allAfrica.com: Mozambique: Country Pursuing Investment for Development, President Says (Page 1 of 2)

Armando Guebuza, who won the presidency of Mozambique in December 2004 elections, is one of the African leaders attending the Corporate Council on Africa's Business Summit in Baltimore this week. Guebuza, a leading member of the Frelimo independence movement since its early days, says one of his primary aims is attracting investment to Mozambique, which has been pursuing an aggressive policy of economic development after years of war against Portuguese colonial rule, followed by an insurgency backed by the white government in South Africa. A peace agreement with the former rebels in 1992 has largely held, and Renamo, despite continuing disputes about its implementation, holds seats in the country's parliament.

Mozambique and the United States have signed a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) designed to promote trade between the two countries. U.S. officials cited Mozambique as "a positive model because of its impressive track record on democracy, political stability, economic growth, openness to foreign direct investment and expanding exports." President Guebuza talked to AllAfrica on the first day of the Summit.

Mozambique is one of the countries that will benefit from the recent agreement among the industrialized nations, leading up to next month's G8 Summit in Scotland, to reduce the debt of the world's poorest countries. Will this help you?

A lot. A lot. We used to have to spend 57 million U.S. dollars on debt servicing every year. We don't yet know how much the agreement reduces our payments - it reduces our debt by 47 per cent - but it will help. That money we save is going to be used in the social area: for education, for getting water to the population and for health services.

What are your top development priorities?

We consider that, together with the need of building the infrastructure that we lack in rural areas, we need to attract investment. The business climate in Mozambique is one of the reasons we are here today. People working in rural areas need better markets. They need work in order to create rural credit. You cannot solve the problems in those areas without rural credit. But first we need to make the work force more productive.

Today most of the youngsters in rural areas are unable to make a difference in their communities because they don't have enough education and training. They are not able to work to transform the situation for a better one, to promote the situation in their favor.

Is tourism one of those areas that you see as a development engine, where you want to expand infrastructure?

Definitely. Today Mozambique is becoming a tourist attraction. But the problem is that we do not have enough infrastructure, and we are lacking transport to attract more people into those tourist areas. We have game parks, nice resorts, very good beaches along the coast - with some hotels but not enough, not enough. So we need infrastructure. We're not making use of all those things, so we want to attract investment in that area.

The Working Group on Climate Change and Development has just released a report in London warning that unless industrialised countries cut carbon emissions by a huge amount, development in poor countries may not only stop, but may be reversed, and that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, designed to halve poverty by 2015, may not be met. At the same time, the report cites Mozambique as an example of creative initiatives to mitigate the effects of climate change - changes already being felt in Mozambique - at the community level. What prompts these responses?

We have a situation now where floods, where droughts are usual. This makes it easy for people to understand that something is happening, that where there is an international alarm sounding, that there is something we can do at home. People are understanding that they need to do things. That's why we are working hard.

Education in general and more opportunities for girls in particular are among the Millennium Development Goals. Do you see Mozambique as reaching some of the goals?

It is reaching for them, but we haven't reached yet. We still have a challenge to reach those goals, still have a long way to go to do that. We're moving towards that, but we have not achieved.

Mozambique has a woman as prime minister - an advance in gender equity over many industrial democracies. But that doesn't guarantee that women and girls will experience equity in their own lives, in their communities, doesn't insure that they can attain an education or negotiate safe sexual relations, for instance.

Starting with "up there" at the top - here we have the minister of foreign affairs (gesturing to Alcinda Antonio de Abreu), who is a woman, other ministers who are women. In parliament we have more than 30 per cent of deputies, members of parliament who are women. Two governors out of eleven are women. So women are part of the leadership in administration and in this fight against gender discrimination.

We are now feeling that we are on the way to reach some level of girls in primary school that almost matches the female population. We still have problems, they have problems, but today we have more girls than we used to have - more than double. Our challenge is to make sure that they go all the way to university, or at least through secondary school.

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