ACT News Update

Mozambique 01/05

Drought and other factors lead to deteriorating situation in Mozambique

Geneva, November 22, 2005--The situation in rural areas of Mozambique stemming from a prolonged drought, as in several other countries in eastern and southern Africa, has been deteriorating in the last several months. Added to the drought conditions is a list of economic, social and health factors that feed on and exacerbate each other, quickly sending many rural communities in particular in a downward spiral.

It is against this backdrop that members of the global alliance Action by Churches Together (ACT) International in Mozambique are calling other members to action. “We need [to] support [people] now because the rains have started and farmers need seeds now,” says Philip Wijmans, head of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) program in Mozambique, which, with the Ecumenical Committee for Social Development (CEDES), is responding to the drought in Mozambique under an ACT appeal.

“The situation in the center and south of the country is serious,” writes Wijmans from Maputo. “The people have no food, and the nutritional status of children is being affected.”

Wijmans says the World Food Program (WFP) has also received little support for its response in rural areas. Wijmans and the LWF emergency and microfinance officer attended the WFP coordination meeting earlier this month where it was shared that, since a May 2005 multi-sectoral Group of Vulnerability Survey, food security has been deteriorating. The survey found that the majority of households have no food reserves or seeds and have limited income-generating opportunities.

The survey found additional factors that are putting people at further risk: an increase in the prices of basic commodities and fuel, making it harder for people to obtain food and seeds; scarcity of water due to a number of boreholes that are not operational; and cattle, a valuable commodity of rural farmers, dying from lack of water and unclean conditions.

In all, the survey, conducted from October 4 to 14, found that 801,653 people in 60 districts in Mozambique are vulnerable to food insecurity through March next year.

In the ACT appeal, issued on October 4, LWF and CEDES have proposed to provide drought-related assistance to approximately 23,000 households in the affected provinces of Maputo, Gaza, Inhambane, Sofala, Manica, and Tete. According to Wijmans, the LWF-CEDES response does not include any significant food distributions, but the members would distribute food if the appeal could be revised and supported by ACT members.

Another complicating factor in the situation identified in the WFP survey and by others is the ongoing forced migration to neighboring countries because of the drought and the migration of men to South Africa in search of work. Audax Rukonge, a student intern with LWF who was sponsored by ACT member FinnChurchAid, in a reflection paper following an impact study, observes: “Whenever the young men grow [up] they dream of going to make money in South Africa, in mining or shoddy jobs. For them, South Africa is a promised land, where, despite their little education, they can still earn something. Just to earn something to bring home. Nevertheless, there is a mounting danger in this migration. Women are left to take care of the children at home, in some cases only to receive coffins of their husbands. If they are lucky, they’d nurse their husbands at home before they die.”

Rukonge is referring to HIV and AIDS, “a silent killer, gulping the lives of young women and men” in a community in Gaza where he worked.

Rukonge notes that LWF, in its long-term development projects, has worked with this community on awareness of HIV and AIDS, which have been additional, deadly consequences of the migration, but there are also social-cultural and economic factors that themselves have fuelled the spread of the infection, notes Rukonge. “With challenges of poverty, [one is] forced to accept migration to South Africa as one of the mitigation strategies by households.” He quotes an old man who is a former migrant worker in South Africa: “Although we take energy and labour away from this community to South Africa, and in turn we get AIDS, we have no other alternative.”

LWF, CEDES and other members of the ACT Mozambique Network have also been proactive in responding to the drought and other disasters that the region is prone to. In October, the network held a community-based disaster-preparedness workshop in Langa Boi community funded through ACT Appeal AFMZ-51 – Community-based Disaster Preparedness. During the workshop, participants identified many of their challenges, but the workshop named solutions and strengths of the community as well, including high involvement of families in relief projects because of high participation by women and a desire to find alternatives to modern development to lesson the cost of rain-fed crops.

Elsewhere in the region, from Malawi to Lesotho, ACT members are assisting rural communities that are also suffering from drought conditions, which have persisted for several years in some places. The situations in other countries are often equally complex with a number of complicating factors. U.K.-based Christian Aid, an ACT member that is active in many food-related emergencies in Africa, says in a June 2003 report titled “Why is southern Africa hungry? The roots of southern Africa’s food crisis” that “the hunger crisis is due to an explosive combination – chronic poverty, poor governance, market failure, soaring rates of HIV/AIDS and economic failure” ACT members who are working in Mozambique and other drought-stricken African countries believe that these countries’ string of crises, long in the making, must be addressed with a long-term perspective and long-term solutions to help communities break the downward spiral.

LWF-Mozambique and the Ecumenical Committee for Social Development (CEDES) are responding to the drought on behalf of ACT members around the world under ACT Appeal AFMZ52 - Assistance to Drought Affected. The appeal has received US$230,000 (17 percent) of the requested US$1.3 million.