Maputo, 8 April (AIM) – Mozambican Finance Minister, Carla Louveira, accused the World Bank of using outdated statistics in its latest report on Mozambique.

The report, entitled “Economic Update of Mozambique: From Fragility to Stability”, published in March, states that Mozambique is “the second poorest country and among the ten most unequal in the world”.

Just as the World Bank should have expected, this led to a series of media headlines announcing that Mozambique is “the second poorest country” on the planet.

This is obviously false. Anyone who accepts the World Bank’s claim would have us believe that Mozambique is poorer than war-torn hellholes like Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan or South Sudan.

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 that made the extraordinary claim that processed cashew nuts were worth less than unprocessed nuts.

Today, in an equally poor quality exercise, the World Bank bases its statements about Mozambican poverty on figures that are years out of date. Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the Mozambican Women’s Day celebrations on Tuesday in Maputo, Louveira said that, although the report is dated March 2026, the data is from 2019.

“The statistics used were collected during the Covid-19 pandemic period, and were published in 2022,” said Louveira. Furthermore, the World Bank report only analyzed “consumption poverty”, assessing whether families had enough money to purchase a “basic basket” of goods and services, while the Mozambican government has a broader definition of what it calls “multidimensional poverty”.

Furthermore, the Minister noted, the timeline used by the World Bank for the Mozambican case was different from that used for several other countries.

“In many of these countries”, said Louveira, “the comparative analysis was carried out with recent household surveys. If we used these more recent data, the picture in our country would obviously be different”.

Asked how the government managed to pay off, in advance, all of its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Louveira stressed that it did not use the State Budget.

“Our country has liquid international reserves available”, he highlighted, and the government paid the debt to the IMF using these reserves.

There was no risk of running out of reserves, which were still sufficient to pay for four to five months of imports of goods and services. Paying the debt to the IMF would only have “a slight impact”, he insisted.

The debt paid was 515.04 million Special Drawing Rights (equivalent to 603.1 million dollars).
(AIM)
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