“We have stayed here, in this same district of Macomia, since the beginning and throughout the conflict and we never left this area. At this moment, there are lots of people in this village, but what happened was that, during the attacks, we fled into the woods and stayed there for six days without water or food. To this day, we’re still here and we haven’t gone anywhere.”
Said Ms. Mendonca Joao.
Ms. Joao, 25 years old, experienced the horrors of the armed conflict and the violence in the Cabo Delgado Province of northern Mozambique. Shortly after the attacks on the village by non-State armed groups, she found her home burned along with buildings such as schools, clinics and the local police stations.
A little over a year later, Ms. Joao continues rebuilding her life. She is not alone in her story: many of the 744,000 internally displaced people who fled the conflict areas, some for as long as two years, are slowly starting to voluntarily return to their areas of origin. People from Cabo Delgado are currently living in and returning to areas where all infrastructure was destroyed, including buildings that had already been damaged by Cyclone Kenneth in 2019 and where the provision of basic public services has yet to resume.
The India-UN Fund and UNDP are supporting the full reconstruction of the Macomia Health Centre, which started with clean-up and minor repairs, including the installation of a generator for light, mainly in the maternity ward where mothers were previously giving birth in the dark. Ms. Catarina Falume, a resident of Macomia who works with the local community and returnees in the district’s clean-up activities supported by the India-UN Fund and UNDP, reported that “I am responsible for the family but currently, the financial life is not good because we are unstable. There is a lot of running around due to insecurity. There is great value in this activity that we do because we are putting right the area of our hospital with good visibility and hygiene. We hope that our hospital will have the same conditions as before. When this activity ends, I will produce my cassava again because at the end of this activity, I will have some money in my hands.”
