Manuel Homem, who was speaking to students at the Óscar Ribas University, about the challenges facing the capital over the next four years, said that they essentially involve "ensuring that people have the necessary conditions to be in this space".
"To have a little idea of what I mean, about a month ago, on one of these long weekends - I have to receive, by virtue of my duties, the state of the situation in the province at all levels - and a curious piece of information was to see that in the municipality of Viana [one of the seven municipalities of Luanda], during a long weekend, 356 children were born", he said.
The governor of Luanda stressed that the birth rate in Angola is high, noting that Luanda is included in the list where the rate is growing rapidly.
Luanda province, with an area of 18,826 square kilometers and close to 10 million inhabitants, has Viana, with 3.6 percent of the total area, as the most populous municipality and an estimated population of over two million inhabitants.
According to Manuel Homem, Luanda's challenges are not limited to the creation of infrastructure, namely roads, schools, energy, water, health facilities, but it is essential that, as a country, it reflects a lot on the issue of population growth.
"As we look at the effort that needs to be made between the speed with which children are born and the infrastructure needs that are necessary for them to have schools, health centers, it is a challenge that should make us continue to reflect on whether the solutions that we have been implementing are sufficient to accommodate all needs or at least accommodate the effort that will be required", he said.
The official reiterated that, in order to reflect on Luanda's challenges, it is necessary to focus on people.
Manuel Homem said that Luanda was allocated, for this year, a budget of 356 billion kwanzas, but to meet the challenges it would need an amount four times higher.
According to Manuel Homem, 3747 public and private schools are mapped in Luanda, the latter in the majority, which do not respond to current needs, stressing that almost 1.5 million children are outside the education system, despite around 70 per percent of Luanda's investments are aimed at building school establishments.
"And it is a challenge that does not just stem from the lack of capacity to build schools (...). If we do birth statistics at the level of different hospitals, not to mention those that are born with traditional midwives, we have a birth rate so high that our capacity to have classrooms to house all the children who will be born this year, five years from now would have to be triple the capacity of today", he pointed out.
In terms of health, the governor said that the health network is made up of 173 units, which respond to the needs of the province, with challenges still being essentially to place services in primary units and improve infrastructures, with plans to expand the network to more almost 200 units.
Regarding access to water and basic sanitation, Manuel Homem considered that this is the "biggest challenge", as the water distribution capacity for Luanda is 30 percent, "still far short of needs".
With regard to basic sanitation, the governor referred that the problems caused by the rains stem from the need to improve its micro and macro drainage infrastructures, which from an infrastructural point of view cover only 3 percent.
"That is, the ditches that were built to respond to the needs of water drainage are still only at 3 percent (...) in the others it works due to the natural gravitation of the waterways that the province has", he stressed, remembering that added to this fact is also the settlement of populations in areas of water passage.
Manuel Homem also expressed concern about public safety, which requires attention, an increase in police units and the involvement of society and families to find solutions.
