AGAPE has been working in Mozambique for over 20 years now. In this period, we have learned to know the population, the customs and the approaches, we have understood the difficulties of working with the institutions but also the great potential of this work and the benefits that the beneficiaries of the projects could draw from it. But how did we get to 12 projects active at the same time? We took our time.

In 2000, when we arrived, and for over 15 years we worked alongside the Scalabrinian Sisters of Ressano Garcia and the local population, with small agricultural and livestock projects, construction of wells and support for the children and young people hosted in the orphanage managed by the congregation. Already in those years, however, we began to experiment with other activities such as drama therapy and some entrepreneurial projects.

In 2017 the decisive turning point: we began the procedures for the local recognition of the association and in 2018 AGAPE Mozambico was born, which will have as its legal representative Valentina, who has been working with us in the country since 2009, and as collaborators Jorge, a project manager with great experience within international organizations, and Katiza, for the administration and accounting part. From this moment on, the projects begin to grow, in number and importance: many are linked to children and younger people, such as the Entendarte project on music therapy and art therapy, or the support for the Mahotas Psychosocial Rehabilitation Center for the physically and mentally disabled, but also many that aim to create job opportunities for older children, such as the Cremedoce de Fronteira solidarity ice cream shop, university scholarships, the Bomba Social project on entrepreneurial training and, last in order of time but first in importance, the Building With The Music project.

This project, funded by the Italian Cooperation, is only the latest of many that AGAPE Mozambique would not be able to carry out if it were not for the competent and generous collaborators, true custodians of the association’s mission. Before the project began, neither the office in Italy, nor the one in Mozambique, had had experience of what it meant to manage a capital of this magnitude (almost one and a half million in three years), so many partners (the Mozambican Ministry of Culture, the Municipality of Milan, Milano Musica and Diapason Progetti Musicali) and activities with a high degree of complexity and complementarity. But the experience and, above all, the friendship and trust that have been created in these years of projects, is allowing the project to progress.

The Distance Support program, from which everything started, after 22 years, continues to benefit children and their families. This project has also changed and improved over time: from Ressano Garcia, today we are also in Maputo and there are 4 associations with which we work. This type of collaboration with local organizations is mainly used to improve the skills of the operators and volunteers who work there, making them responsible for their community, and to increase the trust in AGAPE by the population. Being there always brings us to a condition of equality and listening, today allows us to be well received in communities and public institutions.

Our Civil Service volunteers are requested every year in more structures. Local organizations also realize the importance of acquiring new skills, increasing the activities they can offer to their beneficiaries and networking with other organizations that operate in the same territory. With PASSI Società Cooperativa, every year we bring 12 young volunteers to work in Maputo and the impact they are having on the projects is truly important and evident after 4 years from the start of the program and 40 young people who have left: in addition to the short-term activities that they carry out in their 10 months of service, the associations that host them grow both quantitatively, increasing their offer to the community, but above all qualitatively. Every year, the quality of the activities and the management of the same and of those who carry them out improves.

The volunteers are inserted, from their arrival, within our partner organizations, and for the entire duration of the experience they work in close contact with the Mozambicans, their managers. This “hierarchy” is not always easy to manage, because the initial cultural shock is significant and requires a lot of humility and listening skills, but if overcome, it gives all the actors involved a moment of true personal and professional growth. Today, all the projects in which AGAPE Mozambique is involved or decides to develop directly include a multidisciplinary training component that aims to empower local partners, public or private, and communities, so that they can independently improve their living conditions and bring about lasting change in the country. This means that in Mozambique the association operates at different levels and in very distant areas, but with a single goal: to create sustainable economic, social and environmental development.

This approach is what we also want to pursue in the other missions of the association: the birth of AGAPE R.D. Congo will allow us to export this good practice to the Congolese territory, giving us the opportunity to develop flexible and impactful projects together with the local entities with which we already work and other new ones, with different skills and in different areas of intervention.