Edson Cortez was born on May 2, 1979, in Quelimane, Zambezia Province. He is the eldest son of six siblings. In 1985, the family moved to Maputo where he attended primary school on “February 3rd”. He started his secondary education at “Maxaquene” and completed it at the Maputo Commercial School. He loves football. outside the country, he has no particular preference for a club, but he likes the Portuguese coach, José Mourinho. Internally, he likes the “maxaquene”. took a special high school exam, passed, competed and entered the “Eduardo mondlane” university
“I was a good history student and I liked letters in general. this was decisive for my choice of the social sciences as my university degree. I did a bachelor's degree, then a degree in Public Administration. in the course of my bachelor's and licentiate degrees, among the professors who marked me are Professor Fernando Ganhão (History of ideas) and Adelino Pimpão (Fundamentals of economics)", said.
It was with Ganhão that he learned that you should have different perspectives on a given subject and not be afraid of making mistakes and thinking differently. Marcelo Mosse's friend, in 2003, in the process of identifying a scientific problem, for his graduation monograph, he was the one who advised him to choose corruption as a theme. had as advisor Professor José Jaime macuane and presented the Monograph “Analysis of the phenomenon of corruption in the health sector – the case of the Ministry of Health”.
Marcelo went to Portugal to do a master's degree in “Development Studies”. When he returned, in 2004, he invited him to join Adriano nuvunga (with whom he had already been speaking) to found an organization that would work on corruption issues.
“At that time, Mosse knew some donors, including Marc de Tollenaere, who worked at Sdc (Swiss cooperation) and we were consolidating the idea. we invited other people (most of them former UFicS colleagues) and the Public integrity center was created in 2005. we invited people by affinity and because we had common ideas. At the time, no one imagined that an organization would emerge with the level of prestige that ciP has today (modesty aside). What moved us is the idea that a country is not made with a single way of thinking. Democracy must be polyphonic. We used what we learned at the university as a methodological focus. as you can see, our effort is to verify, analyze and present evidence. Under the direction of Marcelo Mosse, investigative journalism asserted itself, in the initial phase, as a very important transversal area in our organization. Dialogue is an important component of democracy” explained.
In any country in the world, one of the sectors where aspects of corruption occur is Procurement. It was necessary to know the cool part. It was necessary to be prepared to analyze the issue of governance in its breadth and magnitude. in the case of mozambique, there was a need to be prepared to avoid materializing the infamous “resource curse”. According to Cortez, current director of the CIP, “It was taking into account these and other aspects that we built the pillars of the ciP, hiring competent employees for each of the areas. The idea is to look at our mission and vision and shape the organization's structure, to respond and correspond to these two aspects”.
To end our conversation, he considered the campaign “I don't pay the debts”, one of the unique moments in the life of the CIP.
