Mozambique Human Development and Questionable Data,Mozambique,Mozambique Human Development

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Friday claimed that Mozambique "has enjoyed significant progress in human development" since the end of the war of destabilisation in 1992.

At the Maputo launch of the 2010 Global Human Development Report, the UNDP said that Mozambique "has registered among the most positive trends in the region" - but because of the extremely low base in 1992, "Mozambique continues to have among the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) scores and significant challenges, including growing inequality, remain. The pace of development must increase in order for the country to climb on the HDI ranking".

The HDI is a composite measure, which considers what the UN regards as the three fundamental dimensions of human development - life expectancy, educational attainment and a decent standard of living. Each of these is given a weighting of a third in calculating the index.
A country's score can range, in theory from zero to one. Some developed countries come close to one - at the top of the index is Norway, with a score of 0.938, followed by Australia (0.937) and New Zealand (0.907). At the bottom is Zimbabwe, with a score of just 0.140.
Mozambique is given a score of 0.284, which puts it at number 165 out of the 169 countries covered. This is a marginal improvement on last year's score of 0.280, which placed Mozambique in 172nd position out of 182 countries.

So should we cheer? Hardly - for a glance at the index shows some very curious claims. Surely nobody in their right mind could claim that the ruined west African state of Guinea-Bissau has a higher human development than Mozambique - yet Guinea-Bissau gets a score of 0.289, and is one place higher than Mozambique (rather than one place lower as in 2009).

Much worse is the sudden improvement in Afghanistan's status. From second to last in 2009, Afghanistan has leapfrogged into position 155, with an HDI score of 0.349. This is a country still wracked by war, and religious extremism, a country where for many years half the population (women) were denied access to education, and a country where opium production is one of the main features of the economy. Yet the compilers of the report would have us believe that Afghanistan is substantially more developed than Mozambique.
At the other end of the scale, the score of the United States has suddenly improved, and it is now in fourth position. We are expected to believe that human development in the US is better than in Canada or Sweden (positions eight and nine). This stretches credibility, but certain people will doubtless find the new figures ideologically useful.

Comparisons, however, are made difficult by the fact that the goalposts have shifted. Educational attainment, which counts for a third of the HDI, used to be measured by the adult literacy rate, and the combined enrolment rate in primary, secondary and tertiary education. But this year the education indicators are the average number of years of schooling received by people aged 25 and over, and the expected years of schooling that a child of school age can expect to receive "if prevailing patterns of age-specific enrolment rates stay the same throughout the child's life".

So instead of measuring something in the present, such as the literacy rate, the gurus of the HDI are going in for forecasts instead - how many years of education children are likely to receive. UNDP-Mozambique acknowledges that the new methodology has serious implications for post-conflict countries such as Mozambique, since "it amplifies the prevailing costs of war, which deprived a large part of the adult population from schooling, and excludes efforts such as adult education and literacy campaigns".

A further significant change in methodology concerns the standard of living component of the HDI. This used to be measured by per capita GDP, but now per capita Gross National Income (GNI) is chosen instead. The reason given is that "while GDP is a measure of economic growth output, it does not reflect a country's disposable income".

One can argue about whether GDP or GNI is a better indicator - but what is quite certain is that that if you measure GDP one year and GNI the next, you have no true comparison.
The UNDP interim representative in Mozambique, Jocelyn Mason, admitted this. At the Friday ceremony launching the 2010 report he said "it is important to stress that we cannot compare the HDI of a country using the new methodology adopted this year with the HDI of the country in previous years".
Yet this is precisely what the report does, in a statistical table entitled Human Development Trends, 1980-2010. It has looked at all the HDI figures for the past 30 years, and has somehow recalculated them in line with the new methodology. One can wonder whether the compilers of the report really have all the necessary data to undertake this massive task of recalculation.

he Mozambican 2009 HDI of 0.280 cannot be found in any previous report - the 2009 report in fact gave Mozambique an HDI of 0.402, up from 0.397 the previous year. The statisticians in New York have worked their magic on their numbers to produce a plausible series of HDI figures from 1980 to the present, but ones which never appeared in earlier documents.
On top of the methodological problems come the sheer inaccuracies. To calculate per capita figures, whether of GDP or GNI, you need to know how large the population is. The report gives Mozambique's 2010 population as 23.4 million. But the true figure, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE), based on the 2007 census, is 22.4 million. An extra million people, an error of 4.5 per cent, is far from negligible.
Since there is only one census, and only one statistical authority in Mozambique, the UNDP's population figure can politely be described as a fiction.