Muapula Mission - Mozambique

Dewald and Valerie Knoetze arrived in Cuamba in February 1995 and went to Muapula in August of the same year. He was a technician at the post office before that and initially went to Cuamba to play a support role for Frits and his family. Valerie is a qualified junior primary teacher. They have two daughters, Lizette and Jessica. A Dutch organization became involved in the community development work in 1997 and this has enable Dewald to accomplish quite a lot in a relatively short time. Dewald works under Servir Moçambique (Serve Mozambique), an non profit making organization that works alongside missions and churches. They identify and train local people in various practical and business skills and try to instill christian work ethics.

Basically the community development program in Muapula is an “outgrowers” project where sunflower seed are sold to the local people. They go and plant it on their lands and tend to it until it is harvest time. [In Niassa, as in so many other parts of Africa, the economical system of the local people is basically a subsistence system where each family or adult member of a family is allocated a peace of land that belongs to him and on which he plants (in the case of Muapula) mainly maize for food.] Once the sunflowers are ready, the people sell it and earn some urgently needed money. In 2001 a thousand families have benefitted from this project by recieving money for the 80 tons of sunflowers that they had produced. A factory that processes the sunflower and presses oil from it has been build in Muapula on Servir Mozambique’s grounds. The oil is then sold in Cuamba and other towns in the vicinity to generate enough funds to perpetuate the cycle. Valerie is involved in the administration and bookkeeping side of this whole project. At the end of 2007 the Knoetze family returned to South Africa and pastor Frits van der Merwe is currently running the project with a few Makhuas trained under Dewald Knoetze.