Photo: Miramar<\/p>\n
Mozambican Finance Minister Carla Louveira has accused the World Bank of using outdated statistics in its latest report on Mozambique.<\/p>\n
The report, entitled \u201cMozambique Economic Update: From Fragility to Stability<\/a>\u201d, published in March, claims that Mozambique is \u201cthe second poorest country and among the ten most unequal in the world\u201d.<\/p>\n As the World Bank must have expected, this has led to a spate of media headlines, announcing that Mozambique is \u201cthe second poorest country\u201d on the planet.<\/p>\n This is obviously untrue. Anyone who accepts the World Bank claim would have us believe that Mozambique is poorer than such war-torn hellholes as Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan or South Sudan.<\/p>\n This is far from the first time that the World Bank has spread falsehoods about Mozambique. In the late 1990s, for example, the Bank was at the forefront of an ideologically driven campaign to dismantle the cashew processing industry, using fraudulent statistics which made the extraordinary claim that processed cashew nuts were worth less than the unprocessed nuts.<\/p>\n Today, in an equally shoddy exercise, the World Bank bases its claims about Mozambican poverty on figures that are years out of date. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of Tuesday\u2019s Maputo celebrations of Mozambican Women\u2019s Day, Louveira said that, although the report bears the date March 2026, the data come from 2019.<\/p>\n Mozambican government has broader definition of what it calls \u201cmulti-dimensional poverty\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe statistics used were collected in the period of the Covid-19 pandemic, and were published in 2022\u201d, said Louveira.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the World Bank report only looked at \u201cconsumption poverty\u201d, assessing whether households had enough money to acquire a \u201cbasic basket\u201d of goods and services, whereas the Mozambican government has a broader definition of what it calls \u201cmulti-dimensional poverty\u201d.<\/p>\n Furthermore, noted the Minister, the time line used by the World Bank for the Mozambican case was different from that used for various other countries.<\/p>\n \u201cIn many of these countries\u201d, said Louveira, \u201cthe comparative analysis was made with recent household surveys. If we were to use these more recent data, the picture of our country would obviously be different\u201d.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n READ:\u00a0 Finance minister chairs high-level meeting on joint review of World Bank project portfolio in Mozambique<\/a><\/p>\n Sharp increase in Mozambique\u2019s public sector wage bill has been driven by increases in salaries, rather than increases in workforce \u2013 World Bank<\/a><\/p>\n World Bank says Mozambique overruns pose a $50 billion risk \u2013 Bloomberg<\/a><\/p>\n Mozambique stands at a critical juncture \u2013 World Bank<\/a><\/p>\n Mozambique: World Bank flags \u2018unsustainable\u2019 public debt<\/a><\/p>\n