Maputo, 29 Jul (AIM) – The chairperson of the Mozambican Stock Exchange, Salimo Valá, believes that the large number of poor people and social inequality are the main factors that are delaying the country’s economic development.
According to Valá, speaking to the independent television station STV, social inequality causes poor distribution of opportunities, which deprives marginalized people of resources and prevents them from contributing to development.
“The children of those with higher incomes and better opportunities will be like their parents. So the children of poor families will find it more difficult to enter the economic circuit. The danger of having too many poor people who are marginalized in the country’s economic development is that we are leaving out our greatest energy”, he said.
According to the government’s National Development Strategy (ENDE), the number of people living below the poverty line, far from declining, has sharply increased. These official statistics show that there was an increase in “consumption poverty” from 46.1 per cent of the adult population in 2014/15 to 68.2 per cent in 2019/2020, followed by a slight decline, to 65 per cent, in 2022.
This is the first time that the government has publicly acknowledged that it is losing the fight against poverty, and that the number of people living below the poverty line, far from declining, has sharply increased.
According to Valá, in order to create social inclusion, there is a need to modernize agriculture and fisheries, since these are the activities that can fight poverty more effectively.
“We need to take that energy, which is the citizens, men and women, already in the productive sector, increase their productivity, and strengthen their technical and management capacity so that they can produce more and better”, he said.
He also pointed to the country’s potential of mineral resources in the creation of jobs, saying that it may empower young people.
“In the areas where resources are extracted: rubies, gas, and heavy sands, among others, there is poverty. So we have to question the approaches we are taking, in the sense that they have to be sensitive to improving the living conditions of people in those territories”, he said.
The country, he added, must create strategic policies and look at the issue of governance “and tax reforms to stimulate small and medium-sized businesses. For example, tax payments should be adjusted to the productive capacity of each company.”
(AIM)
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