Overview

LWF Mozambique program focuses on rights based community empowerment approach emphasizing participation and ownership by the targeted communities. The empowerment approach builds people’s capacity and competence, both as individuals and as participating members of community groups to plan and achieve results for themselves.  Rights based approach is based on idea of supporting and accompanying local communities to identify and claim their rights, and to sensitize the duty bearers to recognize and respect these rights.

The program has three Strategic areas:

1. Livelihoods
2. Disaster Risk Reduction and Emergency Response
3. Advocacy and Human Rights

GAZA RURAL RESILIENCE PROJECT

Gaza Province is located in the south of Mozambique, and is regularly suffering of flooding and drought. Since 2015, the province is among those worst affected by El Niño in Mozambique. To reduce the impact of these phenomena, LWF Mozambique is since May 2016 implementing the rural resilience project in Gaza province to address the following needs:

• Community-based disaster risk preparedness and contingency plans
• Innovative ways to alleviate lack of water during dry periods, like rain water harvesting
• Alternative income-generating opportunities to expand the livelihood opportunities

UPR ENGAGEMENT PROJECT

The project is an advocacy project aiming for impact on three levels; on the community level, communities are made aware of their rights, and concrete cases of human rights violations are collected on the community level. On national level, the project concentrates on building a strong national NGO platform presenting the civil society widely across all the provinces and different thematic areas. On international level, the project works with the human rights systems in Geneva, and lobbies international audiences like diplomatic missions.  The main objectives of the project are:

• Effective coalition working on national level
• Recommendations of UPR report accepted by the Mozambican Government
• Concrete improvements in human rights situation on local level

FLAGSHIP LAND RIGHTS ADVOCACY PROJECT

The project focuses on the land rights of rural communities. On community level,  the project works in two districts, Buzi and Chibabava, in Sofala province, where the populations are experiencing multi-dimensional poverty aggravated by conflict over land and other resources like water between smallholders and big commercial farmers, and uncontrolled use of natural resources, e.g. large scale logging. The project aims for impact on three levels:

• Local level – identify cases of land grabbing and look for solutions on local level between the companies, smallholder community and local government authorities
• National level – work with allies to create mechanisms for greater transparency in land allocation
• International level – advocate for smallholder rights in binding international agreements

PRO-POOR SESAME VALUE CHAIN PROJECT

The Value Chain project will commence in August 2016, and the aim of the project is to contribute to improved rural livelihoods in three districts of Sofala province through increased market access. The initiative for this project came from the rural communities, wishing to increase their access to income through agricultural activities.

The project aims to address the following bottle-necks of the market participation and income generation of smallholder farmers:

• Strengthening producer associations to increase negotiating power
• Use of environmentally-friendly methods to increase the yields
• Linkages to input suppliers and buyers of agricultural production
• Training in quality control to increase the marketability of production