rural infrastructure, storage and blending facilities, the lack of credit and limited knowledge of farmers of how to use fertilisers are the key constraints for an increased use.”

According to the First Resolution of the Abuja Declaration on fertiliser, African governments have to increase fertiliser use from the average of eight kg of nutrients per hectare to 50 kg of nutrients per hectare by 2015.

“Although no country in sub-Saharan Africa has achieved this target, there are some signs of improvement in the implementation of the Abuja Declaration on Fertiliser by the countries and Regional Economic Communities since June 2006,” says Richard Mkandawire, vice president of the African Fertiliser and Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP). He says that Malawi has increased its fertiliser use from an average of 10kg/ha in the 90s, to a current 33kg/ha, and shows the commitment of countries to reach the target of 50kg/ha.

Mkandawire tells IPS that the partnership is undertaking technical research to advance appropriate soil management practices, including the facilitation of soil mapping. It is also testing soil to ensure that smallholder farmers are able to access fertiliser blends that are suitable for their land.

Mkandawire acknowledges that there is no silver bullet to lowering the cost of fertiliser for smallholder farmers. But he says AFAP has employed several types of financial mechanisms to help lower the cost. The mechanisms include facilitating guarantees to fertiliser distributors for retailer credit, financing assistance to importers or blenders to improve facilities, training, financial and technical assistance to warehouses at ports.

In August, AFAP in collaboration with the International Fertiliser Industry Association (IFA) launched a multi-media campaign in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to push African governments to invest in agriculture productivity.

According to the campaign, African governments should ensure farmers have access to adequate and improved inputs especially fertiliser for agriculture transformation and economic development.

In June, African heads of state committed themselves to use agriculture growth to double food productivity, halve poverty and eliminate child under nutrition by 2025 when they came up with the Malabo Declaration following a meeting in Equatorial Guinea.

Charlotte Hebebrand, IFA director general, says Africa’s fertiliser demand is less than three percent of the global market. The continent’s production continues to be low and a significant share of the local production is exported as raw materials.

“Our estimates are that demand will increase over the course of the next three to five years in countries that are stable politically, committed to allocate at least 10 percent of their budget to agriculture, and those that have established sound fertiliser subsidy schemes,” Hebebrand tells IPS.

“Equipped with the right inputs and the knowledge to use these inputs, yields can increase tremendously. For every one kilogram of nutrient applied, farmers obtain five to 30 kg of additional product.”

Poor supply chains for fertilisers where farmers often have to travel long distances to buy a bag of fertiliser, are a primary cause of low fertiliser use in Africa. Poor farming practises are also worsening soil health in Africa.

An analysis of soil health in Africa by the Nairobi-based Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) shows that croplands across sub-Saharan Africa lose 30 to 80 kgs per hectare of essential plant nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen annually as a result of unsustainable farming practices, which the report warns will “kill Africa’s hopes for a food-secure future.”

AGRA’s Soil Health Programme is working on solving the problem by supporting an extensive network of partnerships in 13 countries in which three million farmers have been trained in using organic matter, applying small amounts of mineral fertilisers, and planting legume crops like cowpea, soybean and pigeon pea.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

COUNTDOWN SNAPSHOT: HOW MOZAMBIQUE IS COPING WITH AIDS

By Mercedes Sayagues
MAPUTO, Aug 12 2014 (IPS)

Mozambique struggles to contain the HIV epidemic with one in ten among its 24 million people infected. Helping them is not easy when only 60 percent of people have access to health services.

There are five doctors and 25 nurses per 100,000 people. In neighbouring South Africa, the ratio is 55 doctors and 383 nurses.

Recently, the United Nations ranked Mozambique 178 among 187 countries in human development. Quick stats:

• 50 years: life expectancy
• 3: mean years of schooling
• 70 percent: number of people living in poverty
• 40 percent: number of women who give birth at home
• 56 000: number of women infected with HIV annually

Excessive dependence on donors is another problem, with 90 percent of the health ministry’s HIV/AIDS budget paid by theUnited States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The overall health budget is just eight percent of the total state budget, far from reaching the 2001 Abuja commitment to allocate 15 percent to health.

Nonetheless, Mozambique is doing quite well in preventing mother to child HIV transmission. Infection rates among children have plummeted, but remain too high at 12,000 in 2013. The good news is that this number is half of what it was five years ago.

Sources: UNAIDS, UNICEF

Some 50,000 elephants are being killed each year in Africa, alongside 1,000 rhinos, leaving perhaps as few as 250,000 elephants in the wild globally. Credit: PJ KAPDostie/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 2 2014 (IPS)

Environmentalists are formally urging President Barack Obama to enact trade sanctions on Mozambique over the country’s alleged chronic facilitation of elephant and rhinoceros poaching through broad swathes of southern Africa.

Investigators say substantial evidence exists of Mozambique’s failure to abide by international conventions against wildlife trafficking, including to back up allegations of state complicity.“We believe that there are ex-military officials who are providing political protection to the [trafficking] syndicates who are arming and funding these poaching teams." -- Allan Thornton

While President Obama last year mounted a new initiative by the U.S. government to tackle international wildlife trafficking, with a particular focus on ivory, some say Mozambique’s actions are undermining those efforts – and threatening these species worldwide.

A new petition, publicly announced Wednesday, now provides evidence on the issue and urges the president to make use of legal authorities to encourage Mozambique to crack down on poachers.

“Mozambique continues to play an ever-growing and uncontained role in rhinoceros and elephant poaching,” Susie Ellis, executive director of the International Rhino Foundation, one of the petitioners, told IPS.

“Although they have been given direction by the international community to enact certain controls, those have been only superficial and have had no meaningful effect. If you look at the large-scale poaching and illegal trade in rhino horn and elephant ivory out of Mozambique, it’s directly undercut President Obama’s [efforts] on wildlife trafficking.”

Increasingly working hand in hand with organised crime, poachers over the past three years have killed record numbers of elephants and rhinoceroses, particularly in Africa. Some 50,000 elephants are being killed each year in Africa, alongside 1,000 rhinos, leaving perhaps as few as 250,000 elephants in the wild globally.

Driving this illicit market is increased consumer demand in Asia, particularly in China and Vietnam. According to a U.N. report from last year, large seizures of ivory bound for Asia have more than doubled since 2009.

The new petition focuses on the central international agreement around wildlife trafficking, known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and warns that Mozambique’s outsized role in African ivory poaching is diluting the convention’s effectiveness. The CITES standing committee is meeting next week in Switzerland.

“Available evidence indicates that Mozambican nationals constitute the highest number of foreign arrests for poaching in South Africa. Organized crime syndicates based in Mozambique are driving large scale illegal trade in rhino horn and elephant ivory,” the petition states.

“Given the scope and depth of the illegal killing and trade in rhino and elephant products by Mozambican nationals, we urge the United States to … enact substantial trade sanctions.”

High-level complicity

Supporters say that strong action by the Mozambican authorities would have a significant and immediate impact on the global supply of illicit ivory.

Officials reportedly estimate that 80 to 90 percent of all poachers in South Africa’s massive Kruger National Park are Mozambican nationals. Local groups say that on most nights more than a dozen separate poaching parties can be prowling the park, most from well-documented “poaching villages” located across the border in Mozambique.

Meanwhile, enforcement of wildlife-related legislation in Mozambique is said to be essentially non-existent, with penalties for poaching and trafficking thus far not effective. Yet changing that situation has been complicated by what appears to be state collusion.

“It’s impossible for that level of illegal activity to be going on without high-level complicity,” Allan Thornton, president of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a watchdog group based here and in London that co-authored the new petition, told IPS.

“We believe that there are ex-military officials who are providing political protection to the [trafficking] syndicates who are arming and funding these poaching teams. There is substantial evidence implicating both the police and military.”

Mozambique keeps strict control over the types of weapons used by the country’s poachers, Thornton notes, yet such weapons are available to the military. Similarly, police and military uniforms have repeatedly been found in poaching camps.

Thornton says that putting together the new petition took several months, due to the mass of evidence available.

“If all Mozambican citizens were prevented from illicitly crossing over the border, poaching would drop significantly. But there has been no enforcement on the Mozambique side, despite legal obligations under CITES,” he says.

“We believe that the Mozambique government should be held accountable for their activities and act rapidly against these poachers, criminal syndicates and those protecting them. They could close this trade literally in a week.

Unparalleled scope

Thornton says his office is not yet clear on whether the Obama administration has exerted diplomatic pressure on the Mozambique government over the issue of wildlife trafficking. But in filing the new petition, these groups are highlighting the fact that the president does indeed have the legal backing to act on the issue.

Under U.S. legislation known as the Pelly Amendment, the president is allowed to impose trade sanctions if a country is certified to be “diminishing the effectiveness” of an international conservation programme. (U.S. officials could not be reached for comment for this story.)

Further, there is notable precedent under which past determinations – set in motion by EIA petitions – have met with particular success. Two decades ago, for instance, a similar petition was lodged around the trafficking of rhinoceros and tiger parts through Taiwan into China.

That effort resulted in U.S. trade sanctions. Over the following two years, both the Taiwanese and Chinese governments engaged in a broad crackdown on these trades.

“This had a huge impact on reducing demand [for ivory] and reducing the poaching of rhinos virtually around the world,” Thornton says.

“We saw rhino populations stabilise worldwide, because two of the biggest markets had closed for demand. This is the same thing we’re now looking for in Mozambique.”

He continues: “And we’re hoping for a particularly prompt response, because the scope of illegal activities we’re currently seeing – where one country is sending hundreds of poachers into another country – is almost unparalleled.”

Chronic shortages of antiretroviral drugs endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of HIV positive Mozambicans. Courtesy: Amos Zacarias

By Amos Zacarias
MAPUTO, Jun 19 2014 (IPS)

Chronic shortages of antiretrovirals across Mozambique are endangering the health and the lives of tens of thousands of HIV positive people on treatment.

Some 454,000 people are on antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, or just under one-third of the 1.6 million Mozambicans living with HIV in 2013, according to government figures.

“Our patients complain they are not receiving the complete dosage of medicines,” says Judite de Jesus Mutote, president of Hi Xikanwe (“we are together,” in the local Shangaan language), a group that assists people on ARV treatment in Maputo.

For ARVs to be effective, the pills must be taken every day at the same time.  Interrupting treatment has serious health consequences.

“Stopping treatment  increases viral load, causes opportunistic infections, and creates resistance to the drug, with the patient needing stronger and more expensive  medicines, which sometimes the country does not have,”  Jose Enrique Zelaya, head of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in Mozambique, told IPS.

Shortages of essential medicines happen intermittently in Mozambique, but the last six months have been especially critical for ARV supply.

Press reports from across the country, but especially the central and northern provinces, tell of people going several times to the clinic, spending time and money only to return empty-handed or with two weeks supply instead of one month’s, or bribing the clinic’s staff to get the drugs.

Rural patients are most affected. “In rural areas, the distances between health clinics and patient’s homes are long, and the roads, problematic,” confirms Zelaya.

In the central province of Sofala, attacks by an armed rebel group has cut the main highway, forcing commercial traffic to drive in convoys under military escort, further disrupting supplies of essential goods like medicines.

But even Maputo, the capital, has not been spared ARV shortages, as Hi Xikanwe members confirm.

Some patients resort to buying the drugs at high prices in the informal markets, with no guarantee of their quality. Many suspect that ARVs from government clinics find their way into markets.

Salmira Ngoni*, an HIV-positive, 26-year-old mother, endured months of erratic supply at the clinic in Ndlavela, in Matola city, 20 kms north of Maputo. In December, she bribed a pharmacist to sell her 15 ARV pills without a prescription for the equivalent of 10 dollars.

In January, a frustrated Ngoni took a more drastic step: she quit the government clinic and enrolled in the DREAM programme for HIV positive people, run by the Catholic Community of Sant’Egidio. DREAM has not experienced ARV shortages.

Erratic drug supply is not new to Mozambique.

“Basically, the problem lies in poor planning from the health ministry and in the process of distribution according to demands,” says Zelaya.

Mutote agrees: “We are told the medicines are stored in the health ministry’s warehouse but the problem is distribution. They lack transport to health clinics.”

Source: Ministry of Health, Mozambique

A 2010 report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) noted Mozambique’s logistical challenges “in procurement, distribution, and storage of medicines and medical products. Poor infrastructure can cause delays and harm the quality of the drugs mainly because of exposure to heat.”

According to WHO, the country’s deficit of health staff affects “the rational use of medicines due to limited capacity in prescribing medicine at clinical level and in distributing it at pharmaceutical level.”

Mozambique had 5.6 pharmaceutical professionals per 100,000 persons in 2010, said the report, one of the lowest ratios among poor countries.

Alarm bells ring

Drug shortages ebb and fall, but their increasing frequency alarms foreign donors, who contribute a large chunk of the health budget for AIDS.

In April, at a press conference, Dutch ambassador Frederique de Man, the focal point for the Health Cooperation Partners, observed “the need for the public to buy medicines from informal vendors because the health units frequently run out of stocks of medicines or receive medicines that are past their expiry dates”.

De Man urged the health ministry to listen to the complaints of people and NGOs, and improve the drug supply chain.

Worryingly, ARV shortages threaten Mozambique’s plan to scale up Option B+,the treatment option recommended by WHO for HIV positive mothers. Option B+ is lifelong provision of ARV therapy to pregnant women regardless of their CD4 count.

In 2013, nearly 85,000 HIV positive pregnant women were given ARVs to prevent transmission to their babies.  Of these, half were enrolled in Option B+. This means they must get a monthly supply of 30 pills for the rest of their lives.

“It is crucial to keep these women on treatment but it is not easy due to long distances between clinics and communities,” said Guillermo Marquez, HIV specialist with the United Nations Children’s Fund in Maputo.

With 56,000 new infections among women in 2012, the needs for ARV treatment will continue to grow.

Concerning children, 12,600 were newly infected in 2013, according to government figures – an improvement over the previous year’s figure of 14,000 new child infections.

Mozambique aims to reduce the number of HIV infections among children to fewer than five percent by 2015.

But Zelaya doubts this goal can be reached in time. “To achieve it, the medicines must be available, otherwise it is impossible.”

*Name withheld to protect privacy

Excerpt:

Erasmo Laldás on his strawberry farm in Naamacha, Mozambique. Credit: Amos Zacarias/IPS

By Amos Zacarias
MAPUTO, Mar 12 2014 (IPS)

Some of the technological excellence that revolutionised Brazil’s tropical agriculture is reaching small producers in Mozambique. But it is not enough to compensate for the underfinancing of the sector.

Last year, Erasmo Laldás, a 37-year-old farmer who has worked for 15 years in Namaacha, a village 75 kilometres from Mozambique’s capital Maputo, planted 15,000 seedlings of Festival, a new strawberry variety originated in the United States.

Laldás produced seven tonnes of strawberries, employing eight workers. He sold all his produce in Maputo, and in January was the lead vendor in that market, because there was already a shortage of the fruit in South Africa, his main competitor.Mozambique invests very little in the agricultural sector, although it has been increasing its expenditure. In 2013 it devoted 7.6 percent of its budget to agriculture, equivalent to some six billion dollars.

“The fruit is very good quality, it does not require as many chemical products as the South African strawberries and its harvesting season is longer than the native variety that I was growing before,” he told IPS.

Laldás is the first Mozambican producer to benefit from Brazilian and U.S. aid through technical support to the Mozambique Food and Nutrition Security Programme (PSAL).

Created in 2012, the project brings together the Mozambique Institute of Agricultural Research (IIAM), the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to expand production and distribution capabioities for fruit and vegetables in this African country.

First of all, studies were needed to adapt seeds to the local climate.

IIAM received more than 90 varieties of tomato, cabbage, lettuce, carrot and pepper, which are being tested at the Umbeluzi Agricultural Station, 25 kilometres from Maputo.

“The results of the trials are encouraging; we identified 17 varieties that have the desired phytosanitary characteristics, and are ready to be distributed to farmers.

“We are waiting for them to be registered and approved under the seal of Mozambique,” IIAM researcher Carvalho Ecole told IPS, regretting that his country has not registered new fruit and vegetable varieties for the past 50 years.

Fruit and vegetable growing is a key sector for generating employment and income among small farmers, as this produce represents 20 percent of family expenditure, according to Ecole.

“For a long time, horticulture was neglected. When talking about food security the government thought only about maize, sorghum and cassava,” Ecole said. Moreover, “our producers still do not have credit or financing,” he complained.

South Africa is the largest supplier of fruit and vegetables for southern Mozambique. IIAM figures show that prior to 2010, nearly all the onions, 65 percent of tomatoes and 57 percent of cabbages consumed in the cities of Maputo and Matola were South African. And those proportions have been maintained.

As a result, prices are high. A kilo of tomatoes costs between 50 and 60 meticals (between 1.60 and 2 dollars) and onions a little less. When the new varieties that have been tested are available for national small farmers, prices will be lower, Ecole said.

Mozambique also imports mangos, bananas, oranges, avocados, strawberries and other fruit from South Africa.

“We need to train and empower local small farmers so that in the years to come they can produce enough to supply the domestic market,” José Bellini, EMBRAPA’s coordinator in Mozambique, told IPS.

Agricultural cooperation is the path chosen by Brazil, ever since the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva government (2003-2011), to consolidate its development aid policy, especially in Africa.

Embrapa, a state body made up of 47 research centres located throughout Brazil and several agencies abroad, has worked to transfer part of the knowledge of tropical agriculture accumulated over its 41 years of existence to other countries of the developing South. Its office for Africa was installed in Ghana.

But Brazil’s presence in Mozambique became unequalled with the creation of ProSAVANA, the Triangular Co-operation Programme for Agricultural Development of the Tropical Savannah in Mozambique, supported by the Brazilian and Japanese cooperation agencies (ABC and JICA, respectively), inspired by the experience that made the South American power a granary for the world and the largest exporter of soya.

The goal in the next two decades is to benefit directly 400,000 small and medium farmers and indirectly another 3.6 million, strengthening production and productivity in the northern Nacala Corridor.

Brazil is to build a laboratory for soil and plant analysis in the city of Lichinga. Embrapa is training IIAM researchers and modernising two local research centres.

But ProSAVANA is a controversial programme.

Small farmers and activists are afraid that it will reproduce Brazilian problems, such as the predominance of agribusiness, monoculture, the concentration of land tenure and production by only a few transnational companies, in a country like Mozambique where 80 percent of the population is engaged in family agriculture.

Students at the Agrarian Middle Institute in Inhambane study the development of a variety of lettuce at the Umbeluzi Agricultural Station in Mozambique. Credit: Amos Zacarias/IPS

Supporting the PSAL makes sense in a very different way. It focuses on vegetable growing, and is clearly aimed at small producers and improving local nutrition. But it suffers from limitations of scale and resources.

“We cannot improve our production system without investment. We have taken a giant step, there is more research and technology transfer, but large investments are needed as well,” said Ecole.

Mozambique invests very little in the agricultural sector, although it has been increasing its expenditure. In 2013 it devoted 7.6 percent of its budget to agriculture, equivalent to some six billion dollars.

Thirty percent of the country’s population are hungry, according to 2012 figures from the Technical Secretariat for Food and Nutrition Security. And nearly 80,000 children under the age of five die every year from malnutrition, according to Save the Children, an NGO.

There is no justification for these figures in Mozambique, which has a favourable climate and plentiful labour for large-scale agricultural production, Ecole said.

Namaacha illustrates the contradiction. It is the only district in the country that produces strawberries. It was able to supply the entire Maputo market, but many producers were bankrupted by lack of credit, said Cecília Ruth Bila, the head of the fruits section in IIAM.

“The small farmers find it difficult to get financing, and our banks do not help much, so producers give up,” she complained.

Nearly 150 strawberry farmers in Namaacha gave up growing them in the last five years because they lacked access to credit, according to information from the section.

Laldás is one of the few to continue. Perhaps that is why his dreams are so ambitious. This year he has asked for 150,000 seedlings to expand his growing area to three hectares, and meanwhile he is seeking financing to put in electricity, three greenhouses, an irrigation system and a small improvement industry.

“It will cost me a total of nearly six million meticals [nearly 200,000 dollars],” he said with optimism.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Jose Ricardo is one of the few sweet potato breeders in Mozambique. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
ACCRA, Ghana, Jan 2 2014 (IPS)

For the few plant breeders in Africa like Vivian Oduro, working for an international research institution is an obvious choice, with prestige and benefits any agricultural scientist would find hard to decline.

But Oduro – a sweet potato breeder – is staying put. She will use her expertise in Africa for the farmers with whom she now shares a special bond because she understands their challenges intimately."We have to transform African agriculture by training our scientists who can solve the problems of food crops, and by training them well in Africa for Africa." -- Prof. Eric Danquah

A PhD student at the prestigious West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI) in the Ghanaian capital, Oduro is part of a group of new thinkers in crop breeding who see fresh opportunities in Africa.

“Working overseas is attractive, but so is Africa when you understand what needs to be done,” Oduro told IPS.

She said her passion for breeding sweet potatoes has led her to develop 30 different strains after consulting smallholder farmers in Ghana. By end of 2014, Oduro anticipates the completion of field trials leading to the development of 50 varieties for multiplication and release to farmers.

“When you handle a crop for a long time, you develop love for it. I call my progenies my babies and would not want to leave this for something else or go elsewhere. My training made me better understand the challenges faced by African farmers, something I could have missed had I trained elsewhere,” said Oduro.

Accelerating Africa’s food production has brought more farmland into play, but often without a matching increase in crop yields, a problem scientists blame on climate change, low adaptation of high-yield crop varieties, poor soils and more importantly, lack of plant and seed breeders with an intimate knowledge of what Africa needs, says Prof. Eric Danquah, the director of WACCI.

Established in 2007 to train plant breeders over a 10-year period following a grant from AGRA, WACCI is aiming to become the foremost centre for the training of plant breeders for Africa. It may not be far from its goal, having made history by graduating eight PhD students in a single discipline – plant breeding – on the same day in July 2013. Currently, 54 students are at various stages of PhD training in plant breeding.

“We need political will to get the training right. We cannot adopt a partisan approach to this because this is too important to toy with. We have for too long paid lip service to agriculture,” said Danquah. “Our scientists can think like any other plant breeders anywhere in the world and a number of people around the world are looking for collaborators to access grants. Our scientists are there because they are strategic thinkers and team players, and are results-driven.”

Data on the number of plant breeders in Africa is outdated. Ideally, Danquah said, for every crop in every agro-ecological region, a country requires two well-trained plant breeders who can use both conventional and modern techniques to develop new crops.

It costs up to 140,000 dollars to train a plant breeder to PhD level (a four-year programme) at WACCI, a cost Danquah said has been criticised as too high but is justified in keeping to high standards that produce high-quality scientists.

Africa, Danquah told IPS, will continue to lose its few seed breeders to foreign institutions at the expense of its agricultural productivity and competitiveness unless there is investment in the training and retention of plant and seed technology specialists.

“We have to transform African agriculture by training our scientists who can solve the problems of food crops, and by training them well in Africa for Africa,” Danquah told IPS, lamenting that while African governments have agreed to invest at least one percent of their budgets in agriculture, many have not followed through.

“Unless we invest at least one percent of our budgets into science and development to train plant breeders Africa needs urgently, we are bound to fail,” Danquah said, calling for national research funds instituted by law and governed by independent apolitical institutions and not by politicians.

WACCI, recently named a beneficiary of the World Bank’s Africa Centres of Excellence project, has launched a 30-million-dollar endowment to bankroll the future training of plant breeders in Africa.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has for more than five years funded more than 500 MSc and PhD students in various agricultural disciplines in 15 universities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

AGRA’s president, Jane Karuku, said the graduates have to date released 66 improved varieties of beans, cowpeas, maize, cassava, sorghum and groundnuts. Using a north-south, south-south collaboration approach, the training has ensured scientists are familiar with local tastes and preferences to develop crop varieties suitable for farmers and consumers.

“The benefits of this approach are manifold. It is considerably cheaper than it is to send the scientists over to Europe or to the U.S., ” Karuku said, adding “These students are well-versed in local problems and can offer viable as well as sustainable solutions, be it crop breeding, soil health management, policy or enterprise development.”

AGRA has invested in a programme to increase the number of crop breeders in Africa. Mozambique is one of the beneficiary countries, where Jose Ricardo is one of the few sweet potato breeders. Ricardo has helped develop and release 15 sweet potato varieties suited for Mozambique, where sweet potatoes are the third most important crop after maize and cassava.

According to AGRA’s inaugural Africa Agriculture Status Report (AASR), launched in September 2013 in Mozambique, there is a serious lack of data on existing agricultural skills capacity in Africa. The AASR seeks to provide a more accurate picture of agriculture statistics in Africa. The report shows that Africa has the lowest research capacity of any part of the world, with only 70 researchers per million population compared to 2,640 researchers and 4,380 researchers in North America and Japan, respectively.

“It is not only the numbers that are needed, the quality of scientists has to improve to match the changes in the agriculture landscape,” the report noted.

Maize breeder Pedro Fato, who works for the Agricultural Research Institute of Mozambique (IIAM), returned to Mozambique after earning his PhD because he believes his skills are critical for his country. Fato has worked on a maize variety tolerant to diseases and limited water, in a nation where droughts and floods are a recurrent problem for farmers.

Population density is high in rural Mozambique. Credit: Courtesy of União Nacional de Camponeses

By Amos Zacarias
NAMPULA, Mozambique , Dec 28 2013 (IPS)

Rodolfo Razão, an elderly small farmer in Mozambique, obtained an official land usage certificate for his 10 hectares in 2010, but he has only been able to use seven. The rest was occupied by a South African company that grows soy, maize and beans on some 10,000 hectares in the northeast of the country.

He got nowhere filing a complaint with the authorities in the district of Monapo, where he lives, in the province of Nampula. And at the age of 78, he can’t wait much longer.

Brígida Mohamad, a 50-year-old widow, is worried about one of her seven children, whose land was also invaded by a company.

“My son has nowhere to grow his crops; our ‘machambas’ [farms] aren’t for sale,” she complained when she met with IPS in Nacololo, the village in Monapo where she has lived her whole life.

These are two cases that help explain the fear among small farmers regarding the Programme of Triangular Cooperation for Agricultural Development of the Tropical Savannahs of Mozambique (ProSavana), which is backed by the cooperation agencies of Brazil (ABC) and Japan (JICA).

Inspired by the technology for tropical agriculture developed in Brazil, ProSavana is aimed at increasing production in the Nacala Corridor, a 14.5-million-hectare area in central and northern Mozambique that has agricultural potential similar to the Cerrado region – Brazil’s savannah.Of the 4.5 million inhabitants of the Corridor, 80 percent live in rural areas, representing much higher population density than in Brazil and other countries, where the countryside has lost much of its population as agriculture has modernised.

Of the 4.5 million inhabitants of the Corridor, 80 percent live in rural areas, representing much higher population density than in Brazil and other countries, where the countryside has lost much of its population as agriculture has modernised.

But in certain parts of the Corridor, it is possible to go two kilometres without seeing a house, as the families who depend on subsistence farming are spread out and isolated, on farms averaging 1.5 hectares in size.

Cassava is the basis of the local diet. The small farmers also grow maize, pumpkins, sunflowers and sweet potatoes for their own consumption, as well as cash crops: cotton, tobacco and cashew nuts.

The prospect of turning the Corridor into the country’s breadbasket, where agricultural exports are facilitated by the Nacala port on the Indian Ocean, is expected to intensify conflicts over land by attracting companies focused on large-scale, high-yield production on immense estates that displace traditional farming populations.

The arrival of these big investors is a terrible thing, Mohamad said. She is opposed not only to the changes directly brought about by ProSavana, but to others that could be accelerated due to the programme’s influence.

The coordinator of ProSavana, Calisto Bias, told IPS that peasant farmers will not lose their land. He added that the main objective of the programme is to support farmers living in the Corridor and help improve their production techniques.

But Sheila Rafi, natural resources officer with Livaningo, a Mozambican environmental organisation, said the way of life of local communities will be disrupted because the investors will bring in new employer-employee relations as local people produce crops for the companies, and monoculture will undermine the tradition of “producing a little of everything for their own diet.”

Generating jobs by means of investment and value chains is one of ProSavana’s stated missions. Another is modernising and diversifying agriculture with a view to boosting productivity and output, according to the website created by the Agriculture Ministry.

But the greatest fear, the biggest threat, is land-grabbing. Many are trying to protect their land by obtaining the “land usage right” based on customary occupancy (known as DUAT). But the certificate does not actually guarantee a thing, local farmers told IPS.

Under the laws of this southeast African nation, all land belongs to the state and cannot be sold or mortgaged. Farmers can apply to the government for a DUAT for up to 50 years.

Some 250 small farmers in Nacololo gathered Dec. 11 outside the home of the local chief to demand explanations about the alleged grabbing of nearly 600 hectares of land by Suni, a South African company.

The district of Malema, 230 km from the city of Nampula, is also experiencing turbulent times. Major agribusiness companies like Japan’s Nitori Holding Company operate in that area. Nitori was granted a concession to grow cotton on 20,000 hectares of land, and the people who live there will be resettled elsewhere.

Another of the companies is Agromoz (Agribusiness de Moçambique SA), a joint venture between Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal, which is producing soy on 10,000 hectares.

The lack of information from the government has exacerbated worries about what is going to happen. “We only heard from the media and civil society organisations that there’s a programme called ProSavana; the government hasn’t told us anything yet,” said Razão.

Costa Estevão, president of the Nampula Provincial Nucleus of Small-Scale Farmers, said “We aren’t opposed to development, but we want policies that benefit small farmers and we want them to explain to us what ProSavana is.”

The triangular agreement, which was reached in 2011 and combines Japan’s import market with Brazil’s know-how and Mozambique’s land, has already proved fertile ground for controversy.

Social organisations from the three countries have mobilised against ProSavana, rejecting it or demanding that it be reformulated.

Brazil wants “to export a model that is in conflict,” said Fátima Mello, director of international relations for the Brazilian organisation FASE and an active participant in the People’s Triangular Conference on ProSavana, held in Maputo in August.

Millions of landless peasants, a major rural exodus, fierce land disputes, deforestation and unprecedented use of pesticides and herbicides have been the result of the model that has prioritised agribusiness, monoculture for export and large corporations, say activists who defend family farming as one of the keys to food security.

An important component of that model is the Japan-Brazil Cooperation Programme for Development of the Cerrado, which got underway in 1978 in central Brazil and is now serving as an inspiration for ProSavana.

The technology that will be transferred to farmers in the Nacala Corridor comes from Brazil.

The Brazilian governmental agricultural research agency, Embrapa, is training extension workers and staff at Mozambique’s Institute for Agricultural Research (IIAM), in ProSavana’s first project, which will run from 2011 to 2016.

Brazilian participation is also decisive in the rest of the components of the programme: the master plan assessing the rural areas and crops with good potential in the Corridor, and the project for extension and models.

“The breadth and grandeur of the ProSavana Programme contrast with the failure of the law and the total absence of a deep, broad, transparent and democratic public debate,” says an open letter signed by 23 Mozambican social organisations and movements and 43 international organisations.

The letter, addressed to the leaders of Brazil, Japan and Mozambique and signed May 23 in Maputo, also called for the environmental impact assessment required by law.

The signatories demanded the immediate suspension of the programme, an official dialogue with all affected segments of society, a priority on family farming and agroecology, and a policy based on food sovereignty.

They also said that all of the resources allocated to ProSavana should be “reallocated to efforts to define and implement a National Plan for the Support of Sustainable Family Farming.”

Free speech key to Mozambique’s development and there are now four private newspapers, many bookshops, numerous cafes, and exhibition venues. However, these are in centralised Maputo and the challenge of informing the rural electorate about the issues remains huge. Credit: Thembi Mutch/IPS

By Thembi Mutch
MAPUTO, Jun 29 2013 (IPS)

In downtown Maputo, the walls are covered with the local newspaper, Verdade, and a range of people, young and old, male and female, are reading it. Verdade, which means Truth in Portuguese, is a free weekly newspaper that is pasted on the walls of buildings in Mozambique’s capital.

It is one of the most innovative, imaginative and, its publishers claim, widely-read newspapers in Mozambique. Aside from the 32-page hard copy of the newspaper, Verdade has a website, a dedicated mobile phone news site, and a presence on social network sites Twitter and Facebook.

All its news is sourced from the community, and people verify and correct the information online. There are no official figures of how many people have access to the internet in Mozambique, but it is estimated that one percent of the population is connected. Verdade also makes use of mobile phones. Citizen reporters, including taxi drivers and shopkeepers from all over this southern African nation, send text messages of their local news to Verdade’s Maputo office.

This citizen journalism is considered key to Verdade’s success. Until four years ago, the state-owned Noticias newspaper dominated Mozambican media. News was little more than propaganda. But with the Mozambican regional elections set for November, and the national elections for 2014, a spotlight has been placed on the issue of accessing information.

“Really this is the first election that we are covering what is happening in the country. Before, in 2008, we were just getting started. We just reported the final results. But now, after five years, the media is a tool for the transformation and development of the country. This election is one of the first steps,” Verdade’s editor-in-chief Adérito Caldeira told IPS.

One of the jobs for the Verdade team will be to ensure polling stations are open, that people know how to use them, and that the election data is reliably relayed.

But also, for the elections to be effective, people must be aware of the issues and what they are voting for.

Mozambique is over 800,000 square kilometres, almost twice the size of neighbouring Zimbabwe, and this makes getting news out and spreading information a real challenge.

Added to this is the fact that 60 percent of Mozambicans are illiterate, and only 10 percent of the country’s almost 24 million people have access to electricity, according to the United Nations Development Programme.

And, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), there is a legal vacuum surrounding the right to information, “which is becoming a serious obstacle to the credibility of the state and to achieving the other fundamental rights and freedoms that are connected to the right to information.”

No Freedom to Access Information

Over 20 civil society groups, spearheaded by MISA, have been trying for the last seven years to get the Freedom of Information Bill through parliament.

According to MISA, the bill “will allow the state to bring the voice of the people into the development processes, opening the path to ensure that all vital forces in society, and particularly vulnerable groups, have a word to say.”

Anthropologist Luka Mucavele told IPS: “The bill will allow access to state files and records, which is a step towards the dismantling of the centralised socialist state. But of course its success rests completely on people knowing they have a right to information, and that they have the time and inclination to pursue this.”

Yveth Matunza, a lawyer at the Mozambican Human Rights League, is worried. “Identity and information are linked. We do have an exemplary constitution here in Mozambique, so the machinery exists. However, most people here don’t know their rights, information is presented in a biased way, and is not explained well,” she told IPS.

“We have a lot of problems when it comes to accessing information. We don’t know when the Freedom of Information Act will become law. We only know it’s on the agenda. Even if this law passes, I don’t believe it will give us access to information,” said Matunza who, in her spare time, is also one Mozambique’s two female rappers.

The bill contains public interest clauses that could override claims of national security or commercial secrecy where public health, environmental dangers, or human rights violations are involved.

Free speech key to Mozambique’s development

There are now four private newspapers in Mozambique, many bookshops, numerous cafes, and exhibition venues, including the French Cultural Institute. However, these are in centralised Maputo and the challenge of informing the rural electorate about the issues remains huge, Mucavele said.

Joaquim Chissau is the owner and editor of Zambeze, one of the other private newspapers in Maputo.

“Expressing our national identity is very important. Since the death of Carlos Cardoso (a journalist investigating government fraud who was shot outside his home in a Maputo suburb) in 2000 we have definitely seen a big improvement in debate,” he told IPS.

“Discussion and debate are a very important part of Mozambican society … there are big discussions we need to have, particularly on the role of oil and gas, and the opposition party, Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance) in Mozambique.”

Renamo has threatened to unleash violence across the country if the ruling Mozambique Liberation Front, known by its Portuguese acronym Frelimo, does not loosen its control on politics and the economy. Since April, there have been repeated skirmishes with both sides, and 11 soldiers and five civilians have been killed to date.

Ivan Levanjeira was born and raised in Mafalala, a township on the outskirts of Maputo and runs the only community tourism initiative in Mozambique. For him, freedom of speech and expression is key to Mozambique’s development. “We are a diverse community, very politicised, our grandparents were forced immigrants. We know our history, and we know our rights.”

But architecture student Walter Tembe is less enthusiastic.

“The economic boom is only for a very, very few… People are worried about getting their next meal. Most of us are blind, we don’t know what’s going on, and if we question too much there’s trouble.”

By Jinty Jackson
MAPUTO, Jun 28 2013 (IPS)

Mounds of sand and rubble are what are left of sections of Maputo’s beachfront road as bulldozers, manned by Chinese construction workers, tear up the road that is being rebuilt. Southern Africa is under construction and the reminders are everywhere.

Amid the dust and earth-moving equipment, delegates from across the southern African region are gathering in the Mozambican capital Jun. 27-28 at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Infrastructure Investment meeting to try to galvanise the funding needed for an ambitious cross-border infrastructure network that will help make the region globally competitive.

Over the next 15 years SADC wants to set in motion an extensive revamping of existing infrastructure as well as building new logistics, including hydro-dams, power transmission lines, roads and railways, while boosting internet connectivity and broadband access across the region.

An estimated 64 billion dollars are urgently needed to fund the first phase of an “Infrastructure Master Plan” SADC adopted at a 2012 summit in Maputo and wants to start putting into motion. Over the next 15 years the total cost of infrastructure projects could run to 500 billion dollars.

“This number can be frightening, but if we do not invest now we will jeopardise our trade capacity,” SADC secretary-general Tomaz Salomao admitted. “We have decided to do it now.”

Poor infrastructure is seen as the biggest hurdle to economic growth across the region. Investors complain that weak infrastructure is one of the main pitfalls to operating in the region. In 2009, the World Bank estimated that the “infrastructure gap” cut two percent off national growth figures in the region per year.

How SADC will raise money to fund what is needed is the big question. Several countries have already set aside big amounts for infrastructure; South Africa committed 400 billion dollars in 2012. Regional integration is an obvious way to cut the cost of doing business for everyone.

For development financiers like the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the assurance that governments are prepared to work together on major cross-border projects is half the battle won.

“For us as bankers that is a critical part. When we look at projects the first thing we look at is, does it have sponsor support from various governments? If you have that, you have ticked a major box,” the general manager of the Development Bank of Southern Africa’s Project Fund, Mohale Rakgate, told IPS.

The needs are enormous, and nowhere more so than in the power grid. The region lags behind West and East Africa in terms of access to electricity. Only 24 percent of its residents have access to electricity, and in rural areas the proportion is closer to five percent.

Malawi, Angola and Tanzania have yet to be connected to a common power pool, the Southern African Power Pool, set up by national electricity companies in 1995 to create a common market for power in the region. Bringing them in forms part of SADC’s short-term infrastructure development goals.

Southern Africa is better placed than ever before to be able to finance its more ambitious dreams. Countries in the region have been remarkably resilient in the face of the global economic slow-down. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the region registered robust growth of 5.1 percent in 2012, which could accelerate to 5.4 percent this year.

Demand for the region’s commodities is partially driving growth, according to the IMF.

But that is only part of the story. Southern Africa is more politically stable than it has been for decades, young people are increasingly taking advantage of new economic opportunities – particularly those presented by information technology – and prudent fiscal policies by governments have helped buffer countries from the crisis and helped build up foreign reserves

“These countries now have quite a lot of capacity to raise debt. The question is how much and how sustainable is it?” Graham Smith, programme manager for Trademark Southern Africa, a United Kingdom-funded programme to help boost regional integration, told IPS.

An obvious source of infrastructure funding is the African Development Bank. Infrastructure already makes up over 30 percent of its portfolio, but governments and the bank alone are not up to the task of raising the kind of finance that is now needed.

The bank is in the process of setting up the “Africa 50” fund that it hopes will be able to leverage some 100 billion dollars to finance infrastructure on the continent. The timing for the initiative is right, according to the bank. Quantitative easing in Europe and the United States will make infrastructure investments in the developing world more attractive.

“You are looking at mid-single to double-digit returns over a long period of time such as for roads or power projects,” the African Development Bank’s regional director Ebrima Faal told IPS.

Investment will not only come from outside, but from the continent itself, Faal believes.

“We see tremendous potential for pension funds. We also see tremendous potential for central bank reserves and other sovereign funds investment,” he said.

Beyond development financing, SADC is setting a great deal of store in building what it calls “public private partnerships”.

In Mozambique, the lack of rail infrastructure is hampering a coal rush in the northeastern Tete province. Brazilian coal company Vale had little choice but to finance the revamping of an old rail track through Malawi and down to a deep-water port on Mozambique’s coast, in order to get its coal out. The company said it would spend 6.5 billion dollars on railway and port construction.

“Sometimes people think it is easy. It is not easy. For each dollar we invest in our mine we have to invest another in infrastructure to enable the project to be feasible,” Vale’s chief executive officer in Mozambique, Ricardo Saad, said.

Thanks to Vale’s line, landlocked Malawi will be able to move its goods more easily to the coast as extra capacity is reserved for passengers and goods. And the line offers possibilities of linkages to Zimbabwe and Zambia.

The region’s rail network is a mishmash of poorly maintained, insular systems that need to be painstakingly revamped and connected to each other for development corridors to become realities.

And concessionaires are seldom prepared to take all the risks involved in building infrastructure unless they are involved in high-yield activities like coal mining.

“Ports and power projects are the most likely to attract public-private partnership because you can ring-fence a long-term revenue stream,” said Smith. Much of the rest, he added, “will be public-sector financed.”

China’s deepening role in the infrastructure sector was a matter not widely discussed in Maputo. The Asian giant already has a 20 percent market share of infrastructure contracting, according to a 2012 report by business consultants Ernst & Young. Chinese loans for infrastructure are growing and in 2011 close to 15 billion dollars in Chinese commitments were secured for infrastructure projects continent-wide.

“We are considering collaborating in transport and power projects. It is a big market from a business point of view,” Jon Lee from China’s Development Bank told IPS. The bank’s presence in Maputo was the only sign of a real and burgeoning Chinese engagement on the continent.

“We are going to engage China big time,” SADC’s director of infrastructure and services, Remmy Makumbe, told IPS. “Our only concern about China is that it is mostly involved in bilateral arrangements rather than regional arrangements. We don’t have a problem as long as they engage in bilateral projects that address a regional framework.”

Mozambique’s capital city Maputo has street names after socialist and communist leaders, however, the country has a huge wealth disparity. Credit: Thembi Mutch/IPS

By Thembi Mutch
MAPUTO, Jun 5 2013 (IPS)

Lined up along the streets of central Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city, are expensive, European-style bars and restaurants with sophisticated names like Café Continental, Nautilus, 1908 and Mundos.

And the residential houses and flats in the capital of this southern African nation are a flabbergasting and bewildering array of 1960s modernist and Art Deco icons, mixed with new-money skyscrapers.

Further away in the new, Chinese-built airport in Maputo, which was completed in February 2013, aftershaves sell for 230 dollars, and bottles of Dom Pérignon, a vintage champagne, cost 320 dollars.

That is literally three months’ salary for the average worker, who lives on 3,000 metacals (100 dollars) a month. 

Faustus Cavelelo is a tuk tuk driver who has worked as a private bodyguard for international investors and as a bouncer. He is now saving to support his young family.

“The big investors need bodyguards because yes, they are so rich and they will get robbed. But for the rest of us, it’s completely safe. For myself it’s hard to make money – people are jealous, and selfish, and don’t help each other. I am determined to improve myself. I work 10-hour days, every day, and work out twice a day, just to deal with the stress, the uncertainty.”

No figures exist on the wealth disparity here. Mozambique is a jumble of statistical contradictions. It has one of the highest real GDP growth rates in the world, at 7.5 percent. Yet it ranks 185th out of 187 countries on the 2013 United Nations Human Development Index by the U.N. Development Programme. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, with over 55 percent of its 23.9 million people officially living below the poverty line.

In central Maputo the latest Toyota Pradas, Hiluxs and Land Rovers drive down Avenidas Julius Nyerere, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung. These former socialist leaders might be turning in their graves at the wealth disparities to be found here.

But who are these new super-rich?

A variety of answers emerge: They are government ministers; they are friends and relatives of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo), the ruling party; they are people working with and for the U.N.; and a small handful are oil and gas investors and associated traders.

The international hotels in Maputo are booked to 95 percent capacity in the week with businesspeople converging here from across the globe: Australia, United States, United Arab Emirates, Norway, Brazil and China. The majority are here for the country’s oil and natural gas – in 2011 Mozambique discovered offshore gas fields.

“It certainly is boom time for the Mozambican economy,” Markus Weimer, a senior analyst at Control Risks, an independent global risk consultancy based in London and Maputo, tells IPS.

“The country is performing strongly in a gloomy global context, and GDP growth rates are predicted to be high (above seven percent) for the coming years. The question is whether strong GDP growth can satisfy the raised expectations of a large part of Mozambique’s young and growing population.”

Feling Capella, a journalist and poet, echoes these sentiments.

“There is a growing divide here: between old and young, between rich and poor. We are the new generation, born in the war. We are educated, we want jobs, but we can’t get them. We live in areas where the roads are awful and there is no public lighting, no sewage system,” he tells IPS.

The Mozambican civil war began in 1977 and ended 15 years later in 1992. But corruption has become a major issue in the country.

Sebastien Marlier, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit who tracks developments in Mozambique, was quoted in the Economist as saying: “Corruption has become a major concern in Mozambique. A small elite associated with the ruling party and with strong business interests dominates the economy.”

The director of Mozambique Human Rights League and Mozambique’s national winner of the Secretary’s International Women of Courage Award for 2010, Dr. Alice Mabota, is candid about corruption.

“People are very angry about corruption. They want the right decisions taken by the right people. Frelimo knows they have a problem. I hope the next generation is able to address these problems. Please, I implore our citizens, go ahead, don’t wait for another person to make change, be that person yourself,” she tells IPS.

But something else that is so obviously missing in Maputo are the middle classes. Dentists and doctors here do not own the newest cars and their sunglasses are not international brands such as Gucci or Prada. Analysts say Mozambique is a glaring illustration that the “trickle down” effect of development capitalism does not work.

Natalie Tenzer Silva runs Dana Tours, the biggest tour company in Mozambique. She thinks the big divide between the country’s rich and poor is “unhealthy”.

“We need to cater for the middle market, for mid-range tourists, and we do this by investing in hotels, airports and cheaper travel. At the moment the big hurdle is the cost of travelling inside Mozambique, it’s so huge, but there’s so much here. Extraordinary beaches, countryside, game parks and a thriving cultural scene.

“We can cater for the existing South and East African market that want to travel here, and stimulate growth in country, and create a new, mobile, middle class,” she tells IPS.

Weimer agrees.

“One factor for the large wealth divide is the high level of poverty on the one hand as well as a rapidly emerging business class on the other. The speed of developments is important as it means that many opportunities bypass ‘normal’ citizens. Another factor is that the business environment is particularly difficult for entrepreneurs and SMEs (small and medium enterprises),” he says.

But for democracy like Mozambique’s to be robust, it needs artists and critics. Credit: Thembi Mutch/IPS

By Thembi Mutch
MAPUTO, May 27 2013 (IPS)

Mozambique is proud home to not one, but two female rappers who are both qualified lawyers. Yveth “Vauvita” Matunza is striking. She is tall, wearing shoes with enormous stilettos. She has on full make up and a smart, tailored dress suit. She is doing her masters part time while working full time at the Mozambican Human Rights League offices – and rapping on her off time.

There is no contradiction in this for her. And she is keen to move away from the heterogeneous “plastic” sound of American hip hop and rap, and create a sound that is distinctly Mozambican.

The other of Mozambique’s female rappers is Dama Do Bling “Lady of Bling”, who recently appeared on a glossy magazine cover, holding her baby daughter.

Mozambique’s constitution, which is in the process of being revised, is exemplary in many things. It recognises that all citizens have the right to an education, that men and women are equal in all spheres of life, and that all people have the right to freedom of expression and of the press.

But for democracy to be robust, it needs artists and critics, as the late, prominent female musician Lidia Sthembile Udenga Mate, from the all-female band Likute, told IPS in an interview in March, just before her death.

“The artists, the musicians are the most important voices in society. We mock, we hold a mirror, we criticise, we are honest, we celebrate… our role is vital,” she had said.

In 2010 the vibrant Mozambican rapper Azagaia directly named corrupt politicians during the bread riots that shook the country after prices of bread soared. He was harassed and arrested for one night before being released. But his case did not go unnoticed by the international media.

There are others, for example, who in their music also name the people involved in corrupt land deals. Like Matunza, it seems they are part of a new breed of savvy young Mozambicans who are openly “globalised”, who are not afraid, and who use social media and publicity, negative or not, to get people to pay attention to the issues galvanising this southern African country.

Matunza says she was obsessed with music as a kid.“Here there’s so much opportunity to play all kinds of music, a vortex that has opened up… Creatively, anything is possible.” -- Chude Mondlane

“And later issues of justice dominated. I was never even aware that there was a conflict between working as a lawyer in the day, and an MC and rapper at weekends. I am 100 percent Mozambican and proud – critical of our failures, proud of our successes, and I know I can reach the public.

“I rap about things that affect us, men who don’t stick around to look after their kids, human rights abuses and our leaders… I am indirect, I talk in riddles, my concerts are a complete sell out, and, yes, I am famous.”

At only 28 she is focused and sure. Her father, who was a miner in South Africa, brought home the music of Madonna and South African female singers Brenda Fassie and Yvonne Chaka Chaka, which influenced her.

“There’s huge domestic violence here – our culture is one of submission for women. I speak from personal experience. I come from a violent family, a violent community.

Mozambican rapper Yveth “Vauvita” Matunza is a qualified lawyer who works full time at the Mozambican Human Rights League offices and raps about rights issues and gender violence. Credit: Solange dos Santos/IPS

“What people do and teach and show, is that women must obey their husbands … the number of domestic abuse cases are increasing since September 2009, despite a new act (being passed in) parliament,” she says. In 2009 parliament passed the act on domestic violence, which became operational in March 2010.

She says rap is important to changing attitudes and bringing understanding to the issue.

The enthusiasm in Maputo is palpable. Paulo Chibanga, a music producer and musician who performed in bands, including the South African 340 mill, and Tumi and the Volume, has returned to Mozambique after 15 years in South Africa.

He is working with the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Welfare to raise money, through music performances, for nursery schools in the Mozambican province of Gaza. A war baby, born in 1979 – the country’s civil war began in 1977 and ended in 1992 – Chibanga feels his generation is relatively un-encumbered.

“We are connected to our pasts without being dragged back … we have no resentments, we know our heroes, our culture. We are free, we are positive,” he tells IPS.

But, like Matunza and Mate, Chibanga is politicised, clear and determined to work to an African agenda.

“I think the Western world affects Africa drastically, we are forced to listened to Western music. In Mozambique we don’t have our own record labels, or the option to record. I am more interested in exporting Mozambican culture and musicians, through Bushfire (Swaziland’s pan-African and international music festival) and the AZGO music festival here in Mozambique,” Chibanga says.

Chude Mondlane is the daughter of the revolutionary president of the Front for Liberation of Mozambique or FRELIMO, Eduardo Mondlane. She is a musician, a performer and a big personality. Visibly radiant, she laughs and plays her music on a laptop in the five-star Polana hotel, oblivious to the turned heads.

She has also returned to Mozambique after years of international travel and playing with music greats such as Marcus Miller, Roberta Flack and South African pianist and composer, Abdullah Ibrahim.

“Here there’s so much opportunity to play all kinds of music, a vortex that has opened up…it’s all happening – the worst of the worst, the best of the best. It’s all mixed up. Creatively, anything is possible.”

She is, however, critical of the lack of funding for arts and culture, and the growing dependency on donors and foreign aid.

“We present this face to the donors … We need to be clear about which bits of tradition we want to keep, and which to jettison. Some of our traditions, like female submission, or women being second-class, are actually awful and we need to say this. We can’t only say what donors want.”

Solange Dos Santos is a dynamic female photographer with a degree from the New York Institute of Photography who has just opened up the first photography studio space in Maputo. Dos Santos, like many Mozambicans returning from years abroad, is excited about the future.

“I left in 1996, so coming back now is amazing. So much has changed. It’s buzzing, alive, more liberal, accepting. I love this about Mozambique. It’s very tolerant, very forward looking.

“The infrastructure is way more developed, the nightlife is buzzing, there are films, art (exhibitions), concerts in the park, dancing, theatre, live music every night – it’s so friendly!  There’s something in the air that makes you want to experiment, give it your best. Here you’re allowed to – completely.”

Dos Santos’s pioneering photographic project done with the United Nations Development Programme, which shows albinos in completely new ways, has toured Africa and New York.

“I want people to see the humanity and beauty in each other … We’re so globalised. I can wear a capulana (a traditional wrap), or high heels and still be a feminist.”

Drainage systems in Mozambique’s capital Maputo struggle to cope with rivers flowing into the city and high rainfall that leave streets flooded. Credit:Johannes Myburgh/IPS

By William Mapote
MAPUTO, Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

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.

“Mozambique is a downstream destination for regional rivers, but it still has much to do to maximise those potentials into national development, ” Patrício José, a member of Southern African Development Community’s water division, told IPS.

Some 54 percent of Mozambique’s annual surface flow comes from outside the country and because of its geographical location it has always been vulnerable to natural disaster, particularly flooding, according to the Global Water Partnership Africa.

“In recent years we have seen more of the destruction that water can cause than the benefits it brings. And the country has a challenge to do more to better address the water issue and water-related development,” José said.

Here, in Mozambique, water has been both a blessing and a curse.

In 2000, floods affected 2.5 million people. Over the last few months the Limpopo, Save and Inkomati Rivers flooded, their water levels boosted by the rainfall in neighbouring countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe. With the heavy rains came destruction and since October 2012, about 113 people have been killed and 250,000 affected.

Maria Filda is one of those affected. As the 17-year-old looks down at her newborn baby, she is just glad to be alive. On the day after her baby’s Jan. 13 birth, Filda watched as floods destroyed her house.

“The sound of the rain beating our metal zinc roof was so strong. Suddenly, I saw part of the wall of our house collapsing. I panicked. I carried my daughter in my arms and ran into the sitting room. Before long, my bedroom wall also collapsed,” she told IPS.

Everything she owned, including her baby’s new clothes, was washed away. She now lives in the Força do Povo community school in Hulene suburb, just five kilometers from Mozambique’s capital, Maputo.

Like the rest of the country, Filda is trying to rebuild her life.

The National Institute for Disaster Management evacuated thousands of people from the most-affected provinces of Maputo and Gaza, setting up 16 shelters and providing local communities with food, blankets, water and medicine.

The largest number of people affected by the floods is from Chihaquelane, in Gaza Province. Shelters there are crowded with almost 100,000 people, as authorities struggle to cope with the large numbers.

The destruction wrought by the floods is stark proof of the country’s failing infrastructure and neglected dams, according to José.

“The country has a few dams, but most them are inoperative or work poorly,” José said. “This is one of the problems … because the infrastructure does not work properly to divert the water and manage the overflow from the rivers. We need to improve their functioning and management,” he explained.

The flooding, however, creates a deceptive impression of Mozambique’s water availability. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, the availability of freshwater in Mozambique is expected to decrease by over half by 2025.

As water stress is expected to become an increasing problem, it has made experts question the feasibility of forestry projects that could affect the country’s water balance.

The government has granted concessions to foreign investors on 250,000 hectares of land in Niassa Province in northern Mozambique, with the intention of developing the country into one of Africa’s biggest suppliers of pine and eucalyptus trees for commercial purposes.

While the land allocation has given rise to allegations of landgrabs and the displacement of local communities, water experts are also concerned that the forestry projects could use up a significant portion of the country’s water supply.

This is because eucalyptus trees, for example, need between 800 and 1,200 millimetres (mm) of water per year to grow.

While there is considerable variation in rainfall across different regions in the country, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the U.N. says that the mean annual rainfall ranges from 800 mm to 1,000 mm along the coast and between 1,000 mm and 2,000 mm in the northern region.

Professor Álvaro Carmo Vaz, a Mozambican water specialist, has no doubt that the water balance in Niassa Province will change as a result.

“If you put that kind of fast-growing species like pine and eucalyptus there, which have a much stronger capacity of absorbing water, it means there will be less water flowing into the river. Because what really happens is that you are using the water before it goes into the river,” he told IPS. He said that the effects of the forestry plantations would have on water supply needed to be carefully analysed in order to find ways to deal with the possible reduced availability.

“Water should be a key issue in the future,” Assistant Professor for Irrigation and Drainage at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Rui Miguel Ribeiro, told IPS. “Looking at the specific case of Niassa Province, obviously it will change the water balance,” he said, adding that assessments needed to be done to confirm this.

Charles Mchomboh, the project manager at Chikweti Forests, a company the government leased 100,000 hectares of land to in Niassa Province, however, told IPS that there was nothing to be concerned about.

With its plans to grow seven million trees per year, Chikweti Forests currently is one of a total of six forestry companies active in Niassa Province.

Ambrosio Manjate, 55, a smallholder farmer from Palmeira in Southern Mozambique. Farmers’ unions believe that soon land will become very scarce for locals. Credit: Johannes Myburgh/IPS

By William Mapote
MAPUTO, Feb 22 2013 (IPS)

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.

“As the UNAC (Mozambique’s National Peasants Union) we think that in the very short term land will become scarcest for Mozambicans because the government is attracting foreign investors, arguing that we have huge unused land, João Palate, a spokesperson for UNAC, told IPS.

Official figures from the Investment Promotion Centre estimate that Mozambique has around 19 million hectares (ha) of land with a potential for agriculture, forestry and cattle – though only 5.6 million ha are being utilised.

“But what happens, in fact,” Palate explained, “when investors come their appetite is centered on land already being used by locals.” 

Some 64 percent of Mozambicans currently live in rural areas where agriculture is the main form of income and 45 percent live on less than a dollar a day, according to human rights organisation FIAN International.

Over the last two years, the Mozambican government approved more than 10 new foreign agribusiness development projects. The biggest is ProSavana, where more than 10 million ha was awarded to Brazilian and Japanese investors.

“We have cases like the one in Niassa Province, where around four entire districts were leased to Chikweti Forests, expelling thousand of smallholders who had been there for many generations,” Palate said.

Chikweti Forests, a subsidiary of Swedish-based investment fund Global Solidarity Forest Fund, established tree plantations on 13,000 ha.

According to the country’s constitution, the land is owned by the state and cannot be sold but, “the right of use and profit from the land is conferred on individuals or groups…”

According the Mozambique’s land laws, people can apply for the right of use and to profit from land with the provincial government, if it is less than 1,000 ha. For land larger than 10,000 ha, applications are required to be submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. According to the law, land can also be allocated to local communities who have occupied it for more than five years.

Palate underlined that land is a sovereignty issue and food production ought to be dominated by locals empowered with knowledge of better farming practices.

ProSavana, for example, are going to grow soybeans, he said. “Which means their business is focused on export — if so, they are not going to resolve our (food security) problems.”

The ProSavana project will be implemented in the Nacala Development Corridor, an area between Nampula, Zambézia and Niassa Provinces in northern Mozambique. Land marked out for the project is currently occupied by thousand of smallholder farmers.

The government, meanwhile, has repeatedly denied claims that smallholder farmers would lose their land in the deal.

Unfulfilled Promises

Mother of three, Delfina Sidónio, has lost count of the number of times she was promised compensation for the loss of her traditional land, she told IPS.

She lost her five-hectare farm in Ruace community in Zambézia Province to Portuguese agribusinesses Quifel when the company was awarded 10,000 ha of land there by the government. Operating under the project name Hoyo-Hoyo the company plans to grow soy and sunflowers for biofuel production.

“I was expelled from my land, which I inherited from my parents, with promises of new land to work on and 680 dollars in compensation. Since I was expelled, one year ago, all I was paid is about a quarter of the amount they promised to pay, and there is no information about the new land to work on,” Sidónio told IPS.

Sidónio is one of more than 200 smallholders who lost their land in the deal.

“Our life was all in that land. That land gave us food and supplies – our life style,” Ernesto Elias, head of the smallholders’ association forum in Ruace, told IPS.

“At the beginning, the company promised to give us new farming land to build infrastructure, to supply water and to pay compensation according to what we had on the farm,” he recalled, “but after a few months all the promises became lies.”

Fatima José, another smallholder farmer from the area, said she is worried about her immediate future. “The last harvest crops are now finishing in our storehouses and from the next two months we don’t know how we will survive,” she told IPS.

Contacted by IPS, the Quiefel office in Gurue, Zambézia Province, denied the allegations. “We are preparing ourselves to fulfill the remaining promises done during negotiations with the communities until next June,” a company official said. “And from then on, nobody will talk about land grabbing in Ruace, but will talk about sustainable cooperation between community and investors to develop agribusiness.”

Mahomed Valá, the national director of Agrarian Services in the Ministry of Agriculture, told IPS that the government is aware of the Ruace community complaint. But all the government could do at this stage is to call for dialogue between the contenders, he said.

“Basically the conflict is concerning unfulfilled promises. The company promised land for resettlement, seed and inoculation to support the smallholders, some infrastructures, among other facilities, but they did not fulfil all the promises. I met the company and advised them to strengthen their dialogue with the community and fulfill their promises,” Valá said.

A small big problem

“The important thing to be done to avoid land conflicts is to adopt win-win solutions,” Rafael Uaiene, Assistant Professor in International Development at the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University told IPS.

Mozambique is still a poor country and needs investment to explore its potential, according to Uaiene. “But the country has to protect the land rights of communities and to promote investment in agriculture, as well.”

Win-win means leasing the land to maximise its use, according to the scholar, “And in the case of land that was being used by local communities, they have to be given compensation as the law defines and be integrated into the cycle of the investments,” Uaiene said.

A mother waits for her baby to be vaccinated at the Bugurundi Clinic in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Kristin Palitza
DAR ES SALAAM, Dec 22 2012 (IPS)

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.

She also uses the phone to schedule appointments, access patient records and order new vaccines when stock runs low.

It is – for now – a theoretical scenario on how mobile technology can help improve childhood immunisation in sub-Saharan Africa. But it will soon become a reality in Mozambique, a country the size of Turkey, where 135 out of 1,000 children die before their fifth birthday.

The southern African nation’s Department of Health has teamed up with the GAVI Alliance, a public-private partnership for immunisation, to launch a pilot project in about 100 clinics in early 2013 where health workers will test the effectiveness and cost benefits of using mobile phones to communicate with patients.

The yearlong three-million-dollar pilot project has been co-financed by British telecommunications giant Vodafone and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. At the end of the trial, vaccination levels in Mozambique should improve by five to 10 percent, the donors say.

“One thousand new mobile broadband connections are made every minute in the developing world, which means we have a tremendous opportunity to transform lives in an easily accessible way,” explains U.K. Secretary of State for International Development Justine Greening.

Africa is the world’s fastest-growing mobile phone market and the second largest after Asia, according to Groupe Speciale Mobile Association, a global industry body. There are about 700 million mobile connections on the continent and the number of mobile phone users increased by nearly 20 percent every year over the last five years.

Although not every mother in the poor nation of Mozambique, which according to United Nations statistics had a meagre gross national income per capita of 382 dollars in 2009, has a mobile phone, at least one family member or a neighbour usually does.

As part of the pilot project caregivers will be registered on a health ministry database and will be educated and alerted by text message about the availability of vaccines and their importance. They can reply via SMS to schedule clinic appointments and will receive notifications and reminders about their children’s past and future vaccinations to make sure each child receives a full immunisation schedule.

Mozambique’s health workers will receive smartphones with software to access records and schedule appointments and help clinics in remote locations monitor stocks to make sure vaccines are available when mothers arrive with their children.

“Mobile technology will help us identify children who until now have been missed and make sure they get a full set of vaccinations,” GAVI CEO Seth Berkley tells IPS. The ability to notify and remind mothers of vaccination appointments is expected to make a big dent in high drop-off rates, where a child receives only one out of two or three necessary injections to make a vaccine effective, he says.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), immunisation is the most cost-effective public health intervention after the provision of clean water. More than a million children die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases, while every fifth child in Africa remains unimmunised, the organisation says.

A number of other African nations have started to use mobile technology in some areas of public health care, although the Mozambican pilot project will be the most comprehensive when it comes to immunisation and will use software specifically developed for national conditions and needs.

Tanzania, for example, uses mobile stock management technology to track malaria treatments in 5,000 clinics across the country. In South Africa, 1,800 remote community health workers use mobile phones to access and update patient records. And when Ghana rolled out rotavirus and pneumococcal vaccines this April, a major local religious organisation helped notify mothers about the new immunisations by arranging for 1.5 million SMS messages to be sent out.

South Sudan, supported by the WHO, began to manage vaccine stocks through mobile technology in mid-2012 in its central and state stores, while Rwanda’s health ministry uses mobile phones to monitor maternal and child mortality.

“The cell phone has been revolutionising (African) healthcare more than any other technology,” Richard Sezibera, Rwanda’s former minister of health and current secretary-general of the East African Community, tells IPS.

Providing health workers with mobile devices “has really changed life in Rwanda,” he adds. The strategy has helped bring down Rwanda’s under-five mortality rate from 163 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 56 per 1,000 live births in 2011, according to U.N. Children’s Fund figures.

Sezibera also believes that using mobile technology can help health departments to better manage their usually meagre budgets. Since most African nations only spend an average of five percent of GDP on health, “how we finance health is becoming increasingly important,” he says. “Using mobile technology can help reduce supply chain and transaction costs.”

If Mozambique’s pilot project is successful, it will be expanded to 1,500 clinics across the country. If that works well, GAVI hopes to implement it in many other low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Berkley says.

Civil society organisations, which have been working to improve child health in those countries for years, believe the approach could make a huge difference to children’s lives.

“We know the children in remote areas are missing out (on being vaccinated), with 22 million around the world being left behind,” says Justin Forsyth, CEO of the international charity Save the Children. That is every fifth child. “Mobile technology, in the hands of front line health workers, could help close the gap.”