The GCAP campaign in Mozambique is on track. Last Wednesday 1st June, we launched the campaign through a public forum about the issue of poverty and MDG progress in Africa and Mozambique in particularly. About 100 people from different organizations, students, academics, attended the event lead by Graça Machel. The event had the participation of senior members of Mozambican Government; UNDP and prominent Mozambicans activists. Were planning to bring Pres. Chissano to the campaign.

As Senior Public Health Adviser you will among other things assist the Provincial Health Directorate in advising within public health planning, monitoring, quality development and other parts of the Health Sector Programme. You will collaborate closely with the provincial Chief Medical Officer in the elaboration and implementation of new health initiatives. You have an academic medical degree, preferably combined with a postgraduate degree in public health planning and/or -administration. You must be ready for changing environments in which fluency in English and interest in learning Portuguese is required.

Mozambique has failed to meet almost any of its targets for governance, justice or corruption control, but its performance over the past year was still "satisfactory", according to a joint donor-government statement issued Thursday 12 May. But speaking for donors, Swiss ambassador Adrian Hadorn said that the government would have to act on rights and on corruption if it expected to continue to maintain donor confidence. An accompanying independent report was highly critical of donor performance. It also criticised the government for being "passive", for failing to provide leadership, and for being subservient to donors. Read more details in the Mozambique Bulletin, available by clicking on the link below.

For the well-being of today's families and for future generations, how important is investment in education and other forms of human capital? This report analyzes the potential for investments in education - by individual households, by government, and by donor agencies - to reduce poverty in postwar Mozambique. It also explores the factors that influence the decision to send children to school, and how long children remain in school.

An ambitious plan to hire an average of 9,000 new teachers a year in Mozambique is expected to ease the workload of existing educators and improve the quality of education, a senior official told IRIN. "The teachers at the moment are overburdened," Telesfero de Jesus of the ministry of education said. Severe staff shortages meant many teachers had to teach two shifts.

On 28 March 2005, the Maputo City Court's eighth section, in an unprecedented move, decided to bar the media from covering a libel case involving one of six men sentenced to long prison terms in January 2003 for the murder of Mozambique's foremost investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso. The case is of great public interest since it pits Attorney General Joaquim Madeira against Momad Assife Abdul Satar (also known as "Nini"). Madeira has alleged that Satar libelled him in open letters published in the weekly "Demos".

The Mozambican government intends to transform the fight against HIV/AIDS into "a national emergency", declares the government's five year programme, which is now before the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic. The current HIV prevalence is estimated at 14.9 per cent among adults aged between 15 and 49. There are thought to be 1.4 million HIV-positive Mozambicans, 60 per cent of whom are women.

"The Zambezi River is the source of life for our families… [it] is generous and other users along with us benefit from it. We respect all of them as good neighbors, and we especially recognize the important role of Cahora Bassa dam… However, in the 30 years since the dam's construction, we have lost productive lands along the river and on the islands. The reeds we use have disappeared. Fish in the river have also decreased. In the delta, the River arms are progressively drying up. The mangroves are threatened, and so, too, is the prawn fishery…" These are some of the conclusions that a group of 70 subsistence farmers, fishermen and NGO members from the Lower Zambezi River in Mozambique developed in a declaration they presented to government authorities in October 2004. The full article is contained in the February edition of the World Rivers Review. published by the International Rivers Network.

The new Mozambique government has probably broken its agreement with the IMF by hiring sufficient teachers, says the Mozambique Bulletin. "All over Africa, the IMF has imposed a cap on government wages of between 7 per cent and 7.5 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product, effectively national income). In nearly all countries, teachers are the biggest part of the wage bill, and by setting the cap as a percentage of GDP, it means the poorest countries, which usually have the biggest educational needs, can hire the fewest teachers. This, in turn, means these countries are less likely to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Initially the Ministry of Education said it needed to recruit a further 10,000 teachers for this year, but because of the IMF cap, the Ministry of Finance only allowed the hiring of 4000. The new Education Minister, Aires Aly, last week announced that the Ministry of Finance will allow him to hire 5000 extra teachers. Read the full newsletter by clicking on the link below.

"Chaos, incompetence, secrecy and arrogance on the part of the National Election Commission (CNE) are all shown in the ruling last month of the Constitutional Council and in internal CNE documents released by Renamo. Numbers don't add up, results were changed without explanation, crimes were not investigated or prosecuted, and instructions from the Constitutional Council were ignored." This is the latest analysis of the elections in Mozambique from the Mozambique Political Process Bulletin which notes that perhaps it is time for civil society to hold public hearings and promote changes to the electoral system.

Reaction to President Armando Guebuza's inaugural speech this week has mostly been positive, with Mozambicans agreeing that poverty, corruption and crime are the key challenges facing the country. "It was a good speech, and was in line with what he said in his campaign - what we hope now is that this is not only a speech," Lorenco Jossias, editor of the Independent Zambezia newspaper, told IRIN last Thursday.

Armando Guebuza was sworn in as Mozambique's new president on Wednesday, in an inauguration generally seen as ushering in a fresh, reformist agenda for the country. Fernando Goncalves, editor-in chief of Savana, an independently weekly, told IRIN he was cautiously optimistic that Guebuza could deliver. "We will judge him by his actions, but what we can say at the moment is, it is a good sign that he has identified corruption as a major problem in Mozambique."

The tall man is skeletal. Even so, it is a huge feat for him to muster up the energy to sit upright in front of his visitor – a young, vibrant woman. They sit on wooden chairs around a small table in the centre of a starkly bare room. Lying on the table are a wall clock and several packets of pills – for the time being, things that are key to the man’s survival. "Why do you have to go yourself to the hospital tomorrow?" asks the 31-year-old woman, Louisa*. The man, 51-year-old Fernando, coughs and then replies faintly, between gasps of breath, "My wife doesn’t understand Portuguese well, so it is difficult with the doctors."

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has called on the Mozambican authorities to protect Jeremias Langa, news director of the privately-owned television station Soico TV (STV). On 27 January 2005, the journalist was kidnapped at gunpoint in Maputo. He was held briefly and threatened with "the same fate as journalist Carlos Cardoso if [he] continued to talk too much." Cardoso was killed in 2000. Langa was previously attacked and threatened by armed men in October 2004.

Mozambique's supreme law-making body has called for the inclusion of local and international observer missions at all stages of the vote tally, ensuring greater transparency in future elections. Although the Constitutional Council (CC) last Thursday validated the results of the December 2004 general elections, which the ruling FRELIMO party won by a landslide, it reportedly said it had followed the debate on observers' access to vote tabulation "with concern".

Mozambique's main opposition party, RENAMO, will reserve action on its allegations of vote rigging till the country's supreme law-making body makes a ruling on the conduct of the December 2004 parliamentary and presidential elections. The former rebel movement's national council announced after meeting this week that although it rejected the election results, it would only call for elections in the areas where "irregularities" had been reported, according to Namubrete. Last month the party called for a re-run of the entire electoral process.

The National Elections Commission (CNE) has said that hundreds of editais (polling station results sheets) had been "stolen" and not included in the final results. It also admitted ballot box stuffing in Tete. In making its various secret "corrections", the CNE says it gave an extra parliamentary seat to Renamo in Zambezia. The admissions that two of Renamo's key complaints were valid came at a CNE press conference in which the CNE said it rejected Renamo's protest over the 1-2 December elections. The statement leaves the election results even murkier and more confused than before, reports the latest edition of the Mozambique Political Process Bulletin.

Mozambique's National Council for the Fight Against AIDS (CNCS) has spent less than 40 percent of the funds allocated to HIV/AIDS activities in the country in 2004. According to the local news agency, AIM, the CNCS had planned programmes costing US $17.7 million, but only $6.5 million was disbursed and used, leaving projects planned by civil society and the public sector in the lurch.

Armando Emilio Guebuza of Mozambique's ruling FRELIMO party is heading for a landslide victory in the recent presidential polls, if the results published so far are to be believed. A coalition of twenty opposition parties however says they are a result of massive fraud and demands fresh elections. The preliminary results from six out of Mozambique's ten provinces have already been published. According to the National Electoral Commission, FRELIMO candidate Guebuza received about 70 percent of the vote in these provinces.

Corruption is a worldwide and age-old phenomenon. Yet in recent years, Northern donors have become increasingly vocal about corruption in Southern countries and the need for these countries to clean themselves up. Northern donors themselves, however, refuse to change their own policies, or to make tackling corruption a priority. Indeed, they continue to support corrupt Southern elites who are willing to back Northern priorities on economic liberalisation, including free trade and the down-sizing of the state.