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Mozambican Civil Society Within: Evaluation, Challenges, Opportunities and Action
2. They recommended consolidation of the existing spaces and mechanisms for
coordinating and financing CSO interventions at all levels of society;
3. They recommended building CSO technical and knowledge capacity to improve their
use of policies and laws and the spaces already provided by the state, the private sector
and the international community, and to improve their actions with communities:
4. They recommended improving CSO knowledge, promoting continuous research that
could influence and better inform their actions, based on evidence;
5. They recommended that a periodic Civil Society Index study be carried out.
Specific Recommendations for Each Dimension
Given the limited time available, the workshop participants agreed that concrete
recommendations should be prepared later by the technical group and other interested parties.
Consequently, the CSI Coordination Team and the workshop facilitators met to draft relevant
and more opportune recommendations.
The recommendations were organized by study dimension in order to visualize how to improve
the index of each one. The set of recommendations makes it possible to contribute to improving
the participation and involvement of civil society in the country’s social and economic change
processes.
Recommendations on the Structure Dimension
The structure of civil society measured the citizen’s involvement in the country’s social and
political affairs, and also how CSOs are organized. As the final score was 1.1, a relatively poor
structure, the following is recommended:
• Civil society organizations should try to encourage and challenge citizens to exercise
their citizenship more by getting involved in social and political affairs such as, for
example, supporting poor and/or vulnerable communities, exercising their constitutional
and human rights but also by fulfilling their civic duties;
• Organizations that are large in terms of financial and human capacity as well as
geographical coverage should seek ways of providing funds, resources and assistance
to less able ones. This could be done in two complementary ways: i) establishing a
coordination mechanism for building capacity in specific areas that improve their social
and political interventions: ii) using the same mechanism to coordinate the
deconcentration of funds, human resources and knowledge among the organizations.
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Civil Society Index, Mozambique 2007