Maputo, Feb. 11, 2026 (Lusa) - Mozambique's Minister of Communications and Digital Transformation, Américo Muchanga, on Wednesday challenged the private sector to actively participate in the country's digital transformation, ensuring that companies will be actors in this transition and will benefit from the outcome.
"We want the private sector to do this, contracted by the state, with state supervision, the state establishing the architecture, the rules (...) the private sector will, yes, first benefit from this digital transformation process, but secondly, it will be the actor in the implementation of these systems," said the minister.
The minister took this position when speaking at a panel at the first National Conference on Digital Transformation, which is taking place today in Maputo, with the participation of the country's president, Daniel Chapo. He stressed the importance of everyone participating in this process so that it can "quickly" move forward and ensure, "ultimately, that citizens benefit" from this ongoing digital revolution.
As an example, Muchanga pointed out the need to "interoperate" private systems with those of the state through this digital transition: "If a financial institution, a bank, wants to create a customer account, instead of asking for identification and rewriting the information on the ID card in its digital system, it will be possible for the financial institution's system to interconnect with the state system and obtain this data directly".
And this, he said, "will result in two things", firstly in "being able to serve the customer quickly", but also in ensuring the secure identification of the user.
"Because when I present an identification document such as an ID card, driving licence, or any other form of document, the financial institution only trusts the document I present to it. Because it has no way of confirming the authenticity of the document. But if, instead of using the data on the ID card, it is bringing in data from the State's civil identification system, it provides greater certainty that this person is who they say they are," the minister warned.
However, he stressed, "the private sector will feel" that the state "does not want to implement these systems," nor will it develop the applications or implement the data centres and communication infrastructure, a task that will fall to companies.
The minister therefore invited the private sector to be ‘an actor in this process. Because that is how we are going to build the state we want, in a safe and secure manner and with the quality expected of our state."
Muchanga recalled that the government had already begun in 2025 to launch public tenders as part of this digital transition process, particularly in public institutions, which will continue this year, "both to establish digital systems and to establish digital infrastructure."
He recalled that in this regard, the Mozambican digital signature platform with digital certification has already been launched, a company has been contracted "to create the interoperability system" and another to develop the citizen portal.
"We are going to promote a tender to be able to have the digital identity system. We have launched a tender to expand the telecommunications infrastructure to more than 300 sites [antennas]," said the Minister of Communications and Digital Transformation, stressing that "most" of these projects are financed by the World Bank.
PVJ/AYLS // AYLS
Lusa
