Why Cahora Bassa’s Socioeconomic Survey Could Reshape the Zone

One company operates a hydroelectric facility large enough to supply most of a nation’s electricity. It also holds a concession zone covering 2,665 square kilometres of central Mozambican territory. And it does not have a complete, current picture of who lives, fishes, farms, and mines inside that zone.

That gap is why Cahora Bassa Hydroelectric Company (HCB) has gone to market. Communities, artisanal fishers, semi-industrial kapenta operators, small-scale gold miners, and tourism ventures have all been expanding their footprint inside a reservoir concession that Mozambican law designates as public-domain and partially protected. In response, HCB has issued a formal expression of interest for a specialised firm to conduct a georeferenced inventory of the human activity inside its territory, confirmed by a Lusa dispatch dated 17 September 2026 and a tender notice on 360 Mozambique dated 18 September 2026.

Here is what that kind of survey actually does, why operators of large hydropower infrastructure commission them, and what the findings could unlock, or destabilise, for the people and businesses currently occupying that territory.

What HCB is actually commissioning and why now

Strip away the procurement language and the survey has a defined shape. HCB is asking a specialised entity to produce a single, location-referenced picture of everything happening inside the concession zone.

The scope covers six deliverables:

• Identifying the users of the reservoir concession
• Cataloguing the economic activities taking place inside it
• Mapping physical occupations and infrastructure
• Recording the land titles that have been granted
• Making a preliminary assessment of potential conflicts of use
• Recommending an integrated management approach and designing community outreach programmes

This is a structured legal step, not an internal desk study. The tender notice on 360 Mozambique describes the work as “consultancy services in socioeconomic studies and territorial management” and invites qualified firms to submit expressions of interest. As of 21 September 2026, publicly accessible sources report the tender as open. No shortlisting, award, or commencement has been reported, and no completion date has been set.

HCB frames the exercise around a strategic need: conserving the water resources essential to hydroelectric generation and preventing conflicts over how the land is used.

HCB’s stated rationale Sustainable management of the concession zone is treated as strategically important for conserving the water resources on which power generation depends. The company’s stated aim is to improve integrated management of the area and to prevent conflicts of use.

One word in HCB’s own framing carries more weight than it first appears: “updated.” The company is not commissioning a first-ever inventory. It is seeking an updated one, which tells you existing data is either outdated or was never comprehensive to begin with.

That detail reframes the whole exercise. A facility of this scale is currently being managed with an incomplete picture of who sits inside its concession and on what legal basis they are there. The survey is therefore reactive rather than precautionary: the territory has already been claimed by multiple competing actors, and HCB is trying to establish what it is dealing with.

For the people and businesses inside the zone, that matters directly. The inventory will create, for the first time, a georeferenced record of every land claim, every economic activity, and every potential conflict. It becomes the foundation for any future land-use decision that could touch their livelihoods.

The human geography HCB is trying to map

Zoom in from the scale of the concession and the abstraction resolves into people. The territory inside the zone is not empty land awaiting classification. It is worked, settled, and fished.

The documented economic activities inside the reservoir concession include:

• Artisanal fishing using drag and gill nets
• Semi-industrial kapenta fishing associations operating under exclusive licences
• Rainfed family agriculture: maize, sorghum, millet, groundnuts, and vegetables
• Local commerce
• Tourism using the reservoir for water sports
• Formal employment with HCB
• Seasonal labour and livestock rearing

Agriculture dominates. The environmental and social impact assessment for HCB projects around Songo describes family-based rainfed farming as the main economic activity in the Cahora Bassa district, typically worked on two plots per household, one for daily consumption and one held back for surplus and lean years.

The settlement is denser than the remote geography suggests. A 2025 field study by The Wilderness Project recorded average human densities of about 11 people per kilometre along the southern bank outside protected areas, and 13 people per kilometre within Magoe National Park.

The surrounding region carries a substantial population. A November 2025 report on the planned Chitima District Hospital noted the facility is expected to serve roughly 187,000 inhabitants across the districts of Cahora Bassa, Changara, Marávia, Mágoè, and Marara in Tete province.

HCB’s own recent environmental and social documentation names the specific groups it considers directly affected: residents of Songo town, communities south of the plant, Marávia communities on the north bank, Magoe communities along the reservoir, and the fishing businesses operating reservoir-side. What that documentation does not provide is an updated aggregate count, which is precisely the gap the survey is meant to close.

The result is layered tenure complexity: informal settlement density combined with multi-generational land use, all inside a zone the law treats as partially protected. For the communities involved, being mapped is not neutral. It means their presence is about to be either validated or contested.

The historical layer the survey must account for

None of this exists in a clean slate. The current human geography sits on top of a displacement record that predates the communities now occupying the zone.

Historical research by Allen and Barbara Isaacman, published in Daedalus, documents that around 25,000 peasants were forcibly relocated when the reservoir was created, and that roughly 50,000 had their fertile homelands inundated at impoundment. These are two distinct figures describing two dimensions of displacement: formal forced relocation on one hand, inundation of homelands on the other.

The impact extended far downstream. The same body of research and analyses from International Rivers describe how altered and mistimed flooding below the dam adversely affected hundreds of thousands of downstream households and degraded the Zambezi Delta, including reduced shrimp yields on the Sofala Bank linked to changes in runoff and flood pulses.

HCB’s own recent sustainability documentation acknowledges that no commitments regarding project benefits for affected communities were made at the time of the dam’s original planning and construction. That admission matters here. Any land-use governance process that ignores this displacement record starts from a contested foundation, and the survey cannot pretend that history away.

Why operators commission these surveys and what international standards require

Step back from HCB specifically and a pattern appears. Georeferenced socioeconomic surveys are not an idiosyncratic corporate whim. They are the recognised first move for any large hydropower operator managing land-use obligations under international development finance standards.

World Bank guidance on the social risks of hydropower identifies comprehensive socioeconomic surveys and livelihood assessments as core good-practice elements across five themes: consultation and participation, resettlement, livelihood restoration, reservoir impoundment, and attention to vulnerable communities and cultural heritage. The logic is straightforward. You cannot design compensation or livelihood restoration for people you have not counted.

The International Finance Corporation goes further. Its Performance Standard 5, which governs land acquisition and involuntary resettlement, requires robust baseline data on land tenure, resource use, and vulnerable groups before any restriction is imposed.

The Mozambican legal layer sits underneath all of this. Land Law No. 19/97 and the Water Law classify dam reservoirs as public-domain and partially protected, with buffer strips 250 metres from the maximum inundation level where normal land-use rights cannot be acquired, though specific activities may be authorised through special licences. Critically, the same laws recognise that inhabitants losing land or assets may be entitled to compensation.

Mozambican resource law imposes layered obligations on companies holding concessions, with state equity requirements and community benefit provisions that sit alongside the public-domain classifications governing the Cahora Bassa reservoir zone.

Free, Prior and Informed Consent International standards call for Free, Prior and Informed Consent where a project restricts land use or relocates Indigenous or historically underserved communities. Georeferenced socioeconomic data is what identifies which groups those obligations apply to.

Surveys also do constructive work. World Bank research on benefit sharing emphasises that this kind of data underpins local development and revenue-sharing schemes by clarifying which communities live inside the concession and what resources they depend on.

Put those pieces together and the survey’s real character emerges. For anyone operating inside the Cahora Bassa concession, being counted is not a neutral administrative event. International standards require that the resulting data trigger specific obligations around consultation, compensation, and benefit access. The act of being mapped carries legal and financial consequences, and the inventory becomes the document that defines what HCB owes to every person and entity it identifies.

What the survey could unlock and what it could fracture

Formalisation cuts both ways. The same georeferenced record that could clarify rights and reduce conflict can also expose how little communities currently receive, harden the lines of contestation, and become the evidentiary basis for removals rather than protections.

Start with the conflicts the survey will have to navigate. On the water, research on Lake Cahora Bassa’s fisheries documents long-running friction between artisanal gill-net fishers and semi-industrial kapenta operators, including incidents where kapenta boats damage artisanal nets and competition intensifies over fishing grounds. On land, HCB’s own preliminary sustainability assessment flags bank erosion linked to illegal squatters, signalling informal occupation the company wants to control. Environmental studies for Tete province add artisanal gold mining as a further pressure, a source of mercury contamination as well as competing land use.

Artisanal gold mining formalisation in Mozambique has produced mixed results elsewhere in Tete province, where mercury contamination and competing tenure claims have historically made regulatory intervention as likely to generate displacement as to resolve it.

The power imbalance behind these tensions is the reason the survey’s findings will be politically loaded. In 2024, HCB delivered 12,351 GWh, of which 66% went to South Africa’s Eskom, about 30% to Mozambique’s EDM, and 4% to Zimbabwe’s ZESA. Performance has since strengthened: HCB generated 6,399 GWh in the first half of 2026, roughly 10% above forecast and 13% higher than the same period in 2025.

That is the friction in one sentence. A facility generating power primarily for export sits above communities depending on subsistence fishing and farming, most without formal tenure. Any inventory produced in that context will be read through the export-versus-livelihoods lens regardless of how neutral its methodology is.

HCB has already shown its instinct on formalisation. Its 2018 “Strategy to Vacate Hillsides and Concession Areas” demarcated 36 plots in Vila do Songo and Chimoio and secured DUAT titles (Direito de Uso e Aproveitamento da Terra, the Mozambican land-use right) in HCB’s own name to prevent unauthorised occupation. Formalisation, in other words, has previously served concession control rather than community claims.

The risks of a repeat run in four directions:

1. Displacement without compensation: loss of land and resource access without adequate livelihood restoration
2. Marginalisation of subsistence users: artisanal fishers and family farmers sidelined if commercial or conservation interests dominate concession governance
3. Escalation of disputes with NGOs: conflict with community land-rights advocates if the process is read as expropriation rather than regularisation
4. Increased financier scrutiny: social and political pressure on operators and lenders if reservoir management appears to favour export power over local livelihoods

The “green colonialism” framing Activist organisations including Justiça Ambiental and StopMozGas have described large Zambezi energy projects as “green colonialism” when communities are not meaningfully consulted or permitted to decline projects they view as harmful. They stress the right to say no and demand genuine benefit-sharing.

What Kariba and other African precedents suggest

The regional record offers three clear lessons, and they do not point in a single direction.

First, mapping can reveal impact scale that was previously invisible. Socioeconomic surveys of Kariba’s resettlement areas showed that displaced communities had been moved to land insufficient for their traditional farming systems, documenting damage that had been hidden until it was measured.

Second, combined with co-management, mapping can reduce resource conflict. At Kariba, boundary demarcation across the reservoir strengthened fisheries co-management among artisanal fishers, kapenta operators, and fish farmers.

Third, mapping alone does not prevent displacement. Kariba case studies still record forced relocation to marginal land and long-term social trauma in resettled populations. Where communities are excluded from how findings are used, the data can fuel contestation rather than resolve it.

The Zambezi River Authority’s environmental and social management plan for Kariba codifies the sequence: maps, social census, household asset inventories, socioeconomic surveys, and then resettlement action plans. The Cahora Bassa survey slots directly into that recognised regional pattern, which is the point. The precedent suggests the survey’s value will be decided not by what it finds, but by the governance built around the findings.

Making the call on what the survey is worth

The survey is a diagnostic instrument, and like any diagnostic, its value is entirely downstream of the decisions it informs. Right now it is in procurement, not execution. As of 21 September 2026, the tender is open, no firm has been shortlisted or awarded, and no completion date has been set.

The scale explains why the outcome carries weight. Cahora Bassa runs 2,075 MW across five 415-MW Francis turbines and has averaged roughly 15,255 GWh of annual generation over the past decade. Managing the human geography of the concession is strategically inseparable from managing the plant itself.

Three variables will determine whether the inventory produces equitable outcomes:

1. Community inclusion in design: whether community representatives help design and validate the inventory, or whether it is produced over their heads
2. Benefit-sharing versus boundary enforcement: whether the findings trigger livelihood restoration and revenue-sharing commitments, or only concession-boundary enforcement
3. Engagement versus exclusion: whether HCB uses the data to engage current occupants or to remove them

World Bank and IFC guidance is explicit that participatory planning and accessible grievance mechanisms are necessary when land-use control is formalised. HCB’s own admission that no benefit commitments were made at the dam’s construction only raises the stakes on getting this iteration right.

ESG mapping in resource concessions has evolved from a voluntary reporting exercise into a due-diligence baseline that financiers require before committing capital, meaning the socioeconomic inventory HCB is commissioning will be read by lenders through exactly that screening lens.

For the communities, fishing associations, and operators inside the 2,665-square-kilometre zone, the outcome is not an abstract governance question. It will determine whether their presence is legitimised, compensated, or erased. Watch for community participation in the process, watch for whether findings unlock benefit-sharing, and watch for whether civil society is given standing to contest results it disputes.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with financial professionals before making investment decisions. These statements are speculative and subject to change based on market developments and project performance.