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Mozambique

Cabo Delgado multi-sector household survey - Montepuez, Balama, Namuno and Ibo

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Objective

This report aims to provide a holistic view of the needs and risks faced by families in Cabo Delgado. It reviews in detail the conditions of families in four districts - Montepuez, Balama, Namuno and Ibo - both in the centros de reassentamento and in the host communities. The overall objective of this survey is to assess the conditions of families, by reviewing specific communities and groups, as well as their interaction, so as to gain an overall understanding of the basic dynamics of how change happen in this context and ultimately: Improve project targeting, tailoring, and adaptation; Identify more nexus-oriented and contextualized solutions; Orient AVSI's response towards recovery and resilience.

Recommendations addressing Urgent Needs with a Triple Nexus Approach

  • Strengthen and widen support for rural communities by investing in both emergency and recovery initiatives. Most immediately food distributions and more targeted nutrition interventions aimed at the most vulnerable, starting from infants and their mothers, should be considered, most possibly to be implemented before the end of the lean season (liaising with the harvest monitoring system). Looking forward, the boosting of the farming sector would increase the production of food and provide occupation in agriculture activities so as to alleviate the high level of food insecurity and reduce the incentives to engage in controversial activities (ex. the uncontrolled cutting of trees for charcoal production)
  • Consider more carefully health-related issues as a major source of vulnerability. In the short run, WASH initiatives deserve to be scaled up and (especially in Ibo) deepened (reviewing the safety of the few functioning boreholes and the state of the many unused boreholes). Looking forward, health centers should be supported, including by stepping up their outreaching activities, while parallelly strengthening referral pathways in underserved communities (especially rural and centros de reassentamentos).
  • Invest in conflict mitigation and resolution as an essential strategy to improve protection in the short-term and the enabling environment for economic recovery in the medium-long term. An immediate objective should be bettering the level collaboration among parties by improving communication and accountability to beneficiaries while supporting their capacity for self-organization. Going forward, local leaders and administrations should be helped to work more effectively together on day-to-day issues as well as around long-standing controversies (for example land disputes).
  • Consider subsistence farming as a criteria of vulnerability. Data shows that farmers cultivating only one crop (maize or groundnuts) are as food insecure as families facing social vulnerabilities (ex. widows or women-headed families), hence deserve relief too.

Recommendations promoting Recovery while fostering Women Empowerment

  • Identify local solutions by analyzing and strengthening the relations between ordinary people and successful local entrepreneurs, leaders providing tangible support, broker of conflict resolutions, etc.; (avoid analyzing vulnerable people as independent and detached from their communities -- you would not try to understand the condition of young children per se, without analyzing also the state of their parents and the relation parent-child right?)
  • Without abandoning the (sectorial) value chain approach, consider also intersectoral project of recovery (similarly to integrated emergency interventions) and analyze the driver of local exchanges and economy development (territorial analysis of linkages across sectors).
  • Step up support for associations (i.e. farmers groups), as a complement to family/individual garden/activities, not a substitute. Adopt a flexible approaches when it comes to models of intervention: i.e. Farmer Field School vs Lead farmers Consider activities aimed at strengthening groups' organizational capacity and management as an essential part of interventions aimed at strengthening entrepreneurship.
  • Consider group/ mutual support dynamics also (even more so) when providing support to vulnerable people. Monitor people' workload and minimize the burden of low-productivity activities on women as an essential part of the gender empowerment agenda