Mozambique
Ventura Fernando Mufume
President of the Board of Directors
Associação Moçambicana de Monitoria e Avaliação (AMMA(
Posted on 30/09/2022
As an African evaluator, born and raised in a country that went through colonial dominance for 500 years, not only do I support the decolonization of evaluations, the Made in Africa evaluation movement and other initiatives but I also contend with and try to correct a culturally intriguing “sin” that most evaluations commit without knowing.
When designing questionnaires to capture respondents’ demographies, evaluations do often ask whether or not the person belongs to an “indigenous” group. Unfortunately in the African countries where Portuguese colonialism flourished for over half-a- century namely, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and Sao Tome & Principe, the colonial system used a divide and rule approach, among other strategies and words such as “indigenous”, “assimilados” and others, were employed to legitimize a cultural caste system where the native black population was sub-divided into those categories where the “indigenous” was equivalent to “uncivilized” and the assimilado, as who acquired the Portuguese citizenship through a long process of acculturation, subservience and brainwashing, was closer to the system than the non-assimilados. Assimilates were thus used to tax their fellow blacks, using coercive measures including physical abuse, teaching, and playing religious roles.
As the world today grapples with social problems such as racism, it is worth bringing to everyone’s awareness that the employment of the word “indigenous”, in evaluations, in Portuguese speaking African countries resuscitates the legacy of dehumanizing class system the Africans have gradually been burying for generations. Alternatively, evaluations would do less harm adopting categories such as "minority group" and others.
Sincerely,
Ventura Mufume
Freelance evaluation consultant
Mozambique
Mozambique
Ventura Fernando Mufume
President of the Board of Directors
Associação Moçambicana de Monitoria e Avaliação (AMMA(
Posted on 05/05/2025
I applaud Carlos, Arwa, Javier, and Xin for initiating this discussion. The reengineering of global development aid, alongside recurring shocks such as natural disasters, security threats, and economic fragility, should inspire Southern hemisphere countries to mobilize their human resources and create synergies that unlock capacities, promote win-win solutions, and strengthen multilateralism.
A major barrier that evaluation practice should address is the connectivity divide isolating countries and evaluation communities of practice, despite technology's potential to bridge physical boundaries. Internet access remains a luxury for urban technocrats in countries like Mozambique, where education, research, and other processes are still manual-based. The digital transformation driving economies elsewhere has yet to impact traditional socioeconomic sectors such as agriculture, which employs most of the Southern population.
With slow and unequal access to electricity, internet, and road connectivity, countries struggle to share experiences and learn from successful practices. While South-South commercial ties are growing, the exchange of evaluation practices lags behind, despite most countries having active evaluation societies that use evaluation products internally for policy formulation, decision making, and learning.
In summary, effective South-South cooperation in evaluation practice requires vigorous measures to ensure rural communities and peri-urban areas in the Global South have access to internet, mobile networks, and electricity.