This is the first one of a series of reflections about my internship in Mozambique. I apologies to readers as the blog has been quite neglected in the past couple months. However, time permitting, I intend to get back to my normal posting habits. Tell me what you think!
Try the following: google ‘Mozambique government strategy’,
grab a shield, and hit enter. You will be bombarded with hundreds of official
government documents, detailing strategies to… you name it – from reducing
poverty and malnutrition to promoting culture and sovereignty. For newcomers to the country –
such as me – these documents are a solid proof that the government is serious
about the issues of your choice. My issue is food security and nutrition and
if you read the PAMRDC (the government’s strategy to combat malnutrition or
‘the bible’ as I call it), the essence of integrated development emerges
clearly. You look in detailed and
find out that all the Lancet interventions of their maternal and child healthseries are included and you cannot content your happiness. In other countries
where REACH operates, such level of government commitment is years in the
future. But then you take a copy of your bible to a meeting with a provincial ministry director and he says “PAMR….what”?
Yes, Mozambique has a soup of strategies that seek to
satisfy different audiences -especially donors- but
when it comes to implementation these lofty strategies often fail to reach the
ground. So here is my own exercise to navigate this endless list of documents:
The country’s development strategy is set in the PQG – a five year plan – and the PARPA. The former is presented to voters and the later to international donors. In addition to those, pretty much every ministry has its plan, and for cross-sectorial interventions such as nutrition, gender, and others, you also have development plans.
The country’s development strategy is set in the PQG – a five year plan – and the PARPA. The former is presented to voters and the later to international donors. In addition to those, pretty much every ministry has its plan, and for cross-sectorial interventions such as nutrition, gender, and others, you also have development plans.
But those are just the key ingredients for the soup’s
stock. What really makes the soup tasty (or terrible for that matter) are the
local strategies. For that, every provincial and district office has a
multi-year strategy and the yearly PES (economic and social plans). Moreover,
large NGO have projects that completely overshadow the organizational capacity of
these local governments and their respective plans. Not only there is little
coordination between the NGO’s project and the PES, but also such projects
provide little capacity to local governments, and in occasions living things worse off
when the project ends.
Another very significant challenge is that cross-sectorial
issues at national and local level have little legal and budgetary power. Since
these strategies rely on a coordinated approach, they quickly become bureaucratic
orphans as none of the ministries likes to take a leadership role in their
implementation. And while the country has SETSAN - an agency mandated with the
coordination of food security and nutrition interventions among ministries – petty
turf wars have left the agency toothless and inefficient – a comment I will
often hear outside the formal meeting settings.
So what now? Well, stay tuned for the next post. Something
tells me that after all this soup may serve well to Mozambique’s outstanding cuisine.