About Us

The Kuendeleya Association – made up of young Catholics, Protestants, and practicing Muslims - started as an amateur football team on the beach. After I worked in the Mahate neighborhood, where poor Muslims live, with Father Eduardo Roca in helping to welcome displaced people who came from Mocímboa and Macomia, in 2018, to Pemba, with whom I also studied ethics at the Catholic University of Mozambique, followed Cyclone Kenneth strikes the entire province of Cabo Delgado. We all lent a hand.

In 2020, with the intensity of the terrorist attacks, we were on Paquite beach playing football and, suddenly, we saw four boats full of people. Frightened, we ran to the neighborhood and talked to the community police. These went to do the screening and, after all, there were internally displaced persons, several women, and many children. The police called us to help and we were there for three days. I then had the idea of asking for help from family and friends of bread and sugar for tea to distribute. Arrivals intensified: 386/427/780/1000/2980 per day.

That was when we started to see NGOs, Caritas, UNICEF, etc. appear.

We don't stop. We launched a fund campaign and were always keen to present accounts, show on Facebook how aid was applied, talk to donors about the specific needs of the people we contacted. The city started to trust us. We are trying to legalize the association, but the difficulties that arise are many, there is always an obstacle ... We do not give up! Cabo Delgado's youth aspire to a new order that overcomes poverty and the stark injustices of this land of theirs and wants to act ethically, teaching it to the youngest. Our target group is children, pregnant women, the elderly, and mothers at a very young age, especially the most vulnerable people.

Kuendeleya means to proceed - to develop - to continue in the native languages: muani, macua, swahili and maconde.

1. Kuendeleya sees this political-military crisis of invasion of the northern region and center of Cabo Delgado province as a very dramatic situation by those who destroy it through horror. A painful uncertainty is experienced daily, especially due to the lack of security and effective responses to terrorists. It's scary to live like that.
2. Kuendeleya has done a double or even a triple job:
   1. Psychological and moral assistance in listening, welcoming and some social reintegration;
   2. Humanitarian aid for victims (preparation and provision of meals and necessities);
   3. Great availability to help internally displaced people in various aspects of disembarkation, contact of family members, creation of shelters, etc. We help in fences in the place so that they can rest, or even go to sleep, in the first minutes, when they arrive in the city of Pemba, especially those who do not have families or friends to be able to welcome them.

For social reintegration, we developed training sessions, teaching how to do something positive, create a small business for sustainability. Lectures on entrepreneurship and small businesses in the city.

Well, now, there are problems with healthy eating because there are thousands of children and women, vulnerable elderly people, with dehydration and weakness, they need food and also agricultural tools to work with the land in food production and, who knows if they can do it a better thing, decrease the import.

There is an urgent need to educate the country in public ethics; we have to have ethics as a fundamental value for socioeconomic, political, military, sporting growth and development, to guarantee human rights to citizens and respect, love, and justice towards human life. We must all be treated as People.

We have the purpose of acting in society, in this theater in which we live, to make it more reliable. We would like to promote short-term training in professional ethics and deontology, but we felt a lot of official resistance and little support. We want respect for human dignity. We promote interreligious dialogues, gender equality, impartiality, justice, and, above all, peace.