This is the next post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This one is all about the economy of Mozambique. Imagine this as a sort of brief and impersonal overview of just the facts. Its kind of like trying to read the license plate of a parked car when you’re going 60mph on the highway. This series is my attempt to answer many of the questions that I’ve been asked about Mozambique, other than the always popular “where’s THAT?” These articles should help you understand what things are like in Mozambique and just how they came to be that way.
Mozambique is one of the least developed countries on earth. There is really now way to soften that fact. Its about as third world as it gets, and Nampula is one of the most undeveloped parts of the country. In order to appreciate the gravity of just what it is like to be in one of the most undeveloped places in the world, you must first realize that much of the inability to develop is directly tied to the economic potential of the region. This frist post on economy is designed to tell you just what it looks like for most people in Nampula: where they live, what access they have, what they do for a living, what opportunites they have to spend their very hard earned dollars on, and just what the difficulties are from a purely economic standpoint.
To begin, I’m going to throw some slightly disjointed statistics at you. You may notice that this is the first time I’m directly stealing facts from Wikipedia (and even if I cited that Nampula is the Tatooine of the Empire it wouldn’t make a difference). The truth is for most of this I have a secret source. It is the “Strategic Plan for the development of the Province of of Mozambique”. Its an intra-governmental (emphasis on mental) memo that was circulated by the Provincial government here and was signed by the Governor himself. The only reason I have it is because I think one of the kids stole it from somewhere and gave it to me so they wouldn’t be caught with it. Consider that:
• Nampula is listed at 9th out of 11 provinces for Development. The two worse than us don’t have a city over 15,000 people.
• In our Province, 92% of people don’t have electricity, 78% don’t have a radio, 84% don’t have access to clean water.
• Six of the 18 districts of Nampula don’t have electricity at all.
• 85% of the Province practices agriculture for a living. Of these people, 2% are mechanized (tractors, combines, etc). The remaining 98% farm by hand without even the aid of animals.
• The Province declares that, “82% of roads and 88% of bridges are currently passable.”
• Half of cities don’t have a bank branch anywhere near them.
• There is one doctor for every 35,000.
• While unemployment it impossible to estimate, the Province does estimate than within Nampula City (pop. 1/2million) that 69% of people live in absolute poverty (less than $1 per day).
• The GDP (per capita) in our province is about $450USD per year. That number is an average weighted by the fact that there are a small amount of people that earn a ton of money. Still, it means that on average people earn about $1.25 per day.
• For the last 6 years, population growth has outpaced economic growth, and after accounting for inflation and population the economy of Nampula has been decreasing by about 2% per year.
Also, while the causality of the relationships between education and economics is very challenging to figure out, the problem is caused/exacerbated by the fact that the literacy rate is only 30% (85% and 55% of men don’t know how to read). To make matters worse, the university in our city is currently producing more lawyers than teachers.
Most people here are lucky if they can find a trade to practice or anyone to train them. People are reluctant to teach trades because once that person learns a skill (welding, mechanics, construction) they become a threat to take jobs from the person teaching them. Nobody has money to open a store and its impossible to get a loan for anything. Many people sell goods on the street (bread, fruit, coca-cola, counterfeit Chinese DVDs). The profit margin is so slim that a man selling ice cold coca-cola will earn only about $1.60 at the end of the day.
Many places (including the gov’t) pay people through direct deposit in order to eliminate corruption in the payment process. This results in every day lines being over 1hr long of people standing at the ATM to take out every last cent they have. It also results in most the ATMs in town running out of money frequently through the day.
I want people to appreciate that life here is tough, but there are regions exactly like Nampula all over the world. You can go to hundreds of towns in China, India, South Africa, middle-of-nowhere Mongolia and see that people live in the same or worse poverty that people in Nampula do. While places like the slums of India and a million people living in a garbage dump in Cairo and stone-age Aborigines in Australia get lots of attention, places like Mozambique are, on a regional scale (remember, twice the size of California), slightly unprecedented.
Next week we’ll look at how the government helps maintain the economy and put in places policies to promote growth and stability. And if you couldn’t tell, that last sentence was very sarcastic.
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