News

The Lurdes Mutola Foundation, the charitable body set up by Mozambique's best known athlete, former 800 metres world champion, Maria de Lurdes Mutola, has acquired the building that was once the Soviet embassy in Maputo, and plans to turn it into a luxury hotel.

The Maputo City Directorate of Youth and Sports on Tuesday made 300,000 meticais (about 12,000 US dollars) available to the City's Youth Council (CJCM), under a contract- programme which prioritises institutional capacity building.

Mozambican secondary education is not training pupils in the skills they need to enter the labour market, according to Deputy Education Minister Antonia Xavier.

Mozambique's National Roads Administration (ANE) has justified awarding a contract to the highest, rather than the lowest, bidder on the grounds that price was not a "determinant factor".

The number of people affected by natural disasters in Mozambique this rainy season is far fewer than envisaged in the government's contingency plans, the Minister of State Administration, Lucas Chomera, said on Friday.

Mozambique and Spain have reached an understanding that will lead to the signing, by May, of an agreement to grant insurance to the Mozambican agricultural sector.

Mozambique has 19 million hectares of productive forest, where commercial logging can occur, with the sustainable capacity of producing 500,000 cubic metres of logs a year, according to Environment Minister Luciano de Castro.

A team from the World Bank is in Mozambique to investigate allegations that the National Roads Administration (ANE) violated the norms of an international tender it held for the production of drivers' licences and vehicle registration documents, The ANE is accused of awarding the contract, under far from transparent conditions, to the bidder who demanded the highest price, four million dollars, when another reputable bidder was only asking for two million.

The quick and efficient response of the Mozambican government to the floods in the Zambezi Valley and to cyclone Favio in Inhambane province can serve as a model for the rest of Africa and the world, according to Jay Knott, director of the Maputo office of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Mozambican Energy Minister Salvador Namburete has insisted that the government will fully comply with the deadlines involved in paying for its share of Hydroelectrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB), the company that operates the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi river.

The Polana Casino, the only casino in Maputo, wants to maintain its current monopoly on legal gambling in the Mozambican capital.

Slightly less than a third of the people who attended the Counselling and Voluntary Testing Centres (GATVs) in Maputo city last year turned out to be HIV-positive.

Repairing the damage caused by the natural disasters of this year's rainy season, plus interventions to reduce vulnerability, will cost at least 71 million US dollars, according to a report from the Mozambican government, distributed on Monday at a meeting with foreign donors.

The administrator of the Quirimbas National Park, in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado, has denied that oil prospection in the area necessarily endangers the local environment and its biodiversity.

A helicopter started on Friday to operate an airlift between the central Mozambican city of Beira, and the administrative post of Grudje, the area worst hit by floods on the Buzi river, to transport food aid for the victims.

More than 1,700 people, including 900 children, victims of floods on the Buzi river, in the central Mozambican province of Sofala, have been rescued and placed in accommodation centres.

The European Union is donating two million Euros (about 2.7 million US dollars) to assist the victims of cyclone Favio that hit parts of the Mozambican provinces of Inhambane and Sofala last week.

Foreign support for Mozambican efforts to cope with major flooding in the Zambezi Valley are valued and welcome - but the government does not intend to launch an emergency appeal.

Logistic assistance to the about 106,000 victims of floods in the accommodation centres in the Zambezi valley has been improving significantly, reports Monday's issue of the daily paper 'Noticias'.

The publicly owned Mozambique Airports Company (ADM) needs about 170 million US dollars to carry out its three year development plan to improve infrastructures in all airports across the country.