ABSTRACT
Empowerment literally means to give ability to, to permit or enable. The experience of literacy in Mozambique over the years has been characterized by strikingly different moments. The struggles over literacy have been embedded in much broader struggles over competing visions of the social order. The new forms of people’s power established in the liberated territories and the “qualified” personnel tempered in the armed struggle encountered a hostile climate, once they reached Maputo. In Mozambique, local initiatives from the bottom up gave way to top-down directives. The Mozambican government unveiled an orthodox structural adjustment programme in early 1987, culminating four years of complex discussions with donor community members and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank. IMF financing was made dependent on Mozambican compliance with a series of conditions, from devaluations and deregulation to political pluralism and an adoption of a market economy.
