Youth attempt to get beyond subsistence

Mozambique's central province of Zambezia boasts rolling tea estates, vast coconut plantations, cashew farms and one of Africa's few good river ports, yet it has one of the country's worst social and economic indicators. In a province once dubbed the breadbasket of the country, most of the 3.4 million inhabitants live in abject poverty, eking out an existence through subsistence agriculture or working in informal markets. The National Institute of Statistics found that in 2001 three-quarters of the population lived an hour's walk from the nearest health unit; the majority of families had no access to piped water, latrines or electricity; and very few people completed primary school - many adolescents, especially girls, dropped out because of early marriages and pregnancies. Today, HIV/AIDS is having a devastating impact on this already fragile province. There are few testing facilities and the provincial capital has recorded one of the country's highest prevalence rates, with 25 percent of pregnant women HIV positive. In 1999 the United Nations launched a joint UN project to support the provincial HIV/AIDS operational plan, the first project of its kind involving agencies such as the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). The initiative is supported by The UN Foundation. A key challenge is to address HIV/AIDS activities in the context of widespread poverty. UNDP, through implementing partner NGO CARE International, this year supported a microfinance project. Twenty-two-year-old Albano Joao is one of the beneficiaries. He is among a group of six young men, all involved in different occupations, who have learned how to pool their resources, save and provide loans to individual members. Each member contributes Meticais 50,000 (about US $2) every two weeks to a savings fund. At the end of two months, the group has enough to lend one member Meticais 1 million (about US $49) and put aside another Meticais 200,000 ($9.78) for emergencies. Joao borrowed a million meticais earlier this year and, like all the other members, managed to pay back his loan within 30 days. He was able to kick-start his business by buying maize wholesale from the central town of Mocuba and selling it for a small profit in his local seaside village of Supinho, in Nicoadala district. He now makes the trip to Mocuba four times a month and hopes to build on his recent success. "At the moment, with the small profit I make I'm just able to feed me and my wife, but not much more. It is better than before the project, as then I was never sure whether I would have enough money to eat that day," Joao told IRIN. During training workshops and regular visits, CARE officials also take the opportunity to educate project members about HIV/AIDS. "I don't know too much about AIDS," says Joao. "But I know that it is important to use condoms, and you must only use them one time and then throw [them] away." So far the microfinance project has 1,600 beneficiaries in 277 groups. CARE International also conducts training in bookkeeping and managing group conflict, said Angelo Amano, the coordinator of the project. Less than five percent of loans have not been paid back within the 30-day period. Amano argues that the project is more sustainable than microcredit projects, in which international NGOs simply lend beneficiaries money. "This project empowers the group members. We are just facilitating, whereas the community itself is assuming ownership of the project."