Roberto Albino, General Director, Agência de Desenvolvimento do Vale do Zambeze (AdZ)
• Interview
GENERAL DIRECTOR, AGÊNCIA DE DESENVOLVIMENTO DO VALE DO ZAMBEZE (ADZ) What are the best opportunities for economic development in the province where AdZ has its mandate?
AdZ is responsible for the rapid development zone in the central region of Mozambique—the Zambezi River Valley. The region accounts for 27% of national GDP and about 25% of Mozambique’s national population. This region is a huge area, and its main asset is its natural resources. Rice is one of the main crops we produce for local needs and export. In addition, poultry, livestock, and a wide range of seeds can all be produced in huge quantities in the region. AdZ is working to ensure all these crops are produced and distributed locally and abroad. Zambezi River Valley is also where we have a reputation for producing energy. Plus, we have another five big energy projects. The Zambezi River Valley is the country’s best region for energy production. Another of the region’s main opportunities is tourism. In terms of natural resources, we also have iron deposits in the province. These are not yet under exploration, but all the preparation work has been done by a UK investor.
Would you tell us about one or two key projects happening now?
AdZ’s mandate is to promote the Zambezi River Valley itself and also to assist technically and financially with investment projects here. The main sector we have been engaged in so far is agriculture, where we support local producers to ensure they can enhance their capacity to explore the investment potential that exists here. We are heavily focused on rice production. Our main emphasis is first to make the region self-sufficient and then to supply other regions of the country and perhaps later to export rice. For this, we have been investing heavily in research and improving productivity by providing tractors, harvesting equipment, and supporting the industrial sector with manufacturing equipment to ensure we can also produce processed rice locally. This is one of our big goals in terms of agriculture. The second one is in horticulture. We are supporting local horticultural producers with irrigation schemes, improving seed yields, and aggregating the value of what we produce and supply to our main markets. AdZ’s main outreach is smaller farmers to engage them in production and linking them to markets.
“Our main emphasis is first to make the region self-sufficient and then to supply other regions of the country and perhaps later to export rice.”
What are AdZ’s plans to increase agribusiness, and to what extent is the agency involved in supporting rural energy and financial inclusion in your region?
Our approach is always to target the small farmers, as this is how we can promote economic and social inclusion of people in this region. We are engaged with more than 50,000 growers through our programs in different production chains. We provide them with services such as access to mechanization, markets, and technology. We are promoting growth for farmers in their particular areas of production, for example by improving their yields and helping them to get more income out of their crops. We are doing studies into facilitating energy access. In some cases where we cannot provide conventional powerlines, we are providing solar energy. In Tete, we have a flagship irrigation project of more than 1,500ha of production using 100% solar energy. We are busy promoting solar power as an energy source for our small-hold farmers. In terms of access to finance, over the past three or four years we have been able to bring the stateowned National Investment Bank (BNI), which is headquartered in Maputo, to the region. Because we need BNI here, we have supported the bank in establishing a branch and operations in Zambezi River Valley. Today, the local BNI branch is fully operational providing access to finance through our projects in the region. We have also been engaging with the African Development Bank to operate a specific line of credit for rice production. These two development banks are our main intermediaries in terms of providing access to finance for our growers, industries, and traders. ✖
WE WANT TO BUILD a nation that bets on human capital formation and development as its active principle. We intend to invest more in the development of Mozambicans across the country and promote the creation of new employment opportunities on all levels. In the middle-to-long term, we seek to visibly increase public revenue, national average income, and per-capita income. We will continue investing in traditional sectors such as agriculture, fisheries, agro-industry, transport and services, and tourism, all of which hold great potential to create employment. We want Mozambique to continue to be referred to as one of the countries with the highest growth rates in the world; however, the wellbeing of the average citizen is not measured solely through macroeconomic indicators. Vast segments among our rural, peripheral, and urban populations live in poverty. This is exacerbated by the fact that we are a prevalently young nation with high demographic growth. The forecasts are clear: by 2025, we will be 33 million. We need to lay today the fundaments for this not-so-distant future. We need actions, not words. I intend to create and lead a pragmatic government, simplifying its structure and focusing on concrete problem resolution on the basis of justice and social equality.
OUR ULTIMATE MISSION is to ensure that all children have access to quality education and the opportunity to conclude a cycle of education, acquiring at least the basic competences to ensure a better future for our youths. We are investing continuous efforts to ensure to improve the standards and levels of our education system, in all districts of the country. We will pay specific attention to the necessities of the most remote districts in the country, dispatching more professors to these areas, improving the quality of teaching, and involving parents and communities in the process of educating children, so to ensure that all children attend at least the compulsory education cycle (primary education). We also want to improve the quality of our secondary education to offer better and more equal opportunities to our young adults coming out of school, especially girls, so that they are ready to access the job market. Finally, an important goal is to improve transparency and governance in the management of schools at all levels. The challenges lying ahead of us are numerous, and we are determined to tackle all of these in the coming years—the implementation of the Law 18/2018 will be key to ensure this.
THE PROSPECT of mineral resources and gas extraction creates unprecedented momentum for the development of infrastructure, logistics, and transport, which will benefit the whole country. Driven by the necessity to link the Moatize coal mines to the ports, we are seeing the completion of the existing railway-port system in the center and north regions, with a focus on the corridors of Nacala, Beira, and Maputo. One of the goals of the government’s five-year program is to enable our railway-port system to transport larger volumes of cargo. At Port of Beira, work is ongoing on a new coal and mining terminal with 20 million tons annual capacity and a multi-use dock to reduce congestion at the cargo terminal. In the north, we are seeing the implementation of phases I and II of the rehabilitation and modernization project of Nacala port to increase handling capacity. Finally, Pemba is seeing the construction of a bulk cargo terminal to serve the oil and gas industry. There are also plans for the expansion of Pemba’s commercial port and the construction of a transit cargo terminal for the mines in Cabo Delgado. The implementation of all these projects is generating opportunities and capital for the development of logistical solutions across the country.
AFDB FOCUSES on five priorities at the continental level: Feed Africa, that is turning Africa into a net exporter of processed agriculture commodities; Light up Africa, achieving universal energy access; increasing industrial GDP; Integrating Africa, interconnecting African economies and standardizing regulatory frameworks; and Improving quality of life for the people of Africa, creating job and developing skills for the youth. Our focus in Mozambique is to support the government in developing a sufficiently diversified economic base to generate inclusive growth. One of the main pillars of our strategy is agricultural transformation: we want to link agriculture and agro-business to the global markets, strengthen the value chains. A key concern for the transformation of agriculture is climate resilience—an issue that was made all but obvious by Cyclone Idai and major floods. These include investments in water harvesting and technologies for basin and reservoir water collection and the distribution of solar-powered irrigation kits. Most of these projects are directed at smallscale farmers and farmers’ associations. Looking forward, we want to move one notch up the value chain to have fully-fledged agro-industrial parks.