from All Africa Macia, - Mozambican President Armando Guebuza declared on Friday that this year's elevation of the town of Macia, in the southern province of Gaza, to municipal status will speed up its development and contribute significantly to the fight against poverty.Macia is one of ten towns granted municipal status this year, bringing the total number of municipalities in Mozambique to 43. Elections will be held for mayor and for members of the municipal assemblies in all of them on 19 November.Speaking at a rally in Macia, Guebuza said that with these measures of decentralisation the population will participate in the exercise of local power and management.After overthrowing colonialism and achieving peace, the current challenge facing Mozambique is the struggle against poverty,...
from All Africa The Mozambican government believes that it is on track for meeting one of the key targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), that of reducing by half the percentage of people living on less than a dollar a day.The government's balance sheet on economic and social progress in the first half of this year is optimistic that, at the current rate of poverty reduction, the number of people living below the poverty line will fall from the 2003 figure of 54.1 per cent to 45 per cent in 2009, and to 40 per cent by 2015.This will meet the MDG target, the government says. That assumes that, in 1990, 80 per cent of the population were living below the poverty line. Due to the war of destabilisation, accurate figures for that year are impossible to obtain - the first reliable...
from IRIN News After a four year stint working on a South African gold mine in Johannesburg, Orlando Khosa, 33, returned home to Mozambique to establish his own business and eight years later it proved to be a smart business decision."I used to earn about R2,000 (US$250) a month at an underground gold mine in Carlton, but the money was not enough and I decided to come back home in the year 2000," Khosa told IRIN."But since I returned I have been looking after my family working as a dealer and supplier of goods such as TVs, radios and cellphones and other services. I make more money that way," he said, outside his kiosk situated in the narrow streets of the poor residential district of Polana Canico, on the outskirts of the Mozambican capital, Maputo.Khosa is one of the more than...
from AFP via Google MAPUTO — The spread of HIV in Mozambique has hit the economy and is heightening poverty, the United Nations chief representative in the country said on Friday."One of the biggest challenges of the growth of Mozambique's economy is the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS which is affecting most of the economic sectors and creating new levels of poverty," Ndolamb Ngokwey said at the opening of the country's first national conference on the pandemic.Mozambique has an HIV rate of 16.3 percent among its population aged between 15 and 49 years and authorities say at least 500 new infections are registered daily."As part of the United Nations' reform programmes in which Mozambique is a pilot project there is a need to fight the impact of AIDS and to uplift human rights," Ngokwey...
from I AfricaCreation of more job posts in urban and rural areas of Mozambique will help reduce poverty levels, a United Nations' country representative said on Thursday.Speaking at a poverty alleviation seminar in Maputo, Ndolamby Ngokwey said instruments used in the fight against poverty were limited while resources were little."We have agreed that poverty alleviation will be achieved through the creation of more job posts, as a way of increasing buying power of people in order for them to have decent lives, good health and education," Ngokwey said.The seminar was part of the government's ongoing consultative forums under its Poverty Reduction Programmes which are now in their fourth phase.Under the programmes the government implements development programmes in consultation with civil...
from Reuters South Africa By Charles MangwiroMAPUTO (Reuters) - Mozambique wants to reduce poverty significantly by 2009 through creating more jobs and small enterprises in the agriculture sector, a government minister said on Tuesday.Planning and Development Minister Aiuba Quereneia told Reuters in an interview that 54 percent of the southern African country's 20 million population currently lived in poverty.he government aims to cut this to 45 percent in 2009."We are pressing for the establishments of small and medium enterprises, a 'Green Revolution' in agriculture, its marketing and transportation," he said."Therefore we are allocating an annual $205 million to 128 districts in order to cut poverty from the current 54 percent to 45 percent by 2009."Quereneia said Mozambique would lay...
from Reuters Africa By Charles MangwiroMAPUTO (Reuters) - AIDS is becoming a major threat to Mozambique's booming economy, killing off workers who are key to the southern African nation's development, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Friday.More than 16 percent of Mozambicans between the ages of 14 and 49, generally the most economically productive, are infected with HIV. An estimated 500 new infections occur each day."It is affecting the prospects of Mozambique, particularly its limited human resources," Age Bakker, the head of an IMF mission to the country, told reporters in the Mozambican capital Maputo."We recommend the government to work harder, although we reckon that it (the pandemic) has the full attention of the government," Bakker added.Mozambique, one of the...
from The Mail and GuardianMozambique's poverty-alleviation programme this week received a boost following the approval of a further $60-million loan by the World Bank."The council of executive directors of the World Bank has approved a credit for the International Development Association [IDA] to the value of $60-million for the implementation of the fourth phase of Poverty Reduction Support Credit [PRSC-4] for Mozambique," the bank said in Maputo on Friday.The fourth phase of the PRSC is the second in a series of operations approved by the World Bank and will assist the government of Mozambique, among others, to implement reforms that will result in the reduction of poverty indices, and to help the country achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).Michael Baxter,...
from the UN News Centre14 January 2008 – The United Nations is stepping up relief operations in central Mozambique as a sharp rise in floodwaters along the Zambezi River in the past 48 hours uproots yet more people to join the tens of thousands already displaced.“The number of people displaced is fast reaching a critical mass,” the representative of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Leila Pakkala, said today. “Urgent action is crucial to prevent outbreaks of diseases, which are of great concern at the onset of a crisis, especially among children.”An estimated 50,000 people have already been evacuated to resettlement centres across four provinces. The floods have hit some of the poorest and most isolated communities in the country, where access to social services is...
from All AfricaUN Integrated Regional Information NetworksMaputoFor years, the coal-mining town of Moatize, in the northern Mozambican province of Tete, has been a ghost of its former self, but this is about to change.Its railroad is closed and the purpose-built prefabricated neighbourhood, called Berlin after long-disappeared German miners, now houses local residents. Like much of Mozambique's extractive industry, the decades-long civil war resulted in large-scale damage to infrastructure, and the region's mineral wealth was all but ignored.But the peace dividend appears to be paying off since hostilities ended in 1992. Vale do Rio Doce, a Brazilian mining company, is expected to resuscitate coal mining at Moatize by 2010 and its investment has already begun to bring rapid changes to the...
from the Independent On LineMaputo - Current efforts by the Mozambican government to alleviate poverty were on track and could result in the reduction of poverty indices by 50 percent by the year 2015, state media reported on Wednesday.Fernando Minete of the Mozambican Debt Group told Radio Mozambique that through the government's poverty alleviation programme, there was hope that the UN's Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015 would be met.However, Minete said the government needed to strengthen its efforts by creating credit schemes to help the rural population set up income generating projects.He said through these projects, the rural population - which comprises more than half of the country's population of 20 million living in abject poverty - could increase its...
from All AfricaUnited States Millennium Challenge Corporation (Washington, DC)Washington, D.C.In a signing ceremony today at the State Department's Benjamin Franklin room, Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Ambassador John Danilovich, and Mozambican Minister of Development and Planning Aiuba Cuereneia signed a $506.9 million Compact designed to reduce poverty in Mozambique by promoting sustainable economic growth.Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte officiated and witnessed the signing joined by Mozambican President Armando Guebuza.The Compact between MCC and Mozambique seeks to reduce poverty levels throughincreased incomes by improving water, sanitation, roads, land tenure and agriculture. The program is expected to benefit approximately five...
Top Story: Three weeks ago, my favorite sex advice column answered a reader's letter which asked what the reader should do about a good friend who is HIV positive but continues having sex with people without revealing his HIV status. In his response, columnist Dan Savage suggests dropping the friend, and goes on to propose "drug-support payments," where people who knowingly infect others with HIV are required to pay to support the cost of providing anti-retroviral medications to the people they infect, a burden which often falls onto underfunded state drug assistance programs. He went into more depth about it (as I'll let you read for yourself), and asked for readers' comments. Over the next week his column received a "shitstorm" of feedback from readers, and Dan answered their questions...
from The Tide, NigeriaThe World Bank Board of Directors has approved a loan of 70 million U.S. dollars for Mozambique to support the government’s Second Action Plan for the Reduction of Absolute Poverty (PARPA II).This money, from the Bank’s soft loans arm, the International Development Association (IDA), is part of the “Third Poverty Reduction Support CreditA World Bank press release on Thursday stated that the PRSC 3 will be delivered in three annual installments over the 2007-09 periods.The money will be disbursed, the release added, “against the upfront completion of a number of specific reforms agreed upon by the government and the 18 external partners providing general budget support”.The release quoted Gregor Binkert, the World Bank Task Team leader of the project, as...
As part of its support to 'post-conflict' countries, CTA has published two reports on agricultural information and communication needs in Angola and Mozambique. The reports provide a wealth of insights and information into the current situations in each country.In Angola, it seems that almost all aspects of agricultural information and communication need attention: Organisations expressed a "great need for up-to-date information" [in Portuguese]; "capacity building is needed for the implementation of demand-driven extension services"; "training and support for policy makers is needed to keep a focus on pro-poor and demand driven ICT development"; and, "since most libraries are already damaged and out-of-date, the need exists to build new libraries almost from scratch."Some immediate needs...
from All AfricaUN News Service (New York)New YorkAlthough Mozambique has posted impressive economic gains since the end of a brutal civil war in the early 1990s, nearly half of its children still live in extreme poverty, deprived of basic nutrition, health care, education or shelter, according to a United Nations report launched today.The analysis finds that while the country shows potential to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) related to poverty reduction, child mortality and maternal health by the target date of 2015, the social and economic benefits of the last decade have not been distributed evenly among Mozambique's estimated 10 million children.About 49 per cent face severe water deprivation, which means they only have access to surface water - such as rivers - for...