Women's aid

Most of its people live on less than €1.50 a day, and none lives much past 40. But the outlook for Mozambique isn't entirely bleak. The country has one of Africa's most progressive attitudes to women, who are hopeful about tackling domestic violence, sexual abuse and, above all, HIV-Aids. Ruadhán Mac Cormaicsees how an Irish charity is helping.

Ribaué wakes up with an easy optimism, busy and purposeful and awash with round-eyed radiance. The burnt-red roadway comes alongside a man-made tangle of bamboo and thatch, the market stalls stretching from one end of the village to the other. The place is slowly filling, and a cassette player's tinny pop music drowns out the sellers' calls. Bom dia! Bom dia! And a good day it will be. Their stock is abundant and everywhere the same: buckets and batteries, pots, soaps, sandals. The rows of papaya, tomatoes and cashew run endlessly on; even the hand-made wooden sieves are stockpiled.

The doors of the mud huts stay open - here, life is lived outside - and the women gather in groups: talking, chuckling, tending to their children. One woman walks past in a stately stride, her baby wrapped in a calico scarf, cleaving tight to its mother's back. On her head she carries a basket of onions. She may have walked for two or three hours to get here this morning.

A goat bleats. Crates clatter. Everywhere is ablaze with sunlight. In the middle of the road a young man in an ill-fitting shirt - donated, like everyone else's - cycles past with a dead chicken dangling from each of his handlebars. He looks regal.

The air is of rotting fruit and burnt oil and the possibilities of the new day.

It's Tuesday, and it's just after 6am.

Ribaué is hopeful because it needs to be. The market pulsates with youth and vitality because most people don't grow old here: the average life expectancy is 42 years. Nobody can tell you for sure how many people live in Mozambique - maybe 18 million, maybe 20 million - but, according to the UN, they happen to reside in the ninth poorest country in the world, and almost 80 per cent of them live on less than €1.50 a day.

Google "rural isolation" and surely it will give you Ribaué. It is not so much reached as arrived at by way of a dozen improvised steps: from Ireland the journey involves five flights and a tumbling three-hour drive over sinking, cratered dirt tracks.

Apart from aid workers, the few foreigners who pass through are the intrepid climbers who come to scale the area's granite domes or missionaries en route to claiming the unchurched. If there are others, they have probably lost their way.

To stop here is to be at the heart of Nampula province, in Mozambique's far north, in an Ireland-sized expanse of open savannah broken by imposing rocky outcrops and plateaux. The provincial capital, also Nampula, is the largest place in northern Mozambique, a lively African everytown and, thanks to its single paved road, an important transit hub for the region.

The farther you travel from town the more sparsely inhabited is the countryside. A few miles from Ribaué village, in Cunle, Perda Martin Gonzalvez, a 32-year-old mother of four, sits outside her one-roomed mud shack. She explains that she moved here to be closer to her mother after her husband and father of three of her children died a few years ago. Eight-year-old Ginencio, six-year-old Zatoke and four-year-old Kaosa all attend the local school, which, like all the schools in the district, has so many pupils that each age group is taught in rotation for three hours a day. Their brother Isaria was born two years ago; his father never comes to visit.

Gonzalvez's problems are those of Ribaué writ small. Every morning she walks four kilometres for a few litres of water: arduous, but not by local standards; here, many people walk four times that distance for the same purpose. Although the region is home to a large mineral-water plant, only 10 per cent of local people can access water near their home. The entire district has 85 handpumps, boreholes, taps and wells. That's one for every 700 people.

It's common for Gonzalvez's children to fall ill, she says, for in Nampula province we find ourselves in a cosmopolitan melting pot of world-class diseases, from those that hitch a ride on the back of poverty the world over - TB, rabies, bilharzia, sleeping sickness, typhoid, tick-bite fever, dengue and cholera - to the italicised pandemics of the south: malaria and HIV-Aids. When one of her children has to be treated she will borrow money and sell some of her own vegetables to repay the debt.

Ask Gonzalvez what she would want if the world was hers to have. Simple: a new roof, she says. "The house is the only thing I have, and it has cracks in it." Her predicament is typical, but her demeanour isn't. Gonzalvez speaks Portuguese as well as Makua, the region's language, and in its gliding vowels she lays before you a striking self-assurance, a performer's poise. And, in a way, that's why we're here: Gonzalvez is a public representative, of sorts.

She sits on the local development committee, a group of some 30 men and women that has been representing this community before the district authorities for the past few years. They mediate, they broker, they lobby. And, just by their being, they orient the district planning process towards the villagers' needs.

Like others in neighbouring districts, Cunle's committee was established and supported by Concern - with the help of Depfa Bank, a public-sector lender with German roots and a base at the International Financial Services Centre, in Dublin - to develop channels of civic participation, to help people take part in the planning and monitoring of district development.

And beyond the jargon there is the physical fruit of their work: a wheat mill, cement for a new well, a credit facility, or a new stretch of road, each one a precious stone in this poverty-stricken corner of the world. In 2005 one local committee managed to force a government U-turn on a decision to build a police station when the community wanted - needed - a health centre. After months of argument the authorities relented, and the centre was built.

In Mavile, where a committee of 29 represents a community of 500 families, two additions to the local infrastructure were talked about above all else: a sunflower-oil press and a "bicycle ambulance", little more than a crude metal platform that could be attached to the back of a bike, stretcher-like, to carry its patient to the nearest - read far-away - medical post.

But, as important as these victories are, the committees are about something farther-reaching, more enduring. The oil press will break, and the bicycle ambulance will fall into disuse, but perhaps not so the process by which they were acquired.

Tom Wright, Concern's country director in Mozambique, says the aim is to instil a spirit of confidence where he sees the submissiveness to authority that existed in parts of Ireland a few decades ago. "I remember, as a youth growing up in the west of Ireland, the doctor, the parish priest and the teacher: they held power. And parents, not to mind young people, were almost scared to approach those people about any issues. Now the same situation exists in rural Mozambique, where the people will not counteract authority, they will not call authority to task," he says.

Concern hopes this culture of civic power, of holding authority to account, will embed itself long after the development workers have packed their white jeeps and left. All going well, it will hasten their departure.

Most intriguing, though, are the unexpected pay-offs. It is not until we have left Nampula, after a few days, and are retracing our steps south to the capital, Maputo, that the most striking feature of these committees hits home. Where are the men? They're there, of course, and the documents tell us there are as many men as women on the committees, but the groups seem to have thrown up a similar gender dynamic wherever they arise. In Cunle, 20 of the 30 members are women. Elsewhere, was there a single man who spoke on behalf of his committee? At the meetings, who sat in front and who skulked awkwardly behind? And the committees are a mirror for their villages' division of labour, where the woman is more likely than the man to debate, teach the young, carry the child, feed the family, tend the crop and, then, carry the vegetables on her head to market.

Nampula's society is by tradition a matriarchal one, it turns out, but at a national level, too, Mozambique's attitude to women is one of the most progressive in Africa. At 35 per cent, the proportion of seats they hold in parliament is more than double Ireland's meagre ratio, and family laws introduced in 2004 give women rights they did not have before: they can now have title to property, and the marriage age for women, previously 14, has been raised to 18, the same as for men. The laws state for the first time that there is no head of the family, so couples are free to decide who should represent them. Its value is not only semantic: it means that, whereas previously the father had to be present at the registration of his child's birth, a woman can fill in the documents on her own. Women can now seek bank loans where before they needed the signature of a husband, father or uncle.

But while their dominance on local development committees tells us something about the strength of women's position in the villages, it also hides - or could it reflect? - the extent of women's problems in Mozambique. For the country's difficulties are disproportionately felt by women. Take the land, says Graça Samo, director of Forum Mulher, an umbrella body for groups working on women's issues. A woman such as Perda Gonzalvez owns her mud shack but not the land it is built on, and a government desperate for foreign investment uses confiscated land to lure much-needed dollars and yuan to more remote parts of the country.

"You have the problem that families are losing their land, and the private sector trying to lobby to have privatisation of land, and all this is to the detriment of the local community, because the majority of our population lives in rural areas, and the majority of our population are women," says Samo. "They are mainly in subsistence agriculture. It has become such a big problem that every time you open a magazine or turn on the television you will find someone talking about it."

As development agencies' work brings them further and their education programmes penetrate deeper into the local consciousness, issues such as domestic violence and sexual abuse begin to be reported more and more, although the state hasn't got the capacity to meet victims' needs. So, although women who are beaten at home are urged to report their husbands, those who do have no choice but to return home eventually, because there is nowhere for them to be housed.

One study in Nampula province found that, in one school over a single year, four girls fell pregnant to their teachers. And when a teacher is found guilty he is usually transferred to another school.

Then, of course, there is HIV-Aids, the direst of all the continent's problems. Because women are biologically more vulnerable to infection and often lack the power to insist on contraception, the condition is disproportionately their burden. (The national prevalence rate is 16 per cent, but in the 15-24 age group women are twice as likely to have HIV-Aids.)

Some traditional beliefs make the situation worse. Even the educated revere traditional healers, whose tools are another vector for infection and whose services keep many from reporting their symptoms at health centres. In a few provinces there is a widely held belief in the "cleansing of the widow", a centuries-old ritual holding that, when a husband dies, his wife must be freed from his spirits by having sex with his brother.

"It's one of the questions that raises a lot of controversy. People want to stop it, but it's part of the culture, it's been there for centuries, so organisations are trying to get the communities to use condoms," says Ana Machaieie, Concern's national co-ordinator for HIV-Aids. "For us it might be something that is not correct or that should be stopped, but then it's always been part of their living, and so it's the most natural thing to do . . . I have a study that shows that the women accept that it's a natural thing - otherwise they feel cursed."

For all these problems, not one of them is intractable, says Tom Wright, and where the development committees are set up some progress - albeit slow - can be seen almost instantly. "Overall we can see things improving," he says, "but, from where we're coming from, don't expect to see any significant difference in the next 20 years. It's going to take a long, long time."

As Wright points out, Mozambique is barely 15 years old, year zero being 1992, when the country at last emerged from more than two decades of turmoil spanning a struggle for independence (the Portuguese left in 1975), years of inept USSR-sponsored rule and a brutal 17-year civil war that killed a million people and pushed 1.7 million into neighbouring states.

This historical hiatus has bequeathed to modern Mozambique a vast infrastructural flatland, low on clean water, railway lines, electricity and the traditional tools of a functioning state. Even today there are twice as many paved roads in Co Cork as there are in all of Mozambique, a country so vast that the distance from north to south is equivalent to that between Dublin and Moscow.

And yet the small-scale progress being made in Ribaué is reflected nationally. Political stability has brought economic growth; progress towards development goals such as universal free education continues apace; the country has the capacity to feed itself; and its people are hopeful and forward-looking - although, perhaps, the emotional absolutes of hope and despair are out of place here, where the two cohabit and play off one another like ageing dancers stepping to an old number.

We finish up in Teacane, in Ribaué, where a theatre group has come to perform a play aimed at spreading the message on HIV-Aids. The performance follows a common formula for the genre: a series of tableaux that start off as slapstick routines and turn slowly into variations on the danse macabre in which boy-meets-girl, boy-leaves-girl and girl-falls-ill, the silent killer leading people of all classes and walks of life to the same end.

The set comes to a close with a girl lying alone on the red earth. There's a long pause, then the crowd of hundreds, rapt until now, erupts in whooping, thigh-slapping applause. Suddenly there's a cacophony of noise: children running, babies crying, mothers laughing. The schoolchildren make their way giddily to the wall where their exam results are to be posted this evening. Dogs are barking and a jeep revs its engine. A young man lifts the girl beside him and they embrace, standing still as the dust scatters around them. Dusk is falling and the mosquitoes hover overhead. The place is busy and purposeful and awash with round-eyed radiance.

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic and Dara Mac Dónaill travelled to Mozambique with Concern