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Mozambican Civil Society Within: Evaluation, Challenges, Opportunities and Action
Box 1.1.1: Foundation for Community Development
Hope in the fight for social justice
In the early nineties Mozambique was emerging from a long civil war that had been tearing the country apart
since 1976. In addition to the gigantic tasks of rebuilding basic social infrastructure there was an urgent need to
improve the difficult living conditions of thousands of Mozambicans.
A group of citizens decided to take action and help reduce the poverty and suffering of a major part of the
country’s population. They started to conceive an ambitious project based on the creation of a foundation - an
institution with its own assets and thus an independent one. Once the model had been chosen, the initial capital
of the foundation had to be established from zero. The founding members felt that these resources should first
of all come from within, based on their own resources. In addition, there was also the legal requirement of first
creating an association in order to be able to establish a foundation. The Community Development Association
came into being in 1990 with the aim of generating the necessary human, financial and material resources. A
sign of hope in a country with deep wounds.
Four years later, in 1994 conditions had finally been created for the establishment of the Foundation for Community
Development (FDC). From the mission inherited from the association, the fight against poverty, came the
conviction that it is not fate; poverty is merely the result of a complex mechanism of marginalisation and exploitation
of the underprivileged, limited scientific and technical knowledge, and limited knowledge of appropriate
technologies. It is essentially the result of a system where the poorest groups in society, those without any
education and who are outside the formal institutions of society and the economy, have difficulty gaining access
to resources. The FDC has fervently committed itself to fighting these structural, and also psychological,
obstacles as the root cause of poverty.
The FDC was the main executing agency of the research project on the Civil Society Index in Mozambique. The
FDC is a civil, non-partisan organization with the aim of bringing together forces from all sectors of society to
achieve an ideal of development, democracy and social justice. The FDC’s commitment to carrying out the CSI
research project is a way of embodying its programme strategy, namely, by learning more and strengthening
organised forms of civil society and community leadership.
The CSI research project is completely in line with the FDC mission. So when the opportunity
arose the FDC made it one of the Foundation’s priorities for 2007 and committed itself to
implementing the project successfully.
FDC’s decision to go ahead with the CSI was immediately supported by its international partners
who saw in the project an unprecedented opportunity for a timely diagnosis of the current state
of Mozambican civil society.
Civil Society Index, Mozambique 2007
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