The government of Mozambique announced last Friday, 21 April, that the Export-Import Bank of China has agreed to back the construction of the proposed Mphanda Nkuwa Dam, worth over US $2 billion. The financial agreement comes at great risk to Mozambique's economy, environment, and people, for the benefit of foreign big business. Justiça Ambiental (JA!), a Mozambique-based organization, is urging its government to suspend all activity on the project until all project studies are completed and published.

Six donor countries have granted 39 million US dollars to support education development in Mozambique and the sector's second strategic plan. A memorandum to that effect was signed in Maputo on Tuesday by Education Minister Aires Aly and Dutch Ambassador Lidi Remmelzwaal, on behalf of the six donor countries - namely Holland, Canada, Ireland, Britain, Germany, and Finland. Speaking shortly after the signing ceremony, Remmelzwaal said that this sum will be increased to 50 million US dollars in 2007.

The Mozambican government on Thursday (April 21) signed a memorandum of understanding with the Export-Import Bank of China (China Eximbank) for financing the Mepanda Nkua dam and hydro-electric station on the Zambezi, in the western province of Tete. The cost of the dam, the power station, and the transmission line from Tete to Maputo is put at 2.3 billion US dollars.

Education is a key protective factor against HIV. But school dropouts are increasing in many affected countries. We urgently need new ways to deliver the ‘education vaccine’. Can open, distance and flexible learning (ODFL) meet this need? Researchers from the Institute of Education, University of London, address this question through field studies in Mozambique and South Africa.

Alfonso Pene, an information technology student at Eduardo Mondlane University, spends a lot of time on the Internet researching computer programming languages. But the university's slow connection speed makes doing his homework an exercise in frustration. That is about to change as a result of an effort by six major US foundations - including the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation - to boost Internet bandwidth at African universities.

This study was used to find out the reasons for the continuous drop-out of girls in Primary Education in three districts in Zambezia Province, namely Maganja da Costa, Morrumbala and Nicoadala. The study looked at the barriers to girls' education and the interlinkages between different barriers, both from a rural and semi-urban context, and attempts to establish an understanding of the relations between poverty and other causes affecting girls' access and retention to primary education.

Despite years of interventions designed to turn around Mozambique's historically poor education system, the 2006 school year has kicked off to a dismal start, sparking debate about proposed plans to solve the countries chronic teacher shortages. According to Naima Saú, Deputy Director of Teacher Training at the Ministry of Education, teacher-pupil ratios were a major cause for concern: "on average, there are 50 pupils in each class, and some teachers even have as many as 70 pupils in a class".

The educational level of adults is one of the most important indicators of poverty in Mozambique. More than a decade after the agreement that ended the 16-year civil war, educational levels remain extremely low. Getting more children, and particularly girls, into primary school is a major challenge. And the challenge does not end with getting children into school: it is also important to reduce drop-out rates and ensure that more children complete primary school.

In a repeat of a crisis a decade ago, donors now fear that the IMF is blocking aid increases to Mozambique, reports the Mozambique Political Process Bulletin. With public pressure in several European countries for increased aid, and with problems in Ethiopia and Uganda tainting these former donor darlings, donors are anxious to pump more money into Mozambique - especially as budget support. But the IMF says no - it will not allow Mozambique to accept more budget support. Instead, it wants donors to fund more projects outside the state budget - which goes directly against the policy of many donors.

Mozambique has deposited its instrument of ratification of the protocol on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa with the African Union on 30th December 2005. Mozambique is the 17th state that ratified the protocol (January 18). Burkina Faso and Guinea in West Africa will very shortly deposit their ratification instrument as their parliaments have respectively authorised it.

The man convicted of murdering Mozambican journalist Carlos Cardoso is to serve 30 years in jail. A retrial in Maputo upheld the 2003 conviction of Anibal "Anibalzinho" dos Santos Junior, who planned the killing. An appeal court allowed a retrial since the first trial was conducted in absentia after he fled Mozambique. Cardoso was murdered in 2000 while investigating a $14m fraud related to bank privatisation. The case has drawn attention to corruption in Mozambique.

In a bid to ensure the sustainability of its antiretroviral (ARV) treatment programme in Mozambique, the international NGO, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has focused on skills transfer with the aim of handing over the running of its sites to the government. This would see the government and local community taking over the responsibility for running MSF's Lichinga site in the northern Niassa province, which treats 370 patients, by the end of 2008.

Okello Oculi looks back at a Council for Development and Social Research in Africa (Codesria) meeting that took place in Maputo early in December under the title "Rethinking African Development: Beyond Impasse, Towards Alternatives". While the decimation of African economies through the application of so-called development policies was frequently raised during the meeting, attention also focused on the poor state of African scholarship.

The Council for Development and Social Research in Africa, CODESRIA, held its tri-ennial General Assembly in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, from 6-10 December, 2005. The theme of the event was "Rethinking African Development: Beyond Impasse, Towards Alternatives", and was attended by 400 scholars drawn from within and outside Africa. Its hosting by a Portuguese-speaking country (or rather a country where the language of government is Portuguese) was a landmark in unifying Africa's scholars across colonial language walls. The election of a female Mozambiquecan, Professor Tresa Cruz da Silva, as the new President, retained the tradition of having a woman at the top, while Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, of Nigeria, remains as Executive Secretary. Professor Zen Tedesse from Ethiopia stepped down from the presidency.

The theme of "impasse" in Africa's development clearly also applied to the dismal condition of scholarship in the continent's universities. The chairman of the "Scientific Council" of the organisation reported, for example, that out of the one thousand proposals sent by those who wished to participate in the Maputo assembly, only 155 were suitable in terms of quality of research. There was virtual poverty in philosophical issues including those in the fields of law and anthropology at a time when the continent is desperately in need of new directions and alternatives to the disaster in governance and economic decay which has marked the last three decades.

A major indicator of the impasse for Nigeria was in the low level of representation by the spread of universities which sent scholars and the ranking of those who attended. Only Ahmadu Bello University, Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo, Nsukka, and Lagos State Universities, were represented with a grand total of less than 15. Like Kenya, Nigeria's more senior academics were either out of the business of active and creative scholarship or too tied down with earning money from consultancy work, or both. At a time when both countries are gripped by intense and often murderous struggle for power and over new directions for development, it was laughable that their weight was woefully light in Maputo as CODESRIA searched "Towards Alternatives".

In his opening speech Professor Adebayo Olukoshi condemned increasing calls by leading propagandists in Europe and North America for the "recolonisation of Africa". Professor Jomo Kwame Sunderam, a Malaysian scholar (whose father attended the 1945 Pan African Congress in Manchester and later named his son after Jomo Kenyata and Kwame Nkrumah who were at that Congress), ended his address by stating that: "Our challenge is to make History African", as against calls in newspapers like The Times (of London) and the Washington Post, as well as some think-tanks in London and Washington, for bringing an end to "problems of failed states in Africa" by establishing a new American Empire over the continent. Nigeria's academics and scholars are clearly not responding to these calls by increasingly choosing to watch football matches between Arsenal and Manchester United etc etc, instead of rising to CODESRIA's war horns.

Professor Sunderam drew attention to what he called " a counter-revolution against development economics" which since the 1980s hit Africa devastatingly with "trade liberalisation", "de-agriculturalisation", and negative "terms of trade". Opening up Africa's markets to massive imports resulted in de-industrialisation through the collapse of "whatever manufacturing capacity which had developed" in the 1960s and 1970s. The loss of jobs, in South East Asia, for example, hit jobs where women had sought liberation from tyrannies of household labour. Massive imports of food or food aid, and insistence by the World Bank and the IMF that subsidies to peasant farmers be withdrawn, resulted in undermining local food prices and capacities for food production, resulting in the collapse of food securities all across Africa.

The third blow has been in the prolonged decline in prices of primary commodities. Mwalimu Nyerere had long ago complained about the higher quantities of cotton or sisal Tanzania had to export in order to purchase one imported tractor. While prices of commodities from the tropics (like cotton) have declined severely, that of temperate commodities (like wool) have been much less. Moreover, the industrialized countries are producing chemical products out of Africa's plants, herbs and condiments and claiming intellectual copyrights over them.

In Sunderam's view, "intellectual property rights have become the biggest earners of foreign exchange for the United States of America". Finally, he focused on the sad fact that most governments in Africa now have "fewer instruments to be able to stimulate economic growth". This is due mainly to takeovers of local banks. In Kenya, for example, foreign banks have returned to the colonial practice of not lending to the local private sector, preferring to get 44 per cent of their earnings from buying government bonds; as well as charging interest rates as high as 26 per cent, thereby crippling productive investment.

In any case, only 20 per cent of foreign direct investment goes into the so-called "green fields" i.e. those that create new manufacturing capacities. The myth of foreign direct investment continues to hide the fact that African countries are net exporters of capital to North America and Europe either as debt over-repayments, payments for patents, over invoiced charges by multinational corporations, or stolen funds being hidden by corrupt officials.

One deficiency in the CODESRIA general assembly meeting in Maputo was that this analysis came from a scholar from outside Africa's universities. This is due partly to African governments keeping their own scholars away from government corridors and policy arena, with files marked "Secret" being more accessible to foreign researchers with dollars to pay as tips to their vigilant keepers. In addition to this, is the severe poverty of local scholars, which leaves the best of them vulnerable to funds to be earned from the IMF/World Bank - sponsored projects whose agenda have more to do with "palliative economics" than with "development economics". The promise by the Executive Secretary of the organisation, Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, that "fighting for academic freedom" will be a priority in the next three years, should include yanking open to African researchers creaky gates to government policy vaults.

* Okello Oculi, Ph.D, is Executive Director of Africa Vision

* Please send comments to [email protected]

As the death toll from flooding in Mozambique over the past few days has climbed to 22, officials are now faced with the threat of waterborne diseases like cholera. "About 200 cases of cholera have been reported across the country," a spokesman for Mozambique's National Institute for Disaster Management (INGC), Rogerio Manguele, told IRIN on Monday.

Community radio has developed into the most popular and successful medium in rural Mozambique. However, many stations may have to shut down when their funding runs out later this year, the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) reported.

The Mozambican public prosecutor in the Carloso Cardoso murder case has asked for Anibal dos Santos Junior, or Anibalzinho, to be jailed for up to 30 years, writes Charles Mangwiro on the website www.journalism.co.za Olinda Cossa argued that Anibalzinho was undoubtedly guilty of the 2000 murder of Cardoso, Mozambique’s top investigative journalist. Cossa cited evidence found during the investigations and a series of interviews Anibalzinho gave to the press since his return from South Africa where he was rearrested after his first escape from prison on the eve of his trial in 2002.

London's Guardian on Saturday examined the hurdles Mozambique is facing in trying to reduce mother-to-child HIV transmission. About 35,000 infants contract the virus from their mothers annually in Mozambique, and only 3% of women in the country were tested for HIV in 2003, the Guardian reports. Clinics are able to reduce the risk of vertical HIV transmission by giving pregnant women and their newborns the antiretroviral drug nevirapine and by performing caesarean-section deliveries.

Seventeen long years of civil war in Mozambique, have left behind a scarred terrain and the brutal legacy of widespread economic misery and famine. Worse, a whole generation was born into war and grew up never knowing peace – since the scars of the spirit take the longest to heal.The war started in 1977 and by the time a ceasefire was finally declared during 1992, an estimated seven million guns littered the landscape. But in an effort to initiate something positive out of the void, 'Throne of Weapons' scheme was borne of desire to create a symbol of peace to transcend the violence which had created it and in the process herald a new beginning.

At the start of his retrial for the crime, Anibal dos Santos Junior, or Anibalzinho, has denied any involvement in the 2000 murder of Mozambican investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, writes Charles Mangwiro in a story reposted on www.journalism.co.za ”I neither killed nor contracted anybody to kill Cardoso,” Anibalzinho told the Maputo city court. He was previously sentenced to Mozambique’s longest jail term of 28 and half years after being tried in absentia two years ago.

The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) and the Open Society Justice Initiative (the Justice Initiative) are pleased to invite applications for the Human Rights Fellows Program for the 2006-2008 session.

This program was launched in 2003 by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) and the Open Society Justice Initiative, in collaboration with Conectas Human Rights, the Open Society Foundation (South Africa) and South African, Mozambican and Angolan Civic organizations.

The Fellows Program is 20 months in duration and involves both academic study and practical experience in human rights/public interest advocacy. Up to six human rights lawyers and activists from Angola and Mozambique will be selected to participate. Candidates must be nominated by human rights NGOs based in Angola or Mozambique.

For further information, please visit http://www.conectasur.org/pt/noticia.php?cod=890 or write to [email protected]