Maputo, Mozambique – On a sweltering Saturday afternoon in Maputo, people line up at refreshment stands dotted around a conference venue hosting Mozambique’s biggest annual trade fair. But zipping between them in jeans and a black T-shirt – a tray of drinks in hand – one young woman is trying a different tack.
“Ludmila Malambe, tasty and nutritious,” announces the branding on her shirt, written in Portuguese below an illustration of a cup of baobab fruit juice. The picture mirrors the plastic cups on her tray – all filled to the brim and for sale for 100 meticals ($1.50) a pop as she makes her way through crowded pavilions in search of thirsty customers.
A few rotations later, her tray is cleared. She makes her way out – through the outdoor arena at the centre of the venue, beyond espresso kiosks and stalls selling soft drinks and juices, and out past the main security check where she flashes her entrance wristband before exiting the gate. She pauses on the neatly paved sidewalk for a rush of cars and motorbikes to pass before crossing to the other side.
There, rough sandy pathways have become a temporary home for dozens of boisterous pavement stalls and a thriving informal economy selling food, cosmetics and clothes.
At an unassuming juice stall, she stops and sets down her tray, handing the money she made inside the exhibition venue to Vania Pessane, her boss for the week.
Pessane owns Ludmila Malambe, an emerging part-time business she recently registered that sells juices and other malambe products made from the fruit of local baobab trees.
“Malambe is very popular, all Mozambicans know it,” says Pessane, adding the latest earnings to her waist bag before picking up a five-litre plastic bottle and decanting more of the malambe brew into half a dozen cups.
Her assistant loads the new supply onto her tray before crossing the busy, sandy road back into the venue in search of more customers.
Inside the confines of the 60th Maputo International Trade Fair (FACIM) last week, formal vendors and established businesses paid thousands of meticals to set up shop in coveted booths. Meanwhile, outside, smaller shops and informal sellers seized the opportunity, too.
Some informal vendors told Al Jazeera they had shut their usual businesses in central Maputo or found someone else to staff them for a week while selling their products outside FACIM. But others, like Pessane, work formal office jobs and attend events like this one for their side businesses when they pop up.
“International events in Maputo are very good for small businesses,” she says, displaying a malambe preserve she is taste-testing and planning to sell more widely. “In the next months, we will have a tourism event, a very big international event. Every event that we can know is happening – we go there.”
Pessane hopes malambe will one day put her and her business on the map.
‘Potable water for all’
Mozambique is a Southern African country abundant in resources, including minerals, gas, and natural beauty like beaches and reserves. Yet, the country has struggled economically. More than 70 percent of the population of 34 million lives on less than $2.15 a day in 2025, according to the World Bank, and about 80 percent of people are employed in the informal sector.
But despite the challenges, across Maputo and other cities, residents say the sense of entrepreneurship is strong and officials see opportunities on the horizon.
“We have people saying, ‘Oh, Mozambique has a high rate of unemployment’ but it’s different here,” argues Antonio Grispos, Mozambique’s secretary of state for commerce. “When you are in Europe and you say 20 percent of the population is unemployed, it’s in fact unemployed. In Mozambique, people can be unemployed in an official company, but they have an occupation,” he explains to Al Jazeera at FACIM.
“Those people don’t sit at home and wait until the government pays something. No, they do some other thing: They sell in cash on the street, they sell clothes, they sell something. So you can show people that you don’t have to wait with your CV [to find work].”
Outside FACIM, that sense of entrepreneurship is on display. At the corner of one sandy street, 33-year-old Cardate Massingue barbecues skewers of chicken on a small stand beside other food vendors. She used to work at a supermarket in the city, but lost her job last year. This July, her husband passed away. Left with three children to raise by herself, she runs a small food business in the city to make money.
She decided to try her luck at FACIM as well this year, to find new customers. It’s been “really busy”, Massingue says. “It’s been quite a good environment and I will come back next year,” she adds, but she laments the state of the economy in general, which is not the easiest for a majority of young people.
Grispos acknowledges the challenges facing Mozambique – economic as well as social and political – including instability in the northern Cabo Delgado province and the turbulence that followed last year’s elections.
But he is optimistic about the rest of 2025 and says that with government support, all people in the community can thrive: through investment, opportunities and education.
“We have to choose: we can have champagne for a few, or potable water for everyone. So we prefer the second,” Grispos says, paraphrasing the words of former Burkinabe leader Thomas Sankara, to explain the government’s vision for the country.
Under President Daniel Chapo’s leadership is “a clear vision for the path of development”, he says. Part of that includes investments, like the $20bn partnership agreement signed with a Qatari investment firm last week; and part of it includes energy company Total restarting its LNG project in Cabo Delgado that was suspended over security threats.
But “it is not only by numbers”, Grispos adds. “It’s to share this [Mozambique’s resources] – to be visible to the communities.”
Mozambique is looking for more foreign investment, he says. But in resource-rich areas, this will involve entities abiding by a “law of local content”, through which Mozambicans from surrounding communities will have to be hired to do some jobs, thereby ensuring that the profits gained from the country’s valuable resources are also used to uplift the people who own them.
“The poor guy needs to feel that [benefit] on the table – on the plate,” Grispos says. “So the community must benefit from that [resource]. You cannot take our resources and the community cannot see them.”
Beyond foreign partnerships, the government is also investing more in local businesses, he says, pointing to the $40m Mutual Guarantee Fund that President Chapo had launched days earlier to help small and medium enterprises.
While the funds will directly help businesses, some money will also be allocated for training and financial literacy projects, he says.
“You cannot give some money to someone without financial literacy. In two days, the money goes. You need to teach … because they need to grow,” Grispos says.
‘We need support’
Young Mozambicans are eager for more opportunities, and are keen to work, several told Al Jazeera at FACIM.
A recent university graduate talked about a youth employment summit in Maputo in early August that was heavily advertised and caught the attention of many young people. Hundreds of eager jobseekers arrived at the venue, they said, only to find a few basic booths and most job sectors unrepresented. “Some people took the day off work to attend the event, but they found nothing there in return,” the graduate said.
Working outside FACIM at her food stall, Massingue says: “We need a lot of support.”
But she doesn’t mean with handouts. She says Mozambicans are eager to make a go of it, pointing to her own business that she started by herself. But she hopes the government can put things in place to help people succeed.
“Maybe they could create opportunities so youth can be certified to create their own jobs, and do their own things, so they can be self-employed,” Massingue suggests.
A few metres down the bustling sandy road, Pessane works at her juice stall. She slices a pile of oranges in half before feeding them into a manual juice press to fill a cup. Chattering in Portuguese, she passes the cup to a customer who hands her a pile of meticals and continues on their way.
It’s her third year selling at FACIM, but her first year on the outskirts. While she has to pay to rent her informal stall for the week, she says the cost to rent a booth inside in previous years was much higher.
This way, she gets to have customers both inside and outside the exhibition – with the help of her assistant, who takes the cups of malambe directly to the customers inside.
“FACIM is a very good idea. You can find people here who want what we have,” she says about the trade and investment event, adding that it’s easy to make “partnerships” especially inside the exhibition halls. But she does wish that more of the delegates attending would make their way out to support the informal stalls outside.
“They don’t come outside of the event,” she laments. “They only go to the stands and try and do interactions and investments with other established businesses.”
Still, she acknowledges the government’s move to help provide funding for small businesses – even though she is not sure she will apply.
For her, the key is not just providing funds and investment, but also tapping into the right industries to help products that are quintessentially Mozambican thrive.
Pessane sells an array of juices at her stall, and is by day a public sector employee working in administration at the Maputo Municipality. But malambe is her “focus” and her “true passion” – something she feels the country should also work to promote.
In Mozambique’s Manica province grow fields of ancient baobab trees with bulbous bases and nearly bare branches. And on those trees grows the malambe fruit. Pessane sources them, and using other natural ingredients, processes it into drinks, preserves, yoghurts and more recently, chocolate.
“We don’t have baobab in a lot of countries,” she says. “We have very few countries who have the same. If I can get the opportunity to go out there, I can show people what Mozambique has. I can promote what we have here.”
She has dreams for her own business to grow, first nationally into a chain of shops, then globally.
“I want to be the international malambe brand,” she says.
But to get there requires a roadmap of investment and government support.
“I think if I find someone who can take me to do this same business in higher places where I can be seen, that will help me grow,” she says. “Government should promote our businesses outside – so we can show what we have, what we are, and what we can do with the natural resources that are here.”
The post Benefits ‘on the plate’: Big and small businesses eye growth in Mozambique appeared first on Al Jazeera.
