In 2025, nearly 11.7 percent of the world population in extreme poverty, with the poverty threshold at 2.15 U.S. dollars a day, lived in Nigeria. Moreover, the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounted for around 11.7 percent of the global population in extreme poverty. Other African nations with a large poor population were Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar. Poverty levels remain high despite the forecast decline Poverty is a widespread issue across Africa. Around 429 million people on the continent were living below the extreme poverty line of 2.15 U.S. dollars a day in 2024. Since the continent had approximately 1.4 billion inhabitants, roughly a third of Africa’s population was in extreme poverty that year. Mozambique, Malawi, Central African Republic, and Niger had Africa’s highest extreme poverty rates based on the 2.15 U.S. dollars per day extreme poverty indicator (updated from 1.90 U.S. dollars in September 2022). Although the levels of poverty on the continent are forecast to decrease in the coming years, Africa will remain the poorest region compared to the rest of the world. Prevalence of poverty and malnutrition across Africa Multiple factors are linked to increased poverty. Regions with critical situations of employment, education, health, nutrition, war, and conflict usually have larger poor populations. Consequently, poverty tends to be more prevalent in least-developed and developing countries worldwide. For similar reasons, rural households also face higher poverty levels. In 2024, the extreme poverty rate in Africa stood at around 45 percent among the rural population, compared to seven percent in urban areas. Together with poverty, malnutrition is also widespread in Africa. Limited access to food leads to low health conditions, increasing the poverty risk. At the same time, poverty can determine inadequate nutrition. Almost 38.3 percent of the global undernourished population lived in Africa in 2022.

This dataset comprises interviews conducted between 2016 and 2018 with health service users, health professionals and health system managers in Maputo, Mozambique. The Unequal Voices project – Vozes Desiguais in Portuguese – aimed to strengthen the evidence base on the politics of accountability for health equity via multi-level case studies of health systems in Brazil and Mozambique. The project conducted examined the trajectories of change in the political context and in patterns of health inequalities in Brazil and Mozambique, and carried out four cases studies to compare the operation of different accountability regimes across the two countries and between different areas within each country. The case studies tracked shifts in accountability relationships among managers, providers and citizens and changes in health system performance, in order to arrive at a better understanding of what works for different poor and marginalised groups in different contexts. In each country the research team studied one urban location with competitive politics and a high level of economic inequality and one rural location where the population as a whole has been politically marginalised and under-provided with services.

Health inequities - that is, inequalities in health which result from social, economic or political factors and unfairly disadvantage the poor and marginalised - are trapping millions of people in poverty. Unless they are tackled, the effort to fulfill the promise of universal health coverage as part of the fairer world envisaged in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals may lead to more waste and unfairness, because new health services and resources will fail to reach the people who need them most. In Mozambique, for example, the gap in infant mortality between the best-performing and worst-performing areas actually increased between 1997 and 2008, despite improvements in health indicators for the country as a whole. However, while many low- and middle-income countries are failing to translate economic growth into better health services for the poorest, some - including Brazil - stand out as having taken determined and effective action. One key factor that differentiates a strong performer like Brazil from a relatively weak performer like Mozambique is accountability politics: the formal and informal relationships of oversight and control that ensure that health system managers and service providers deliver for the poorest rather than excluding them. Since the mid-1990s, Brazil has transformed health policy to try to ensure that the poorest people and places are covered by basic services. This shift was driven by many factors: by a strong social movement calling for the right to health; by political competition as politicians realised that improving health care for the poor won them votes; by changes to health service contracting that changed the incentives for local governments and other providers to ensure that services reached the poor; and by mass participation that ensured citizen voice in decisions on health priority-setting and citizen oversight of services. However, these factors did not work equally well for all groups of citizens, and some - notably the country's indigenous peoples - continue to lag behind the population as a whole in terms of improved health outcomes.

This project is designed to address the ESRC-DFID call's key cross-cutting issue of structural inequalities, and its core research question "what political and institutional conditions are associated with effective poverty reduction and development, and what can domestic and external actors do to promote these conditions?", by comparing the dimensions of accountability politics across Brazil and Mozambique and between different areas within each country. As Mozambique and Brazil seek to implement similar policies to improve service delivery, in each country the research team will examine one urban location with competitive politics and a high level of economic inequality and one rural location where the population as a whole has been politically marginalised and under-provided with services, looking at changes in power relationships among managers, providers and citizens and at changes in health system performance, in order to arrive at a better understanding of what works for different poor and marginalised groups in different contexts.

As two Portuguese-speaking countries that have increasingly close economic, political and policy links, Brazil and Mozambique are also well-placed to benefit from exchanges of experience and mutual learning of the kind that Brazil is seeking to promote through its South-South Cooperation programmes. The project will support this mutual learning process by working closely with Brazilian and Mozambican organisations that are engaged in efforts to promote social accountability through the use of community scorecards and through strengthening health oversight committees, and link these...

Data comprise causal diagrams which show links between aspects that influence the well-being of rural inhabitants (e.g. good quality of food, good family relationships, education, etc) with ecosystem services (e.g. food from trees, wood sticks for construction, firewood, wood for charcoal production, etc.) and their causes (e.g. change in land use) in rural Mozambique. Information was gathered at 20 workshops held in Maputo, Xai Xai, Lichinga, Quelimane, and at village level in the districts of Mabalane, Marrupa and Gurue in 2014 and 2015. The objective of the workshops was to examine aspects that influence well-being and their causes in the miombo woodland area of rural Mozambique. One of the objectives of the project was to construct Bayesian belief networks (BBNs) to model future land use change scenarios in rural Mozambique using a participatory approach, to evaluate the consequences of deforestation in the well-being of the rural population. The data were collected as part of the Abrupt Changes in Ecosystem Services and Wellbeing in Mozambican Woodlands (ACES) project and were funded by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme, funded by NERC, the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for International Development (DfID), the three are government organizations from UK. The project was led by the University of Edinburgh, with the collaboration of the Universidad Mondlane, the IIED, and other organizations.