The Report for 2000 has chosen to address a crucial concern in the national development agenda, namely the impact of education on human development in Mozambique. The approach adopted in this Report was to see education as a fundamental human right and thus linking human rights to human development.

While the country has registered considerable progress in the area of education, many challenges still remain in a country where 60.5% of the population cannot read and write. In terms of access to education, a wide gap exists between different regions within the country and between girls and boys. The situation is even more precarious in the rural areas where among women, only one out of 10 can read or write. This low level of literacy reduces the human development index throughout the country, and also constitutes a serious impediment to faster progress in this era of globalized information.

The constraints to development of the education system, which include the shortage of trained teachers, resources and education materials, clearly demand particular attention. The education sector continues to depend on external assistance, though available information shows that the share of donor assistance to education declined from 63.3% in 1994 to 42.5% in 1999. As a proportion of the state budget, the share devoted to education, as well as other social sectors, has been rising since 1996 and additional public resources, previously tied up to service the country’s debt, will be reoriented to boost social sector expenditure, in the foreseeable future, within the framework of the country’s Action Plan for the Reduction of Absolute Poverty (PARPA).