The World Bank’s Poverty, Gender, and Social Assessment for Mozambique reflects poverty’s many dimensions. The Assessment combines disciplines and diagnostic tools to explore poverty using human, social, and monetary indicators and perceptions of poverty highlighted by poor individuals, households, and communities. The objective is to support the development and implementation of propoor policies that really work by taking poverty’s many dimensions into account.
Can Mozambique beat the odds and sustain inclusion in a growing economy? Can Mozambique realize its vision of consolidating peace and democracy, social stability, public safety, and the guarantee of individual freedoms as basic conditions for economic growth and a reduction in absoÂlute poverty?
This report concludes that it can. It can pursue propoor growth by promoting agriculture and the private sector, especially labor-intensive activities, many of them small and informal. It can build human capital by improving access to basic public services, especially for the poor, and by increasing the value for money in public spending. And it can improve governance and accountability by getting government closer to its citizens.
To achieve these goals, the government will need to increase the value for money in its spending on public services. It will also need to target services for the rural poor and enlist poor communities in identifying needs and delivering those services. And it will need to put in place good tracking systems to link program outputs to targets and outcomes, using frequent high-quality household surveys.
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