Mozambique is showing promising economic growth and has enjoyed some degree of political stability. The key element of an educated and skilled labor force, however, continues to hold back the country’s development.
Prior to the civil war the country had been at war for over 10 years to gain independence from Portugal. What was left in 1992 was a broken country with little infrastructure and a population drained of its most educated and skilled members.
Twenty-four years later Mozambique is showing promising economic growth and has enjoyed some degree of political stability. The key element of an educated and skilled labor force, however, continues to hold back the country’s development. Many highly educated Mozambicans have left the country. A recent study by the World Bank revealed some shocking statistics about education in Mozambique.
The study found that during announced visits to schools, 45 percent of the teachers were absent, and of those that were present 11 percent were not in the classroom. This teacher absenteeism problem has resulted in primary school students receiving, on average, only 74 effective teaching days out of 190 school days.
This “human resource” catastrophe is all the more frightening in that the problem will only get worse with the current education system.
Probably even more problematic are the statistics on teacher competence. For example, only 1 percent of all fourth-grade teachers surveyed were able to achieve an 80 percent test score on the very curriculum they were teaching, and only 39 percent of fourth-grade math teachers were able to accomplish the subtraction of numbers with decimals. The result was that only 5 percent of fourth-grade students could subtract doubledigit numbers, and 56 percent of pupils were absent.
World Renew is committed to mitigating this problem by providing informal education and training to farmers and rural business people to help them improve their livelihoods. In a five year program funded with match funding from the Canadian government, we are working with nearly 1,500 individual households to improve their understanding of agriculture and rural business. Farmers in this program will experience yield increases through improvements in soil fertility, soil moisture, and seed quality.
World Renew has also started to work with a new partner in Zambezia Province of Mozambique that bases their work on what they call “the education value chain.” This new partner, ESPANOR, believes that education at every level is critical to the development of Mozambique. We will be supporting their agriculture training and education program, but they also have their own primary school and vocational training programs. The director of ESPANOR, Pastor José Antonio Matique, speaks with passion about the need to cultivate new hope in both the youth and the productive rural farmers in this remote district of Mozambique. We hope to tell you more about the work of this exciting new partner in the coming year.
Juvêncio (pronounced Ju-ven-see -oh) Mataria has spent the past five years working with the fair trade movement in Africa and will start with World Renew in mid-September. Juvêncio and his wife will be living in Lichinga, where our main partner in Mozambique (the Anglican Church) is based. We are overjoyed that such a qualified and skilled individual has agreed to join World Renew, and we know you will enjoy hearing from him firsthand in our next newsletter.
As we welcome Juvêncio, we say goodbye to Jason Horlings, who has been working with us for the past two years. Jason has done an incredible job of innovating our agriculture programming in Mozambique and helping our partners meet the stringent requirements of government donors. Jason will be continuing his education in international development at the University of Ottawa in a master’s-degree program.
We wish him the best, and we hope we will see him again with World Renew once he completes his studies.
Blessings,