The School of Economics, Management and Political Science at the University of Minho (EEG) is proud to announce that Assinde Joaquim Assumane, a PhD student in Management Sciences, presented his doctoral thesis entitled “Outsourcing of Sanitation Services: An Alternative for Service Provision in Local Authorities in Mozambique”, on 16 April 2026.
In the author’s own words:
“This study analyses the outsourcing of sanitation services in Mozambican local authorities, focusing primarily on service quality and resident satisfaction, with cost reduction as a secondary consideration. The research compares five local authorities: Maputo, Matola, Nampula, Quelimane and Chimoio, combining questionnaires to residents, interviews with managers and the legal and institutional framework.
The topic is relevant, topical and substantively important, both for Mozambican public administration and for the literature on local service provision, new public management, the choice of provision mechanisms and municipal governance.
The thesis’s most important contribution is not to ‘prove’ that in-house service provision is always superior, but to show that the debate on outsourcing in Mozambique needs to move beyond the normative level and refocus on concrete institutional conditions: supervisory capacity, the supplier market, financial sustainability, urban scale, contractual quality and resident inclusion.
The most important contribution of the thesis is not to prove that in-house provision is always superior, but to show that the debate on outsourcing in Mozambique needs to move away from the normative level and refocus on concrete institutional conditions: supervisory capacity, the supplier market, financial sustainability, urban scale, contractual quality and the inclusion of residents.”
The doctoral thesis was supervised by Professor Pedro Camões.
EEG congratulates Assinde Joaquim Assumane on the successful defence of his thesis and wishes him every success in his professional and personal life!
