Workshop: Management practices in Manufacturing in Mozambique

This event brought together the research team and local stakeholders to share research results and policy recommendations coming from the project “Management practices in Manufacturing in Mozambique”.

The study used management practices data from Mozambique as well as other 32 developed and developing countries and focused on a comparative analysis of firms within and across countries. There are four main sets of results:

• First, African countries are towards the bottom of the international rank of management practices, and Mozambique in particular is ranked at the bottom of our management index. Mozambican firms have only limited monitoring of production processes, infrequent, short-term and narrow targets, and relatively ineffective human-resource management.
• Second, although some firms in Mozambique have high quality management practices, there is a substantial number of badly-managed firm co-existing with these well managed firms, dragging down the country's average management scores. In fact, we show that 89% of Mozambican firms score within the range of the bottom quartile of US firms. However, the spread of management practices within Mozambique is quite wide, suggesting that while it is possible to implement management best practices across firms, for some reason they are not being implemented more widely.
• Third, when considering the four areas of management practices separately, we see that operations management seem to show the largest gap followed by performance monitoring and target setting between Mozambique and other African countries. When comparing Mozambique with India and China, we observe that, again, operations, monitoring and targets seems to be significant areas of improvement opportunity. That is, Mozambican firms are lagging behind their peers within their region and within other emerging economies.
• Fourth, drawing from the previous three results, we observe two factors that can potentially be determining the low management quality implemented in Mozambican firms: informational barriers and workforce skills.

The presentation was concluded with a set of policy recommendations and a possible framework for their implementation in Mozambique. Professor Ragendra da Sousa and Dr Joaquim Dai then provided a discussion of the project from the perspective of Mozambican private sector development issues. Finally, the workshop ended with a session of Q&A from the floor. Representatives of the Mozambican private sector and civil society actively participated into the discussion providing useful insights and possible ideas for the follow-up phase.