Book Chapter
Blocking Human Potential

This paper deals with one of the most interesting cross-border micro-regions in Africa: the Maputo corridor. In the mid-1990s, the governments of South Africa and Mozambique agreed to reconstruct the Maputo corridor through the implementation of the Maputo Development Corridor (MDC) and its gigantic portfolio of large-scale private investment projects. The analysis shows that the MDC is designed for the purpose of crowding-in external capital in order to build industrial and infrastructural mega-projects such as the USD 2 billion Mozal aluminum smelter, whereas the endogenous capacities and entrepreneurship of the people living in the corridor are largely neglected or even seen as problematic. Hence, the fundamental problem with the MDC lies in its bias towards a capital-intensive industrialization strategy, which fails to utilize and unlock the human potential of Mozambique’s population and its informal economy.