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Mozambican Civil Society Within: Evaluation, Challenges, Opportunities and Action
TABLE 3.2.7: Indicators for Evaluating the Legal Environment
Ref. # Indicators Score
1.2.1 CSO Registration 1
1.2.2 Allowable advocacy activities 1
1.2.3 Tax Laws Favourable to CSOs 1
1.2.3 Tax Benefits for Philanthropy 1
3.2.5.1 CSO Registration
According to the INE terminology for Non-Profit Institutions, most CSOs in Mozambique are
formally classified as associations. This is related to the legal framework. Following a variety of
initiatives, in recent years legal opportunities for the formal establishment of CSOs have grown.
In its CINSFLU2006, in addition to associations the INE identified other institutional forms, namely:
foundations, national NGOs, foreign NGOs and others, for example cooperatives.
Although the CSI study took the INE categories as a point of reference, it is felt that this
classification missed some more or less informal organizational forms that have an important
function in the daily life of Mozambican society. The survey tried to capture information on
community forms of organization that are not visible because neither researchers nor
respondents consider them to be sufficiently organized.
The INOSC07 gathered from respondents the perception that registration is not very useful and
is even less simple. Indeed, from the point of view of knowledge about the real fabric of
Mozambican society it seems that a profound analysis of the effectiveness of the current
registration system is to be recommended. It is possible that the current system is adequate
for certain purposes, such as INE’s national accounts system. But can that system capture the
informal but regular, prevailing and effective dynamics that exist in society?
It should be noted that, according to the literature, some analysts believe that factors behind the
creation of CSOs, whether in the form of associations or more specifically NGOs, are linked to
a number of internal and external factors that favour the emergence of NGOs (Kanji et al., s.d).
Internally, these factors include religious groups or movements that take on social action and
development tasks, the search for alternative employment by professionals and the desire of
parties and politicians to attract resources and channel them to their electoral bases. Externally,
the most direct factor is more support for NGOs by development agencies.
With this perspective this indicator was scored 1.0, with the recommendation that it should
conduct a more detailed and profound investigation of the whole system for categorizing CSOs
and their respective forms of legal recognition.
56
Civil Society Index, Mozambique 2007