Resource information
This assessment, reflecting
poverty's many dimensions in Mozambique, combines
multiple disciplines and diagnostic tools to explore
poverty. It combines quantitative and qualitative approaches
to understand trends in poverty and the dynamics that shape
them. The objective is to support the development and
implementation of proper policies that really work by taking
poverty's multiple dimensions into account. The first
analysis is using multiple quantitative and qualitative
indicators on levels and changes in the opportunities and
outcomes for households and communities in Mozambique since
1997. The main economic developments, analyzes how changes
at the macro and meson level affected household livelihoods,
and how households, especially poor households, responded.
Agriculture and the private sector, especially
labor-intensive activities, many of them small and informal.
It can build human capital by improving access to basic
public services, especially for the poor, and by increasing
the value for money in public spending. And it can improve
governance and accountability by getting government closer
to its citizens. To achieve these goals, the government will
need to increase the value for money in its spending on
public services. It will also need to target services for
the rural poor and enlist poor communities in identifying
needs and delivering those services. And it will need to put
in place good tracking systems to link program outputs to
targets and outcomes, using frequent high-quality household
surveys. Mozambique was an extremely poor country at the
time of its elections in 1994, with decimated
infrastructure, a weak economy, and fragile institutions.
Since then, it has been astonishingly successful at
restoring growth and improving welfare. Sustained growth --
driven primarily by investments in physical capital --
reduced monetary poverty from 69 percent of the populace in
1997 to 54 percent in 2003 and the depth and severity of no
income poverty even more. Broad-based, labor-intensive
private-sector growth was efficient in reducing poverty
until 2003 because it was equally distributed. At the same
time, investments in social and economic infrastructure
extended access to public services, reduced welfare
inequalities, and supported the livelihoods of the average Mozambican.
