A group of representatives from 45 SMEs from Cabo Delgado province, gathered this Tuesday June 7th in the city of Pemba at the seminar “Small Companies, Big Business – the role of Business Cooperation in obtaining new contracts and creating jobs”, held by +Emprego, Camões IP program co-financed by the EU in partnership with Portuguese Cooperation, called for “speed” in the process of creating the Law of Local Content and a “greater articulation of the processes of training and capacity building” in the province, with a view to increasing the participation of Mozambican companies in natural gas mega-projects.
During the panel on “Strategies for Overcoming the Obstacles to Business Cooperation in Cabo Delgado. How to potentiate the use of local content?”, moderated by Celso Chambisso, Executive Editor of Economia & Mercado magazine, and with the participation of CTA, AutoArte, INEP and BlueBiz, the issue of the legal framework was focused first by CTA: “Based on observations made outside the country, it seems necessary that we have a legal basis. The truth is that few SMEs have participated in large projects,” said Samo Dique, economist at the Confederation of Mozambican Economic Associations.
However, the existence of a Law “is not enough to guarantee the participation of SMEs,” in the opinion of Dario Mungoi, representative of the AutoArte company. “One cannot talk about local content without talking about human resources training and certification of companies,” he said, stressing that “these must also be properly prepared and organized if they want to provide services to multinationals,” he pointed out.
As for the fundamental issue of training staff and human resources properly prepared to embrace the challenges that mega-projects pose, João Gomes, a Bluebiz consultant, said that “companies that are in the value chain of mega-projects can and should cooperate, establishing the distribution of the areas that require training, in order to avoid excess of skilled labor in one area, generating others with a deficit,” he explained.
The seminar took place at the Pemba Express Hotel, and was organized by Media 4 Development and ‘+EMPREGO’, in partnership with the Alberto Cassimo Institute for Professional Training and Labor Studies (IFPELAC), the Confederation of Mozambique Economic Associations (CTA) and BlueBiz consulting firm.
