A long-term documentary project on the women who hold up Mozambique’s informal economy: their work, their knowledge, and what they pass on to the next generation.
Across Mozambique, women feed households, earn income, keep skills alive and hold together the networks their communities depend on. Most of this work never enters the official story of development.
Mothers of the Morning documents it through photography, interviews and field research. We follow real women, not an abstract category, and record how work, family, knowledge and place meet in their daily lives.
Meet Emília ↗of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa is informal. In Mozambique it is the great majority, and much of it is carried by women.
Source: ILO · World Bankpeople live on what Emília earns selling fish on the Maputo coast: four children, two grandchildren and a daughter-in-law.
of women passed her trade down: an aunt taught Flora, and Flora taught Emília. No school, no manual. Only experience.
For MOM, storytelling is not just the result of the work. It is the method: how women’s labour moves from the edges of the record to the centre of public conversation.
We document women’s lives and the knowledge passed between them to build an archive that can feed public dialogue, education and wider conversations on gender equality and economic inclusion.
Bring forward the women whose work and knowledge sustain families and communities, yet rarely sit at the centre of public narratives.
Documentary photography, testimony, video and research, used to keep these stories, pass on what they teach and widen how Mozambican women are represented.
Use these stories to shift how women’s work is valued, and open the way to future programmes in learning, collaboration and economic inclusion.
Each story starts with one woman, one place and one trade. We take time to understand the context before the camera comes out.
Field research and long conversations with each woman, her family and her community, with local interpreters where needed.
Photography, interviews and field notes, made with consent and shaped by what she chooses to share.
Every story enters a growing archive of images, stories and context, organised for the long term.
Exhibitions, a photobook, publications and educational use, so the stories reach people beyond the project.
We don’t reduce women to hardship. We document their agency, knowledge, labour and ambition.
A situated, qualitative project. Each story speaks for one life, not for every woman in Mozambique.Interviews for Matriarchs of the Tide took place at Emília’s home in Costa do Sol, with Emília, Flora and their families. This is what the work looks like before the camera comes out.
MOM is built as a continuous investigation, not a set of isolated stories. Each chapter covers one region of Mozambique.
How women sustain their families, earn an income and keep economic practices alive from one generation to the next.
The remaining stories of Chapter I are supported by Cultiv’Arte, funded by the European Union.
Women’s economic activity and its ties to land and territory, family systems, and the knowledge that moves between them.
Matrilineal societies, where lineage and inheritance pass through the mother, and women’s work takes another shape.
To document women’s economic role in Mozambique’s informal sector and strengthen its recognition, through visual storytelling, research and the preservation of lived experience.
Record women’s stories, work and lived experience across the south, centre and north of Mozambique.
Show how women’s work sustains household income, community networks and resilience.
Follow how skills and economic know-how pass from one generation of women to the next.
Prompt public reflection on gender inequality, invisible labour and economic inclusion.
Create a lasting visual and narrative archive for exhibitions, a photobook and education.
By 2027, Mothers of the Morning will hold a high-quality archive of the lives, work and knowledge of Mozambican women, and present it to the public as a photobook and an exhibition.
The archive is meant to outlive the project: a resource for cultural memory, research and education, and the foundation for future public programmes.
Photography, interviews, field notes and research from every chapter, kept and organised for the long term.
The first chapters brought together in print, with the women’s own words alongside the images.
A public exhibition that brings the stories back to the communities and to wider audiences.
We are looking for institutions, cultural organisations, foundations and sponsors who believe in visibility, fair representation and inclusive development.
Chapter I is supported by Cultiv’Arte, a programme funded by the European Union and implemented by Expertise France in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Culture of Mozambique, ideialab and the Franco-Mozambican Cultural Centre. We are now looking for partners to open Chapter II in central Mozambique and Chapter III in northern Mozambique, and to turn the archive into a photobook and exhibition.
Together, we can make sure these stories are not only documented, but kept, shared and carried forward.
Documentary Photographer & Visual Storyteller for Development & Advocacy
Douglas Condzo is a documentary photographer based in Maputo and the founder of Mothers of the Morning. For Douglas, invisibility is not only a lack of images. It is shaped by the narratives that decide what deserves recognition and what stays at the margins. Mothers of the Morning is his response: a long-term record of the women those narratives leave out.
In 2023, DAZED Magazine named him part of its “Next Generation of Photojournalists.” He works across photography, film, creative direction and cultural production, and has collaborated with international organisations and media including IOM, UN-Habitat, Human Rights Watch and Bloomberg News. His photographs have been exhibited in Mozambique and South Africa.
Chapter I of Mothers of the Morning is supported by Cultiv’Arte, funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of Douglas Condzo and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
