Africa-Press – Mozambique. Around 800 families who lost their crops are benefiting from food assistance in two districts of the province of Manica, central Mozambique. Assistance benefiting around 4,000 people is being resumed by the Red Cross of Mozambique and partners.
The beneficiaries are residents of the districts of Tambara and Machaze, whose crops were lost in the 2023/24 agricultural harvest due to drought caused by the El Nino phenomenon.
The support consists of various food products and an estimated monetary value of around 5,000 meticais.
The President of the Mozambique Red Cross (CVM) in Manica, Ricardo Simão, said on Tuesday (21-05) that this was the third phase of aid to families affected by drought in the 2023/24 agricultural campaign.
“We had stopped due to the post-election demonstrations. But as soon as the situation was back to normal, we decided to resume assistance to these families. We are working with the communities and we noticed that the problem of food insecurity has been minimally resolved in these two districts,” Simão said.
Ricardo Simão said that everything indicates that the 2024/25 agricultural campaign could bring better results for producers, so it was therefore time to terminate support to the families.
“In our schedule of activities, we set the end of June as the deadline. We believe that by next month, families will be harvesting what they are producing in this agricultural campaign and the impact of hunger will be less,” Simão said.
“We need to change our support strategy. Instead of providing basic necessities to these and other families, we think we will focus on nutrition and sanitation. But the results we have had in these three phases of assistance to families are encouraging. There was a need to help these families, who were in a vulnerable situation,” he explained.
The process of supporting families in need should have ended after three phases but was extended due to factors including post-election demonstrations.
“We took time because, as we all know, the situation in the country was not the best. Because of the demonstrations, we had to interrupt the entire process. But we also had to digitize the data because our donor wanted to monitor the entire process. This was possible and we believe that by the end of next month we will have finished providing food assistance to these families,” Simão concluded.
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