Moz starts efforts to alleviate poverty

from the Independent On Line

Maputo - Current efforts by the Mozambican government to alleviate poverty were on track and could result in the reduction of poverty indices by 50 percent by the year 2015, state media reported on Wednesday.

Fernando Minete of the Mozambican Debt Group told Radio Mozambique that through the government's poverty alleviation programme, there was hope that the UN's Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015 would be met.

However, Minete said the government needed to strengthen its efforts by creating credit schemes to help the rural population set up income generating projects.

He said through these projects, the rural population - which comprises more than half of the country's population of 20 million living in abject poverty - could increase its income base.

In Mozambique, frequent occurrences of natural disasters affected the agriculture sector.

This sector was the mainstay of the rural population and consequently Mozambique's poor - who lived on one US dollar a day - had become more vulnerable, he said.

On Wednesday, Mozambique joined the international community to celebrate the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. In 1993, the UN general assembly designated the day to promote the need to eradicate poverty and destitution in all countries - particularly developing nations.

At the Millennium Summit, held in 2000, world leaders committed to contribute towards the fight against poverty by halving the number of people who lived on less than one US dollar a day throughout the world.

According to Global Issues, an organisation that documents world wide poverty indices, nearly half of the world's population of three billion people live on less than one US dollar each day.