Cross-cutting approaches
The following cross-cutting priorities have relevance across UNICEF’s Country Programme in Mozambique: Early Childhood Development, Adolescent Programming, Innovation, Gender and Disability, and Climate.
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The following cross-cutting priorities have relevance across UNICEF’s Country Programme in Mozambique: Early Childhood Development, Adolescent Programming, Innovation, Gender and Disability, and Climate. UNICEF pursues a holistic approach, ensuring integration of these priorities within programming in the country.
EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
UNICEF works with all sectors influencing early childhood development, including health, nutrition, WASH, and education, among others, to assist in holistic programming for ensuring children’s healthy early development. UNICEF prioritizes:
- Promoting nurturing care through the Nurturing Care Framework: The Nurturing Care Framework, developed by WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank Group, in collaboration with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, the Early Childhood Development Action Network, and other partners, draws on state-of-the-art evidence to set out the most effective policies and services to help parents and caregivers provide nurturing care for babies. UNICEF promotes use of the nurturing care framework by training community health workers and community groups to promote key practices such as breastfeeding, responsive feeding, play and stimulation. UNICEF supports delivery of an integrated Nutrition Interventions Package (Pacote de Intervencoes de Nutricao), which incorporates key early childhood development practices with nutritional interventions.
- Supporting the roll-out of Mozambique’s ECD Strategy (2018-24), developed by the Government of Mozambique with support from UNICEF and development partners. The ECD Strategy adopts a systems approach to ECD and includes important focus on pre-school learning and creating the foundations for primary school learning.
ADOLESCENT PROGRAMMING
Adolescence is a critical period for individual development, one that is characterized by important transitions. Many lifelong habits are formed during this period which shape future health, social and economic outcomes. Adolescents (aged 10-18) represent nearly 25 per cent of Mozambique’s population, making them a key demographic in the country’s present and future. With 6 million adolescents and 80 per cent of its population under 35, Mozambique has the potential to take advantage of a large demographic dividend. Yet the country has poor indicators across sectors for adolescents, particularly girls, access to resources is limited, and harmful socio-cultural practices persist.
UNICEF prioritizes adolescents facing the greatest inequities and those most vulnerable to, and affected by, conflict and the impacts of climate change. Interventions are implemented through close inter-sectoral collaboration, recognizing the inter-connectedness between results across education, including secondary and second chance education, violence prevention, delaying child marriage, reducing early pregnancies, adolescent mothers’ health and mortality, nutrition outcomes of pregnant adolescents, adolescent mothers, and prevention of vertical transmission of HIV, and social protection needs.
At the same time, every young person should have a voice in identifying problems and finding solutions that impact their health and well-being. It is important to invest in building relationships and partnerships with young people to allow them to co-create meaningful, sustainable solutions for their future.
Within adolescent programming at large, UNICEF prioritizes interventions focusing on adolescent engagement and participation, adolescent health, and adolescent protection.
Hiris Jamal, 19, is a UNICEF-trained Youth Advocate in Nampula. “Being a youth advocate for my country and my city is a big responsibility, and I feel very proud to be entrusted with talking to children about their issues and helping them find solutions to their problems. As a woman and teen, I know the importance of going to school, having a dream, and getting a job. We too often rob girls of their dreams and their possibility to choose when we ask adolescents to be a mother and force them into the responsibility of caring for a child.
I would like to finish law school to become a lawyer and specialize on domestic violence, as I have witnessed too many girls enduring it in silence. I want to help them stand up to their perpetrator and seek justice in court.
I dream that all women in Mozambique have access to quality education, health services, and family planning methods so that they can decide when they want to have children and have the information to decide on everything in their life.”
Around 1,800 adolescents, including those with disabilities, have been trained and engaged yearly in media production and broadcasting.
In the area of adolescent engagement and participation, UNICEF supports multiple platforms and programmes that involve adolescents in participatory action:
- Child-to-child media programme: The programme provides adolescents with an opportunity to engage and shape public discourse of issues they identify as priorities. Since launching two decades ago, the initiative has equipped over 1,700 adolescents annually with TV/Radio production skills, providing a platform to express their opinions on issues of relevance to them.
- U-Report/SMS Biz: In 2016, UNICEF Mozambique and partners adapted the U-Report platform to provide adolescents and young people with access to comprehensive, personalized, and confidential sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and HIV information through SMS by trained counsellors and peers. To date, the U-Report/SMS Biz platform has 771,590 users of whom 59 per cent are male and 41 per cent female.
- Child Parliament: This is a national platform (with provincial representation) comprising over 1,500 adolescent members from all provinces, working under the umbrella of, and in close collaboration with, the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Action on child rights promotion and protection. The mechanism offers adolescents opportunities to express their concerns and engage with the Government at all levels to foster dialogue on child rights in Mozambique.
- Youth advocates: UNICEF works closely with a diverse group of eight youth advocates aged 15-24 from Sofala, Zambezia, Nampula and Maputo provinces. These Youth Advocates are young people who are already actively involved in advocacy around UNICEF priority issues, with a passion for inspiring other young people in a positive way. UNICEF provides platforms and opportunities for these advocates to raise their voices on the issues that matter to them including, for example, through supporting virtual participation in the 2022 Transforming Education Summit and 2023 ECOSOC Youth Forum.
- Artists as activists: In 2022, UNICEF trained, empowered, and engaged 47 young artists from Nampula, Zambezia and Cabo Delgado to produce creative content on issues concerning adolescents and young people, such as teenage pregnancies, violence against children, child marriage, adolescent sexual and reproductive health/HIV, peace and social cohesion, inclusion, and mental health. These artists will continue to act as changemakers in their respective provinces as well as at national level and constitute an important pool of influential activists with significant numbers of young followers who look up to them.
Story: Children and Adolescents get a Voice on Radio and Television
Children and adolescents face a world of challenges and issues that are particular to their specific stage in life, and there’s no one better suited to discuss these than the children and adolescents themselves.
For many years, UNICEF has been partnering with radio and television stations in Mozambique to support the training of teen reporters to report, produce and present a range of programs for children, by children.
“It’s easier when a child talks to another child… when children know the programme is done by children too, they pay more attention than if it were an adult speaking to them,” explains Joao de Britos Langa, Provincial Director of Radio Mozambique in Nampula. Radio Mozambique broadcasts three such weekly programmes in Portuguese and local languages, covering topics from child marriage to climate resilience.
UNICEF’s support of the radio station goes back 20 years and includes not only training but provision of equipment such as computers, laptops, mobile phones and recording devices. As technologies advance, training has also extended to podcast production, new technologies, and emergency situations. Recently, the radio has also started programmes with IDPs in Cabo Delgado, taking trainees to the field to better understand the issue.
Radio is an important medium to promote and influence behaviour change. UNICEF is enhancing the capacities of adolescents to produce and develop programmes relevant to children to share relevant information and provide a platform to voice their opinions.
Eliseba Emilia, 19, has been with the radio for 10 years. “I have always been passionate about communication,” she says. Eliseba was a shy and introverted child, having been a victim of violence on the part of her father. But radio gave her a voice from the young age of 9, and she was able to overcome her experience and use the platform to help other children.
Now she is charge of the radio programme “Entre Nos” (‘between us’), which focuses on girls and young women. “My most important job at the radio is girl empowerment- to give girls power to make decisions for their lives,” Eliseba says.
Alongside working at the radio, Eliseba is also in her second year of law school at Nampula university, with her sights set on becoming a judge. “I want to focus on family law and work for children… I want to do something so that other children don’t suffer the way I suffered.” UNICEF and partners support these initiatives to make her dream become a reality.
In the area of adolescent health, recognizing and understanding the influence of specific socio-cultural norms and practices of different communities is particularly relevant to programmes addressing sexual and reproductive health, as sexuality is both universal and culturally specific.
In support of adolescent health, UNICEF is working to:
- Continuously support health systems strengthening by highlighting and flagging other initiatives impacting young people’s health and well-being such as adolescent nutrition and recommending actions to redress unequal health outcomes, highlighting solutions led by young people.
- Support Ministry of Health efforts to ensure that private and public health facilities provide an integrated package of health services that are adequate for adolescents’ needs, age-appropriate, youth-friendly and gender-sensitive.
- Engage youth through technology such as mobile phones and social media to share accurate information on SRH, safe sex, answer questions, stimulate discussion and generate an interest in SRHR choices, report on gender-based violence and monitor programs.
- Foster supportive environments—from peers, mentors, parents, family members to the broader community—that can support young people’s ability to forge healthy relationships, make informed choices on SRH, safe sex and gender-based violence, and to pursue goals.
In the area of adolescent protection, UNICEF will focus on mobilizing different actors in the country to support the development and implementation of a comprehensive violence prevention strategy – particularly sexual violence in schools and child marriage.
To safeguard the fundamental right of children to receive an education in an environment free from violence and maximize their potential for academic achievement and social and emotional development, UNICEF is working to:
- Promote integrated and indirect prevention and protection in school-based interventions such as school clubs, school enrolment and retention programmes, sexual and reproductive health education services, and promotion of sports.
- Continue investing in strong case management which links community support systems to public systems such as the health, police, and justice system to work effectively for children and marginalized populations.
- Develop a wide range of social and behavioural change (SBC) interventions and tools to support a multi-level, multi-sectoral, participatory, and inclusive social change process. Peer-to-peer adolescent and youth programmes will remain a major focus and community radio networks will be utilized to serve as a continuous feedback mechanism between service providers, the community, and decision makers.
- Continue engaging boys and young men, including male influencers and positive role models, by building their capacities to promote dialogues among their peers that question socio-cultural constructs of male gender roles, promote positive masculinity, and promote a positive approach to social dialogue in favour of girls' rights.
BASIC REQUIREMENTS FOR EFFECTIVE AND ETHICAL PARTICIPATION OF ADOLESCENTS
- TRANSPARENT AND INFORMATIVE: Adolescents must receive full, accessible, diversity-sensitive and age-appropriate information about their right to express their views and the purpose and scope of participation opportunities.
- VOLUNTARY: Adolescents should never be coerced into expressing views against their wishes, and they should be informed that they can cease involvement at any stage.
- RESPECTFUL: Adults should acknowledge, respect and support adolescents’ ideas, actions and existing contributions to their families, schools, cultures and work environments.
- RELEVANT: Adolescents should have opportunities to draw on their knowledge, skills and abilities and to express their views on issues that have real relevance to their lives.
- CHILD-/ADOLESCENT-FRIENDLY: Environments and working methods should consider and reflect adolescents’ evolving capacities and interests.
- INCLUSIVE: Participation opportunities should include marginalized adolescents of different ages, genders, (dis)abilities and backgrounds.
- SUPPORTED BY TRAINING: Adults and adolescents should be trained and mentored in facilitating adolescent participation so they can serve as trainers and facilitators.
- SAFE AND SENSITIVE TO RISK: Expression of views may involve risks. Adolescents should participate in risk assessment and mitigation and know where to go for help if needed.
- ACCOUNTABLE: Adolescents should receive clear feedback on how their participation has influenced outcomes and should be supported to share that feedback with their peers.
Fonte: Engaged and Heard (UNICEF 2021)
INNOVATION
Innovation and digital transformation are key change strategies through which UNICEF accelerates results for children and young people across different sectors.
In this area, UNICEF is working to support the different ministries and agencies of the Government of Mozambique on a number of important initiatives:
- Implementing two key initiatives: Learning Passport, and Giga. The Learning Passport makes curriculum-aligned content easily accessible to students and teachers via digital platforms, complementing existing efforts to address the learning crisis, with a focus on primary education. The Giga initiative aims to map school infrastructure, especially connectivity, and promote a multistakeholder and sustainable approach to ensure learners obtain access to the Internet.
- Rolling-out the upSCALE mobile app (mHealth), a valuable tool which empowers community health workers to diagnose, treat and refer patients through a digital platform. Separately, supporting the launch of the country’s first-ever e-Learning platform for social workers, and also that of SINAS – the country’s national information management system on water and sanitation.
- Supporting Mozambique’s national disaster risk reduction agency to upgrade its emergency preparedness, monitoring and response procedures using a next-generation digital platform. The new portal – part of the Tech for Climate Resilience joint initiative of UNICEF and UNDP – will include a Geographical Information System-based forecasting and risk analysis tool developed by the Italian Government's civil protection department, a machine learning-based early warning mechanism which operates via SMS, and intuitive dashboards.
- Leveraging the existing WhatsApp channel of the SMS-BIZ platform to deliver game-based content that will empower young people and adolescents with 21st-century skills (starting in 2023).
GENDER
The persistence of unequal gender social norms influences household and community power dynamics, limiting access to, and control of, resources for women and girls. This restricts the agency of women and girls to make strategic choices regarding their lives and health (including sexual and reproductive health), while hampering efforts to eradicate gender-based violence and harmful practices. This situation is exacerbated by the lack of adequate access to quality, accessible, gender-responsive and adolescent-friendly services. The impact of conflict and climate-related emergencies is strongly influenced by gender, with women and girls more likely to be forced to adopt negative coping strategies and experience poverty.
UNICEF Mozambique programming emphasizes gender-responsive service provision and the empowerment of adolescent girls, in both development and humanitarian interventions. Crucial to the transformative approach pursued throughout the Country Programme is the engagement of men and boys in efforts to promote a shift in the dominant models of masculinity, promoting positive, non-violent models of masculinity and gender-equal power dynamics within the household and the community.
There is also a need to promote gender equality through policy and legislation, and to reinforce implementation and enforcement to address gender gaps across sectors, while stimulating demand for services through improving quality and gender-responsiveness of key services and creating an enabling environment for women and girls.
UNICEF is prioritizing:
- Strengthening evidence-based approaches to gender-responsive programming through the identification of priority data and information gaps on gender. Gender focus is being mainstreamed across surveys and studies, thereby strengthening the availability of gender-disaggregated data.
- In humanitarian interventions, UNICEF is prioritizing GBV risk mitigation, including in sector and multisectoral programmes, and in the work of UNICEF-led humanitarian clusters and sector groups, with a focus on the safety and resilience of girls and women.
- UNICEF is also seeking to build the agency of women and girls by engaging women, adolescent girls, and their representative organizations in the identification of gender barriers, expression of needs, design, monitoring and implementation of interventions.
- Promoting social and behaviour change at community level, recruiting all sectors and actors to deconstruct gender biases and address discrimination and unequal gender social norms.
DISABILITY
UNICEF’s CPD includes strong focus on disability as a crosscutting issue which will be mainstreamed across both development and humanitarian programming. UNICEF will focus on a twin-track approach to mainstreaming disability inclusive approaches across programming while focusing on target priorities within the disability-inclusive agenda.
UNICEF prioritizes improving access to services for children with disabilities through direct targeting across all sectors. Targeted interventions include inclusive education, early identification, and intervention of developmental disabilities, strengthening assessment for enrolment of people with disabilities in social protection initiatives, improving access to assistive technology, use of latrine add-ons to improve accessibility of WASH infrastructure and creating opportunities for direct participation of children and youth with disabilities. Mainstreamed interventions include capacity development of different actors on disability inclusion, adopting universal design of WASH and school infrastructure, addressing stigma and discrimination, and providing technical guidance on disability inclusion.
CLIMATE
Despite being responsible for only 0,01 per cent of the world’s cumulative Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Mozambique is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and ranks 10th on UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI).
Mozambique’s geographic location in the inter-tropical convergence zone, its 2,470 km-long coastline and the nine transnational river basins flowing through its territory into the Indian Ocean make the country highly prone to recurring floods and cyclones, which are intensifying with climate change. Many areas of Mozambique are also water-scarce because of low aquifer yield or high salinity, and these problems are projected to increase with climate change and intensified drought events. The majority (60 per cent) of Mozambique’s population live in low-lying coastal areas and most of the population live in peri-urban and rural areas with limited access to electricity, improved drinking water and sanitation, and inadequate housing units. Climate change is destroying or interrupting access to critical basic and social services further, creating a vicious cycle. In addition, children are also affected by the negative coping strategies that affected households are often forced to adopt, which include an increased incidence of child labour, child marriage and selling assets. The combined effects of climate change and poverty threaten to exacerbate inequities and push the poorest, most vulnerable children further into poverty.
According to a UNICEF survey report, children and youth in Mozambique are worried about the impacts of climate change and want to be part of the solution. Of 21,000 children and youth who participated in the poll, 64 per cent of respondents indicated that the biggest climate-related challenge in their community was prolonged periods of heat and drought. Nearly half of the respondents said that they had observed less food production and availability in their surrounding area because of climate-related challenges. The overwhelming majority of respondents wished to have an active role in the green transition, citing “lack of knowledge and skills” as their most prominent barrier to this.
Within this context, child-focused action on climate has been established as a cross-cutting area of priority focus for UNICEF’s programme in Mozambique. UNICEF prioritizes:
- Building resilience of children and key services, in line with the Climate Action for Children in Mozambique Strategic Framework 2022-2026 developed by UNICEF. Efforts focus on four pillars: i) Advocating with and for children and youth on climate action; ii) Mainstreaming climate action and resilience; iii) Strengthening disaster risk reduction within the Country Programme; and iv) Greening UNICEF Mozambique’s operations.
- Supporting climate action for children: Globally, UNICEF calls for decision makers to build the resilience of children and young people to the climate and water crisis by Protecting children by adapting their critical services, Preparing children by building their adaptive capacity, and Prioritizing children in climate finance and resources. Generating country-specific evidence and building partnerships with key actors in this area are immediate priorities to provide space for advancing these objectives in Mozambique. Specifically, UNICEF plans to continue to partner with and support young children and adolescents engaged and interested in addressing environmental issues, raising awareness, and conducting research to assess the impact of climate change on children to help shape and implement national climate policies and programmes in a child-sensitive way.
Mozambique is one of the countries that is most severely affected by climate change, facing cyclical flooding and tropical cyclones. To address the impact of climate shocks and stresses on water management, UNICEF supports construction of resilient water systems that can withstand natural disasters, while working to map and understand risks related to various climate change impacts in different areas. UNICEF also works to install climate-friendly water systems in health facilities, which run on solar power. In areas susceptible to flooding, UNICEF supports construction of elevated latrines. Likewise, in the drought areas, we build water systems that use rainwater harvesting approaches, ensuring year-round availability of water.
Story: SMSbiz gives youth a place to ask everything they can’t discuss with their parents
“When should I start having sex? What if I haven’t started menstruating? How do I use a condom?”
Adolescents in Mozambique have many questions about puberty, intimacy, and sexual and reproductive health, but not many people they can ask for reliable and non-judgmental answers.
“It’s very difficult to talk about sex with our parents… I want to talk about these issues, but they feel threatened,” says Ana de Jacinta, 18. “It’s very important to talk to youth before they become sexually active. But the parents’ mentality is different.”
Meanwhile, what teens hear from peers is often wrong. Isaac heard that drinking Coca-Cola with salt can cause a miscarriage. When Hermengina got her period, her sister told she had HIV and was going to die. “It’s a habit in the area, when girls start menstruating, they try to scare them, so they don’t have sex.”
Enter SMSbiz, a digital platform where adolescents and young people can ask questions anonymously and receive reliable, age-appropriate answers from experienced youth outreach workers who have been trained as counsellors within the national HIV and sexual and reproductive health programme, supported by UNICEF and UNFPA.
The platform utilizes U-Report, UNICEF’s flagship digital platform. Thanks to partnership with three mobile network operators – TMCel, Vodacom, and Movitel – the service is free, and users can reach out via SMS and messaging apps to ask about sexual and reproductive health, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), contraception, HIV stigma, and more.
The growth and development of SMSbiz has been driven in part by Francelino Murela, Social and Behavioural Change (SBC) Officer for UNICEF in Maputo. “I could talk about everything growing up. My family was very open. But my friends didn’t have this opportunity and wound up having kids at 17,” he says.
Without correct information, he says, “adolescents make poor choices – early pregnancies, abandoning school, abandoning their future.” They are also more exposed to harmful practices that violate their rights, such as child marriage.
Usually, SMSbiz counsellors provide answers themselves. For complex questions or situations, such as those involving rape or other serious issues, there is a case management protocol and a mechanism for reporting cases to the police.
Since 2015, SMSbiz has provided two million answers, overseen and tracked by three supervisors and a national coordinator. Its 347,000 users come from all over Mozambique. This means SMSbiz is serving very diverse communities with different social norms, so they have three regional hubs with counsellors familiar with local nuances.
Sometimes it is the users themselves that inform SMSbiz. These “super-users” are identified as frequent users by the system’s engagement analytics and are invited to share feedback to inform implementation and also promote the platform in the community.
One super-user is Ana, who had been misinformed about contraceptives. “I love to use SMSbiz to get the right information on important issues,” she says.
Murela is proud of what he has achieved for the community with SMSbiz. “My hope is that more people use our platform to make informed decisions,” he says.
