One of the great achievements of the concept of human development since its articulation in 1990, is that it has succeeded in re-orienting the analysis of development towards the main dimensions of the choices made by human beings; that is, the expansion of their capacity to live increasingly long, materially and spiritually enriching lives. The human development critique of the development trend centered on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) derives essentially from the argument that GDP reflects only the resources that a given nation has at its disposal. However, the differences between nations, in terms of their development, are shown not only in what each country produces, but in what each of them does with the resources generated through the productive process.

Thus, investment in education becomes an integral part of development. Education is an important dimension of human development, and plays a determinant role in expanding the many choices that people make. Indeed, out of theoretically unlimited choices, knowledge in its various forms plays the most determinant role in strengthening the other dimensions of human development.

Education expresses the socialisation of new generations, and the socialisation process is influenced by education, over time. Educated people are better able to adopt increasingly productive methods, they are innovative, and they create the conditions for a longer life. They are better prepared to influence social structures and organisation, and in the process improve the general well-being of society.

It is this relationship that justifies the definition of education as a fundamental right of humanity, enshrined in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This article declares, in its first point: "Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit." With this declaration, the right to education gained, in theory, the same force as the rights to citizenship or to freedom of expression. Thus, on the basis of the ideal underlying this declaration, exclusion from access to reading and writing is a privation that nations must take steps to eliminate.

In its essentials, the concept of human development does no more than pursue an ideal which is a matter of consensus among the community of nations when it stresses the role of education in the development of individuals and of nations, drawing attention to the need to observe this right.

The main purpose of this Report is to analyse the situation of education in Mozambique. The reason motivating the authors was not merely to approach, with intellectual rigour, a theme of great relevance for the concept of human development. Standing above this is the awareness that education has always represented and still represents the most complex and multifaceted development challenge facing independent Mozambique.

The resort to the colonial heritage as a reference point is sometimes regarded as a tired cliché, given its frequent use and abuse to justify situations that are often unjustifiable and to defend the indefensible. But in the case of education, reference to the colonial legacy is an imperative, precisely because it explains many of the problems and challenges that education has confronted and continues to confront, and the incidents that have occurred on its journey through the first 25 years of Mozambique's existence as an independent state.

Mozambique inherited a heavy bur den from the colonial past: in 500 years of domination, colonialism only managed to convert 7% of the indigenous population to its world of reading and writing. It is worth stressing that even the few who had the privilege of access to school during the colonial epoch received an alienating education, because the main foundation of the system was the denial of the values and culture of Mozambicans. This option is hardly surprising since colonial education was, by definition, also a means of domination.

The colonial reference is important because, on the one hand, it explains the appalling under development of the country. It would be utopian to imagine that just 25 years of independence could compensate for the legacy of 500 years, even without factors such as armed conflict, which had a major impact on ` independence. On the other hand, the colonial reference also explains, to some extent, the choices made after independence, many of which, viewed in the ever-wise light of hindsight, may now look like real pedagogic adventures.

Many of the problems that education faces today can be attributed to the urgency with which the new government tried to provide Mozambicans with a fundamental right that had been denied them for centuries, perhaps to the detriment of other aspects over which care should have been taken. This was an irresistible temptation for any nationalist movement of the time.

Furthermore, the analysis of colonial education gives us the context for the complete break with the past that had to be undertaken immediately after independence. The form and the urgency per haps became, in many areas, enemies of perfection. But in 25 years the effort has produced palpable results: the literacy rate rose from 7% in 1975 to 39.5% in 1999, as a corollary of mass access to education.

Despite the remarkable strides, Mozambique is far from solving the problems of access to education for its population. The 1997 General Population Census showed that only 7% of the population have secondary education, 0.8% have technical education, and only 0.3% have higher education. Only 37% of children aged 6 to 12 have access to school.

This means that, right from the start, the future of 63% of Mozambican children is compromised, because they are deprived of access to the basic instrument that would allow them to expand the range of choices for their lives. Gender and regional disparities in access are flagrant.

Those who have the privilege to sit for five or more days a week on the benches of the school system are witnessing a sharp debate in society, which asks to what extent education is really providing them with instruments that are necessary and relevant to the Mozambican context, and that will allow them to reward society with due compensation for the heavy resources invested in their training.

Furthermore, behind the improvement in the educational indicators lies an enormous challenge. When speaking of improvements in access, it is not very usual, for instance, to mention the fact that in 1999, 95.8% of the school population was concentrated in the two levels of primary education, namely EP1, which covers the first five years of schooling, and EP2 which contains the final two years of primary school. EP1 accounted for 87.9% of all pupils and EP2 for 7.9%. The two cycles of secondary education between them account for 3% of the school population, while technical and professional education and higher education account for just 0.8% and 0.4% respectively.

The way in which the educational pyramid narrows so sharply draws attention to the effort the country must undertake to make the system effective and efficient, since the over whelming majority of children do not have access to the full seven years of basic education.

The high repeat and drop-out rates illustrate the inefficiency of the system which obliges the country to spend resources that it does not have. The high repeat and drop-out rates illustrate the inefficiency of the system which obliges the country to spend resources that it does not have to cater for those who repeat their grades a provide education to children who eventually do not complete any educational cycle.

It should also be noted that the educational system is simultaneously being pushed to rethink all of its components, starting with the languages used to transmit knowledge, passing through content and assessment methods, and culminating in bringing education into line with the real development needs of individuals and of the country. To this we could add the issue of cultural values and structure of the social universes of which Mozambique is composed - not to mention the demands for gender equity and equality. Clearly it will be no easy task to undertake this effort under conditions of scar city of human and material resources, and in a world under going rapid and continual transformation, which obliges weak nations to battle constantly against being relegated to the margins.

The appearance of imponderable factors such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic represents a further challenge. Education is called upon to play a significant r ole, not only in protecting its own staff against the virus, but also to structure itself so as to serve simultaneously as a battleground against the spread of the virus, and as a means to manage the impacts. According to a study on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the education sector prepared for the Ministry of Education, the public education sector will have no choice but to adjust to compensate for the loss of about 17% of its staff, according to an HIV-AIDS impact assessment study undertaken for the ministry of Education, including teachers and managers, and to accommodate a growing number of AIDS orphans in the period 2000-2010. This is occurring at a time when the sector is preparing to broaden access increasingly so as to reduce the rates of exclusion.

Is the Mozambican education sector capable of responding to these multiple challenges? Where will the necessary human and material resources come from -particularly if we take into account that over 40% of the education budget is funded by donors? How can the available resources be used in the most efficient and effective way? What reforms are needed to bring the system into line with development needs and socio-cultural reality? What adjustments are necessary to guarantee community involvement in education? What is the r ole of the private sector and of society in education? What synergies can be created between the public, private and community sectors? What r ole is reserved for the international community in this effort? How will the sector meet the challenges of globalisation, and how does it intend to take advantage of the positive aspects of this process? These are some of the questions raised and discussed in the five chapters of this report.

Obviously some questions will have more complete answers than others, but all are, in essence, discussed and problematised. Education and human development in Mozambique An entirely legitimate question that may occur to users of the report is this: to what extent does this report differ from the sector reports drawn up by the Ministry of Education? In the first place, the report is different from the sectoral documents because it analyses the performance of the education sector, first from the perspective of a fundamental universal right and then from the perspective of its relationships with the other choices made by people.

Education is a key indicator for measuring and analysing progress from the perspective of the human development concept. This is why the calculations of the Human Development Index (HDI) join the adult literacy rate to the combined enrolment rate for primary, secondary and higher education to produce one of its three variables; the other variables are longevity (expressed by life expectancy) and income.

This Report tries, as far as possible, to escape from simply listing successes, difficulties and possible solutions. Instead, the Report raises questions, analyses and interrogates the successes, identifies the obstacles, problematises the choices and their relevance for society, and above all points to possible solutions, while always avoiding a prescriptive pretension in its approaches. Thus we stress that the purpose of the Report is not to discuss the education sector in general. The Report presents readings and perceptions on the relevance of the current education system from the perspective that this is a means whereby people acquire knowledge that they need to guide and fulfill themselves as human beings, to help them to eliminate shortages and privations, and provide them with a necessary tools to fight against exclusion and to improve their conditions as members of a community or communities. This is the spirit that guides the discussions in the following chapters.

Chapter 1 provides the conceptual framework of human development, in order to situate the analysis of the performance of the education sector. The chapter depicts the trajectory of the debate around the definition and measurement of progress, centering on the dogma of the automatic link between economic growth and development, and with an illustration on why Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has lost its hegemony as the main indicator of progress.

The chapter introduces succinctly the concept of human development and describes the methods of measuring it and how they have evolved. Finally, it deals with the convergence between human rights and human development and, to recapitulate, dedicates a section to the contents of the two previous National Human Development Reports (NHDR) for Mozambique.

Chapter 2 is divided into two parts. The first deals with the evolution of the overall HDI of Mozambique between 1994 and 1999, calculated according to international parameters which allow a comparison with other countries. One of the specificities of this exercise is that, unlike the previous reports, which were limited to using World Bank data, which forced continual adjustments leading to some confusion in the treatment of data, this time an attempt has been made to improve the use of indicators, resorting to the application of methodologies for estimating and updating them, and using to this end the up-to-date official statistics.

For example, instead of using the World Bank's real per capita GDP (in PPP dollars) for Mozambique, it was decided to establish the conversion rate used for estimating this figure and apply it to the entire series of data published by the National Statistics Institute (INE). The chapter estimates the HDI for 1999, based on the INE data, while for the year 2000 it makes projections based on Ministry of Education data, for the education component, and the government's preliminary estimates for real per capita GDP.

The second part of the chapter makes operational the measurement of human development in the country. Just as in the 1999 edition, a methodology has been developed to estimate the GDP disaggregated by province. The methodology followed can be found in the technical notes appended to the Report. The exercise was intended, in the first place, to estimate the contribution of each province to the GDP in 1999, and analyse the performance in each province. Secondly, the disaggregated GDP makes it possible to estimate the HDI of each province, and to analyse the comparative trends between the various administrative regions.

Chapter 3 debates in detail the question of education in Mozambique. The first part provides a theoretical framework for the theme with a review of the evolution of education in the various stages of history. This part of the chapter makes a brief survey of the perception of the nationalist movements on the role of education, and ends with independence in 1975.

There follows a review of the evolution of education and its content in the period from independence to 1983, the point where the peak of new entries into the system was reached. The following period, up to 1992, was characterised by the resurgence of armed conflict, which had devastating effects on the system in terms of schools destroyed, and the consequent limitation on the supply of education.

The third part of Chapter 3 portrays the post war recovery efforts, advocating a series of reforms intended simultaneously to improve effectiveness and efficiency, to expand supply, and to bring education into line with the development challenges facing the country. The final part of the chapter lists the main challenges that the education sector will have to face in the coming period.

Chapter 4 deals with the appearance of the HIV/AIDS epidemic which threatens education from within and without. From within, because the prognosis is that thousands of teachers and managers will be infected and will eventually perish, victims of AIDS. From without, because education will be obliged to play a multi-faceted role in accommodating the growing number of orphans within the school population, while at the same time it must work with communities on methods of prevention and how to care for those suffering from AIDS. The system of education will have to be adapted to take account of the social changes provoked by the epidemic.

The chapter gives a short history on the origins of the epidemic, its spread and the possible social, demographic and economic repercussions. The fulcrum of the chapter is the discussion of the possible impacts of HIV/AIDS on education and the estimate of the costs in terms of material and human resources for education. The study is inspired by the experience of other countries in the region in order to warn of the probable impacts, and also to make a series of recommendations deemed essential to manage the epidemic and attenuate its negative impact on the sector. Chapter 5 presents the main findings and conclusions of the analyses made throughout the Report.