Good afternoon. Mozambique’s target of universal access to electricity by 2030 has always looked ambitious. The country has made real progress, with national access rate now reported at 66.4%, but the remaining gap is the hardest part. It is not only a question of generating enough power, or even of building enough transmission lines. The harder problem is how to deliver affordable, reliable electricity to a population that remains widely dispersed across rural areas.
That is a technical challenge for the energy sector, but it is also a broader development problem. Rural Mozambique is expensive to serve because many households live far from one another, far from markets, and far from the dense population centres where infrastructure begins to pay for itself. The same problem affects electricity, roads, water, sanitation, schools, health posts, telecoms, agricultural extension and policing. A state can promise universal access, but each extra kilometre of infrastructure becomes harder to justify when it reaches only a small number of people with limited ability to pay.
The full Daily Briefing continues below for Pro subscribers. Subscribers to the Zitamar News tier can read the top half, including the full leader article, here.
This is why a suggestion reportedly made at an energy conference last week — that Mozambique might need to think again about something like the old aldeias comunais model — is provocative and unrealistic but not entirely unserious.
The phrase itself is politically loaded. After independence, communal villages were associated with Frelimo’s attempt to reorganise rural life around collective production, ideological mobilisation and state control. In Cabo Delgado, large villages also carry memories of colonial-era settlements created along roads as part of military efforts to control the population during the liberation war.
