It became routine in the work of Mozambican lawyer Júlia Wachave to hear reports of women who walked for weeks from their homeland to reception centers fleeing the conflict that broke out more than four years ago in Cabo Delgado province.
“One lady took a month to arrive. Another took two, because at each stop she had to have sex with someone in exchange for money for transportation or food”, she tells the leaf.
Wachave is executive director of Promura (Association for the Protection of Women and Girls), a local organization that provides legal assistance and psychosocial support to Mozambican women, especially those whose lives have been directly affected by the humanitarian chaos in Cabo Delgado. For her work, she has been threatened with death three times.
The conflict in the region, started in 2017 by a local Islamic militia, has already spread to the neighboring provinces of Niassa and Nampula and triggered a migration crisis: at least 735,000 people have had to leave their homes to flee the violence — the so-called internally displaced. . Of the total, 52% are women, according to data updated in November by the IOM (International Organization for Migration).
Mozambicans, in many cases, are still responsible for accompanying the elderly and children on walking trips that can total 700 km. More than 147,000 displaced people are up to five years old, and around 3,000 minors are unaccompanied. “Mozambique is already a country with a culture of gender violence, where women are very submissive, and a good part of society is Muslim. [19%, grupo menos numeroso apenas que o de católicos, que são 27%], then the laws of the Koran prevail”, says the activist. “The conflict in Cabo Delgado made everything worse, it overloaded them.”
When arriving at reception centers, more layers of difficulty accumulate. Donated by the IOM, the straw huts with few tents often fail to cope with heavy rains — increasingly intensified by the climate crisis. “Everyone sleeps on the floor, there are few pieces of clothing, there are no sanitary pads. Women exchange sex for a bar of soap”, says Wachave. “I saw a lot of suffering.”
Mozambique is considered one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. In five decades, from 1970 to 2019, 79 extreme events occurred in the Portuguese-speaking country, which places it in second place among the most affected on the African continent, behind South Africa (90), according to data from the WMO (World Meteorological Organization). .
“We know that the displaced are extremely vulnerable to extreme events,” says IOM’s Director of Programs and Operations in Mozambique, Sascha Nlabu. “With the climate emergency, it becomes very clear that this group is going to suffer, because it will exacerbate the deterioration of local conditions and exacerbate humanitarian needs.”
Another impact of climate change, adds Alyona Synenko, spokesperson for the Red Cross for Africa, is the availability of resources such as clean water. According to data from the organization, the province of Cabo Delgado had 3,400 cases of cholera in August 2021, while in the same period of the previous year the figure was 2,200. Diarrhea, the second leading cause of death for children under five, exceeded 28,600 in the first half of 2021.
The availability of basic resources is worsened as the reception centers are only able to receive part of the displaced. According to Nlabu, 200,000 are currently in these locations; the other around 535,000 found shelter in local communities that host them.
“Before the conflict escalated, it was already difficult to guarantee essential services and basic infrastructure, such as running water, for that number of people,” explains Synenko of the Red Cross. “Now the pressure on health facilities has grown so much that the humanitarian situation is very worrying.”
She points out that these locations have been impacted by both weather events and conflict. While cyclones and floods compromise the physical structure, in the nine districts of Cabo Delgado where the war is most intense, 80% of the posts are unable to open their doors, according to the organization’s estimate.
Another type of saturated establishment is teaching, says Carlos Almeida, national coordinator of the Portuguese NGO Helpo, which has been operating in Mozambique since 2010. In many of the villages on the southern fringe of Cabo Delgado where the organization had projects, there was a large increase in the number of families who arrived fleeing the north, with schools receiving up to 20% more students.
He says that the NGO also encountered numerous cases of child malnutrition. “Populations are struggling to rebuild their lives, despite being well received. They don’t have credit to restart a business, and most of them, who lived from agriculture, have difficulty accessing new lands.”
All this overload created friction in some communities, according to the director of the IOM. “Social cohesion in a large number of locations is still positive, but we’ve also seen alarming signs in some of them, with tensions related to resources.”
Regarding the prospects for the future of the region, although the worsening of the crisis is on the horizon, a glimmer of hope emerged in the second half of 2021, when at least five African countries, led by South Africa, sent troops to help fight the Islamic terrorist faction in Cabo Delgado. Nlabu describes international aid as a window of opportunity to intervene and restore public security.
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