Agência de Informação de Moçambique (AIM)

Agência de Informação de Moçambique (AIM) is the national state news agency of Mozambique, headquartered in Maputo on Rua da Rádio Moçambique. AIM was created on 22 November 1975 by Portaria 119/75, shortly after national independence, and has operated continuously since as the country’s sole national wire service, producing news in Portuguese and English on Mozambican politics, economy, society, and international affairs.

The agency is a member of the Aliança das Agências de Informação de Língua Portuguesa (Alliance of Portuguese-Language News Agencies), and its current Portuguese/English news portal, aimnews.org, was rebuilt in March 2023 through a cooperation agreement with Lusa, Portugal’s national news agency. Notable journalists and writers who have served as directors or staff include the murdered investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso (killed in November 2000), the writer Mia Couto, and the writer Luís Carlos Patraquim. Long-serving British journalist Paul Fauvet continues to edit AIM’s English service in 2026.

Media assets

News agency: AIM

Ownership and governance

AIM is wholly state-owned. Per the institutional/legal description published on its own pages, AIM is a State institution with legal personality and administrative autonomy (instituição do Estado com personalidade jurídica e autonomia administrativa), with statutory responsibilities to produce news and information in text, image, and sound for dissemination within and outside Mozambique. This legal status differs from the Empresa Pública form used for the public broadcasters TVM and RM: AIM is institutionally embedded within the state structure rather than constituted as a state-owned commercial enterprise.

AIM is subordinated to GABINFO (Gabinete de Informação), the Government Information Office. AIM’s current organic statute defines it as a public institution with administrative autonomy under the supervisory authority of the GABINFO Director. The current GABINFO Director, Emília Moiane, has publicly confirmed her supervisory role over AIM on multiple occasions, including during the swearing-in ceremonies of successive Director-Generals and in policy challenges to AIM leadership regarding budgetary discipline and editorial direction. GABINFO has not been formally abolished or restructured following the January 2025 creation of the Ministry of Communications and Digital Transformation (MCTD) under Cabinet Minister Américo Muchanga, and as of early 2026 continues to function as AIM’s direct supervisory body.

The current Director-General of AIM is Orlando Gambeta, sworn in on 4 March 2026 by GABINFO Director Emília Moiane. AIM’s Director-General is appointed and sworn in through the executive/GABINFO supervisory chain. At Gambeta’s swearing-in, Moiane challenged him to “promote innovative solutions, strengthen institutional partnerships, and reinforce citizen confidence” and to work for “the promotion of democracy, consolidation of national unity, and dissemination of information at a moment of digital transformation.” Gambeta succeeded Almiro Mazive, who had served as Director-General Interim since 2 June 2025.

The previous substantive Director-General, Jordão Muvale, died on 4 November 2025 at age 56 after an illness. Born 1 January 1969 in Macarringa, Inhambane province, Muvale had been entrusted with the Director-General role on 2 June 2023 by the Prime Minister, with GABINFO carrying the supervisory role. He had a long prior career spanning AIM (1995–2000), the National Council for the Fight Against HIV/AIDS (CNCS) Media Project, multiple ministerial communications roles, and the Directorship of Information and Communication at GABINFO. Muvale also taught journalism at the Escola Superior de Jornalismo. Following his incapacitation by illness in mid-2025, Almiro Mazive was appointed interim Director-General on 2 June 2025; Mazive served until Gambeta’s swearing-in in March 2026.

Other senior staff include Elias Gudo as Chefe de Redacção (Editor-in-Chief) and Paul Fauvet as Editor of the English service. The Information Director at GABINFO, Mendes Mutenda, formerly held the equivalent post at AIM and continues to coordinate closely with AIM leadership.

Source of funding and budget

AIM is funded primarily through the Mozambican state budget, with limited own-source revenue (receitas próprias) and no evidence of a substantial commercial revenue base. Detailed line-item financial disclosures for AIM are not consistently published in the public domain, AIM does not produce a Relatório e Contas of the type published by IGEPE for the public-enterprise broadcasters and Sociedade do Notícias, because as a state institution rather than a state-owned enterprise it falls within the standard government budget rather than the autonomous accounts of the Sector Empresarial do Estado (SEE). AIM’s own 2023 reporting indicated an annual state-budget allocation of around MZN 4 million, alongside some own-source revenue, with GABINFO publicly urging stronger revenue generation and tighter operational discipline.

The financial pressures facing AIM are well documented. In November 2023, GABINFO Director Emília Moiane publicly challenged AIM to adopt new operational policies in light of “exiguidade orçamental” (budgetary exiguity), specifically noting that public-sector reforms, including the reduction of public-sector hiring under the broader fiscal-consolidation programme, were affecting AIM’s professional staffing. In June 2025, GABINFO again recommended to interim Director Almiro Mazive that AIM be managed “taking into account the institution’s scarce resources” and that motivating staff was “key to improving production and productivity.” In June–July 2025, Mazive and Chefe de Redacção Elias Gudo publicly acknowledged that AIM was operating with insufficient journalists due to staff flight and weak equipment, and that, despite 50 years of operation, the agency had never been able to open national-level delegations because of budgetary constraints, with foreign representation also remaining structurally limited.

Editorial independence

AIM’s editorial independence is structurally weak. Its organic-statutory framework defines it as a State institution subordinated to GABINFO, and the broader Mozambican media environment is marked by direct and indirect authority/FRELIMO influence over a significant number of outlets. AIM’s output is institutionally oriented toward official public-information functions, and its leadership has been publicly instructed by GABINFO to support democracy, national unity, citizen confidence, and digital transformation. The agency routinely covers ruling-party leadership visits to its own newsroom (such as the Frelimo Secretary for Communication’s June 2025 visit to AIM and the Frelimo parliamentary spokesperson’s March 2025 visit) as institutional events that affirm the close institutional relationship between the agency and the ruling party. There is no AIM editorial statute publicly available that explicitly guarantees editorial independence from the state, and no independent oversight mechanism exists to validate compliance with journalistic standards. In the absence of a published independent content-monitoring study of AIM’s dispatches, claims about the precise balance of government, opposition, and civil-society voices should be phrased cautiously; the structural conditions under which AIM operates, however, are documented and unambiguous.

AI and digital policy

AIM operates aimnews.org as its primary digital portal, substantially modernised in March 2023 through cooperation with Lusa, alongside Facebook and X/Twitter accounts. No public AIM policy on AI-generated content, content-provenance commitment (e.g. C2PA), or disclosure framework for AI-generated content was identified in the publicly available record, a documented absence rather than a definitive institutional claim. The Lusa cooperation agreement, which has supported AIM’s portal modernisation, has not produced public-facing AI guidance for the Mozambican wire service.

May 2026