Good afternoon. The Northern Integrated Development Agency (ADIN) is showing signs of resurrection, after six years of being largely ineffective and invisible. The agency announced the formal launch last week of a project, announced last year, to rebuild some 150 buildings damaged by the Islamic State-backed insurgency in Cabo Delgado province. At a cost of nearly $28m, funded mostly by the African Development Bank, it is bigger than projects ADIN has delivered (or rather, taken the credit for delivering while other organisations do the hard work). For donor agencies to show faith in ADIN is a new development. What has changed?
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For most of its existence, ADIN has been plagued by two problems: incompetent management, appointed as a result of internal politics rather than on grounds of merit, and a fundamental disagreement between the government and development agencies about the causes of the war in Cabo Delgado. Basically, the government has always insisted that the war is something brought to Mozambique by foreigners, and refuses to accept that it has internal causes like the relative poverty, social and economic inequality, and lack of opportunity in the north. This has blocked the delivery of development projects. An initial plan put together by the United Nations Development Programme, World Bank, European Union and African Development Bank and submitted to President Filipe Nyusi’s government in 2021, was rejected for this reason. A later version was approved the following year, but despite the approval, the government did not really change its mind, and in any case, ADIN did not inspire trust among donors. As a result, they refused to provide funding. ADIN was reduced to inserting itself into smaller projects run by NGOs and acting as an unnecessary middleman, so that it could claim to be doing something.
