Mozambique

Mozambique is a fertile country on the east coast of southern Africa. WaterAid has worked here since 1995 helping communities gain access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene education.

Credit: WaterAid / Jenny Matthews

Mozambique is a fertile country in south-eastern Africa with a coastline that stretches 2500 km along the Indian Ocean.

The ex-Portuguese colony is still recovering from a civil war that lasted from independence in 1975 until 1992.

The ongoing repair of the infrastructure is being accompanied by relative political stability and good economic growth. However, the legacy of war and the country's vulnerability to floods, droughts and earthquakes create serious setbacks to development.

Extreme poverty remains widespread, with low life expectancy and a high child mortality rate. The government estimates that over half of the population do not have safe water to drink.

This situation, combined with inadequate sanitation, means that water-related illnesses become killers, with diarrhoea causing around 10% of deaths in children under the age of five.

WaterAid in Mozambique

WaterAid's aim is to improve the lives of poor people through the provision of safe water, sanitation and hygiene education using technologies that are affordable, appropriate to local conditions and easy to maintain by the community themselves.

In Mozambique 147 out of every 1000 children born die before their fifth birthday. WaterAid's work is vital if families are to improve their children's health and lift their communities out of extreme poverty.

To date, WaterAid has helped more than 270,000 people in Mozambique gain access to water. Our work has particularly focused on working with government departments to implement the national water policy in a way that ensures the poorest people benefit from affordable and long lasting projects.

WaterAid began working in the far northern Niassa province in 1995, strengthening district-based government departments and local non governmental organisations (NGOs) Estamos and Ulongo to work with communities to implement water, hygiene and sanitation projects. 

Using the experience learnt here, WaterAid has been in a partnership with UNICEF since 2002 to act as the technical advisor to a large-scale integrated water, sanitation and hygiene education programme in the neighbouring Zambézia province.

Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world, with Niassa and Zambézia provinces two of the poorest in the country. Because people in these areas live in extreme poverty, hundreds of miles from the nearest town, they need easily-maintained technology to supply clean water. Since 2003 WaterAid has been piloting the use of simple rope pumps.

If the pump breaks, rope is fairly easy to find and cheap enough for communities to afford. Because the rope pump is quick and easy to fix it means that communities do not have to revert to collecting water from unhygienic sources such as unprotected wells, swamps or rivers.

Another WaterAid-promoted technology is the composting latrine. Agricultural trials in Niassa province have shown that compost from these latrines hugely boosts yields of maize crops and fruit trees, both vital to the local economy.

In composting latrines human waste is mixed with soil and ash to decompose into compost which can be dug out after a period of time and used in agriculture. WaterAid and Estamos are responding to demand from farmers to assist in constructing more composting latrines. Incidences of disease will continue to fall as sanitation coverage increases and crop yields rise.

We believe that for projects to be sustainable they must be appropriate to local conditions.

Credit: WaterAid / Jenny Matthews.

Since 2003 WaterAid has been active in the urban areas of the capital Maputo and more recently Quelimane. We are working with the Municipal Government in Maputo in five bairros - unplanned city neighbourhoods - outside the main city water supply network and two bairros inside the network to achieve 100% coverage in water and sanitation. To date this has been achieved in one bairro, Urbanização, with water supplies improved in another, Aeroporto.

Download the Mozambique country information sheet
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