Child Poverty in Mozambique. A Situation and Trend ... - Unicef

This section documents the instruments, processes and institutional responsibilities
within government for policy and planning, resource allocation, implementation and
monitoring and review. It examines the degree to which the Government has been
able to link policy and planning with resource allocation, then analyses the links from
policy, planning and resource allocation to implementation. This is followed by an
examination of government capacity to review its performance. At each stage, the
implications for children are highlighted.
The section also addresses questions related to the way in which external aid
is provided to Mozambique, describing the significant shift to programme aid, in
particular general budget support, that has taken place since 2003. The challenge of
achieving long term reform of aid modalities whilst ensuring short term support to the
population, especially children, is discussed.
A. Policy and planning mechanisms
The principal Government planning document is the Government Five-Year Plan,
which under the Constitution must be produced by each new Government upon
entering office. 17 It establishes the Government’s priorities and operational agenda
until the next General Election. In 2000 and 2005, the Government also produced
Mozambique’s first and second Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PARPA I and
PARPA II). The PARPA is an operationalisation of the Government Five-Year Plan,
focusing only on key sectors for economic growth and poverty reduction and going
into far greater depth with regard to resource allocation and the setting of time
bound targets for monitoring and evaluation of performance. On an annual basis, the
Government produces an Economic and Social Plan (“PES”) outlining priorities for the
following year and the Review of the PES, which reviews PES implementation in the
previous year. The PES is conceived as the annual embodiment of the Government
Five-Year Plan and the PARPA, as well as linking to sectoral plans (see the full planning
and budgeting cycle in Annex II).
The Five-Year Plan forms the centrepiece of the medium-term planning structure.
However, since the programme is submitted to Parliament for debate in its first
session after the elections, the longer PARPA elaboration process allows broader and
deeper consultation, clearer prioritisation, projection of a resource envelope, and timebound
targets with associated indicators for monitoring. Thus, while it was initially
taken on as a form of conditionality, the PARPA has strengthened the Government’s
medium-term planning and budgeting for poverty reduction and economic growth.
(i) The PARPA
As the key instrument for the operationalisation of the Five-Year Plan, the PARPA
deserves particular attention. The Government produced its first PARPA document
for the period 2001 – 2005 in order to qualify for debt relief under the Highly Indebted
Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. The first PARPA was perceived to be a strongly
donor driven document, which emphasised macroeconomic stability, rehabilitation
of infrastructure and development of human capital, and prioritised, as discussed,
expenditures in the six “priority” areas of education, health, infrastructure, agriculture
and rural development, governance and “other” activities (including social action). 18
17 Article 198 of the Constitution mandates that parliament should discuss the Plan (the “Programa Quinquenal do Governo” in Portuguese) at
the initiation of the legislature (Government of Mozambique, 2004).
18 For a children’s rights focused review of PARPA I see Robinson, 2003 (pp. 48 - 65).
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