The Water and Sanitation Infrastructure Administration (AIAS) announced on Tuesday, November 12, that all the contractors’ bids for coastal protection work in Sofala province, in the centre of the country, have been rejected because they did not meet the necessary technical requirements.
According to the director-general of AIAS, Rute Nhamucho, the $60 million project, financed by the World Bank and the banks of the Netherlands and Germany, aims to reduce the impacts associated with extreme weather events, such as cyclones, which have occurred particularly in the city of Beira.
Nhamucho said that the international tender was launched this year and comprised two stages: the first for the evaluation of technical proposals and the second for financial evaluations. ‘When we finished the whole technical evaluation process, we drew up an evaluation report, in accordance with the mechanisms of the funders, combined with our internal rules. From this process, it wasn’t possible to select any company that could go on to the next stage,’ he argued.
The head of the institution stressed that eight companies took part in the tender and that the proposals will be returned because none fully met the requirements, pointing out that the coastal protection project will cover 14 kilometres of coastline.
‘We’re talking about a process that is being conducted with complete transparency, respecting the rules and regulations of both the financial backers and the national ones,’ he emphasised in a report published by Lusa.
Mozambique is considered one of the countries most severely affected by global climate change, facing cyclical floods and tropical cyclones during the rainy season, which runs from October to April.
Extreme events, such as cyclones and storms, caused at least 1016 deaths in the country between 2019-23, affecting around 4.9 million people, according to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE).
In 2019, Sofala province, in the centre of Mozambique, was hit by cyclone Idai, which caused 403 deaths, affected more than a million people and injured another 1,597.
