finally to the minister. The minister devolves the request down to the director of the sector, who in turn sends it down to the head of the department, then to the clerical officers who process the information. After processing, the same hierarchal path is followed up to the minister, before being sent to the citizen who requested it. This process takes more than 21 days. Category 1: Website analysis y There is a growing trend to use websites and social media for interaction with the public. y Many organisations have improved in terms of sharing information on their websites. y There is more news and infographic information rather than relevant documents to share with the public. y Many websites are not well maintained. y Lack of a management and maintenance timetable for the websites; some websites depend on volunteers to populate the site. y Difficulty in covering the costs of running and hosting the site. y Almost all the organisations had difficulty in interacting through online channels. Category 2: Requests for information y There is still no specific structure responsible for receiving, forwarding, processing and responding to requests for information within public and state organisations, which makes it difficult for those receiving the requests to identify the department holding the requested information to which the request should be forwarded. Consequently, requests end up circulating from department to department. y In all organisations, requests are filed at the Reception, General Secretariat or the Communication and Public Relations Departments. y Organisations have mechanisms to control incoming requests, through service counters or the office assistants of the organisations, but there is poor control of requests by citizens once these enter internal circulation which results in requests being lost. y In many organisations, there prevails an excess of centralisation of information in the person of the top leadership of the institution, which means that requests take more time in circulation, complying with the bottom-totop and then top-to-bottom hierarchy. So, first the request received is sent to the head of the sector, who sends it to the director, the director in turn sends it to the deputy minister and RETURN TO CONTENTS PAGE 84 y All organisations have spaces and human resources to handle requests for information, such as libraries or information archives. y In some organisations, an authorisation by the Chairman of the Board of Directors is not sufficient for the release of information, which also requires an authorisation by the portfolio director. This means that even if there is an instruction from the manager, it can take a long time for the information to be released, when middle management are not in agreement. y We were pleased to note that all organisations that responded to requests took care to do so within the timeframe set by law. MOZAMBIQUE SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS