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Mozambican Civil Society Within: Evaluation, Challenges, Opportunities and Action
3.4.5.1 Lobbying for State Service Provision
There is still a strong, centralized state culture in Mozambique that, directly or indirectly, impedes
people’s participation and active initiatives to resolve emerging social needs.
The option of liberal policies to promote a market economy has been used as a subterfuge and
justification for the state to shed many of the social functions that it should carry out, maintain or
even reinforce. Privatisation options for public services are also used as an excuse for the state
not getting involved.
Various NAG members emphasized that, in practice, the privatization of state services only
results in transferring the state’s monopoly power to one or another private entity. Nevertheless,
the NAG also recognized the state’s effort to find effective ways of guaranteeing stability, both
political and financial. In this case, the government’s efforts to achieve budget stability, creating
good articulation with international partners, was explicitly recognised by the NAG. Precisely
because of this positive effort, the NAG decided to increase the initial classification from 1.0 to
2.0.
3.4.5.2 Meeting Pressing Societal Needs Directly
The evidence available in this report shows that the most urgent needs of Mozambicans gravitate
around the lack of sources of income and their standard of living. However, as already noted,
the NAG emphasized yet again that the fact that most CSOs do not deal with employment
promotion makes their relevance questionable.
Moreover, the GAN felt that it was essential that CSOs play a more active role and make every
effort to make public administration improve its performance and service for the citizen. Once
again, the example mentioned above of the relevance of CSOs lobbying parties with parliamentary
seats about a voting card that is more useful for the citizen, that could be used for many different
purposes not just the electoral act, was also mentioned here.
However, the GAN also recognized that on some occasions in the past CSOs were able to
have an impact on the international community, in particular with regard to debt forgiveness.
According to some analysts, their monitoring of how the resources saved were being used
seems to have been less effective (Hodges and Tibana; Administrative Court, 2005, 2006, 2007).
For these somewhat contradictory but not consistent reasons, the NAG has given a score of
2.0. In other words, in this area civil society exists but its impact is limited, occasional or
sporadic.
3.4.5.3 Response to the needs of marginalised groups
This indicator tries to evaluate whether CSOs are more or less effective in providing services to
marginalised groups, compared to the state. At first glance it seems unreasonable to compare
the effectiveness of CSOs with that of the state, as CSOs have much fewer resources than
Civil Society Index, Mozambique 2007
97