Mozambique

Adult Education: Students who are 15 years or older who have not been through the usual system of education can be accommodated in the adult literacy program (Ensiono Primáro de Adultos Alfabetização), which also has two levels. As is the case with students completing EP2, students who have completed the second level of adult literacy education may proceed to an elementary technical vocational education or to enter basic technical professional education from where they can move on to middle elementary technical and vocational education. At this stage students also have the option of choosing vocational schools in education. Or they may proceed to adult secondary education. From here they have the options offered to traditional ESG2 students.

Adult students who have completed the first two levels of adult literacy education have an option not available to traditional students. They may join the accelerated pre-university cycle (Ensino Pré-Universitário Icelerado). This form of education has its roots in the Mozambican liberation struggle when, due to the brain drain and the lack of education of the majority of the people, the maximum access to education had to be provided in the shortest possible time. Accelerated Training for Workers (Centros de Formação Acelerada para Trabalhadores or CFATs) is the Mozambican government's attempt to move beyond basic literacy training to a place where adults could advance their educational potential and as soon as possible make a contribution towards meeting the needs of the emerging nation. In the Centers, academic attainment is raised to the equivalent of grade four in primary schooling. The next step is to raise the level of academic achievement to the equivalent of grade six of primary schooling. Each step can be completed in a fraction of the time, often six months. After completing the accelerated pre-university cycle, adult students may proceed to the higher education level and to possible teacher training courses.

Distance Education: As is the case in most African countries, large land areas, long distances between cities, and the remoteness of large numbers of the population make it necessary for many people to obtain education, especially higher education, through distance education. In distance education there is, thus, not always a clear distinction between nonformal and formal education. In Mozambique the difficult state of distance education is exacerbated by the extreme poverty of the country's population, the high illiteracy rate, and the devastation caused by years of political strife, first internal and then because of being drawn into the political struggles taking place in the then Rhodesia and South Africa. In the early 1980s, the government successfully trained 1,200 unqualified primary school teachers in attempting to cope with the return of the country's nationals from neighboring states. The Ministry of Education then expanded the service to provide education to the wider community. This expansion led to the founding of the Instituto de Aperteiçoamento de Professores or IAP, which took over the responsibility for distance education from the National Institute for Development of Education (INED). INED had, until then, been responsible for introducing new teaching methodologies, including distance education. Funded by the Government of Mozambique and sponsored by the World Bank, the IAP is to provide a nationwide service and support the Ministry of Education in its efforts to collaborate with neighboring countries. It is hoped that despite language differences, regional cooperation will accelerate the development of distance education in the country, bringing in new ideas, the exchange of information, and workshops and seminars that will add to the professional skills of Mozambique's educators.

Through printed course material and through radio, IAP offers a full range of secondary school subjects and the teaching of social sciences, mathematics, and Portuguese. Other institutions involved in distance teaching are the Departamento de Ensino à Distância, which uses printed course material, radio and face-to-face tuition to raise the academic level of primary teachers and to improve their teaching skills and the Instituto de Communicaçao Social which through the medium of radio, a journal called O Campo, and television, makes nonformal education available to peasant farmers and other people living in rural areas.

Global Access: By the end of 1999, all African countries except Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya had local Internet access, with South Africa leading the number of Internet Service Providers and the number of computers connected to the Internet. There is, however, much concern that the English language does not only dominate the global information infrastructure but also that its content almost exclusively targets the needs of users in the United States and the United Kingdom. A 1999 survey of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa has shown that Africa generates only 0.4 percent of global content. If the South African contribution is excluded, the figure is merely 0.02 percent. As there are so few African content developers, there is a growing realization that African academic and research institutions and governments need to make a real effort to rectify the imbalance.

They need not only to publish the academic research done on the African continent, which is presently only available in the sponsoring institutions, but also to develop materials that will allow African and other users to access indigenous languages on the Internet. There is much valuable work being done at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, especially in the areas of language development and language policy, as well as in education. This is a country whose very structure has been destroyed but whose people nevertheless have, time and again, found the will to create a new reality. This new reality could benefit the global discussion in these fields and could enhance the perception in Mozambique that its highest public academic institution has the capacity to produce and publish the information and the research done by its faculty and students. Similarly, while the foreign languages (English, Portuguese, French) spoken in Africa are well-represented on the Internet, little has been undertaken to advance African indigenous languages through this medium. There is no reason why a country like Mozambique whose people speak various Bantu languages, several of which are official and national languages in neighboring countries, should not publish language materials produced in at least some of these languages. Yet, the poverty that puts education beyond the reach of most of the people of Mozambique means that access to the Internet is far beyond the feasible reality available to those who belong to the 80 percent of the world's population that has never heard a dial tone, let alone seen a computer.