Methodological Approach

This chapter describes the background and challenges of the implementation of Brazil’s most audacious project in health: Sociedade Moçambicana de Medicamentos. It is important to mention that the fieldwork and case study were developed around the main hypothesis of this research, namely that Brazil’s health diplomacy has followed the traditional lines of the Itamaraty agenda, but was emphasised under two presidential diplomacies, consequently leading Brazil to become a major protagonist in the field. The findings and evaluation objective of this research rely on identifying what was on the table for Brazil and if indeed its GHD has made a contribution to the country in terms of its soft power.

The chapter contains the following sections. First, SMM: Chronology aims to contest the idea that the factory was part of Lula’s presidential foreign policy, and an exclusive project to emerge from his time in government. By exposing this timeline, one can gain an idea of the construction of Brazil’s soft power and agency in global health, which ended up making this project possible. It also exposes the high political complexity of cooperation in health, and the issues involved in adapting one’s projects to other countries’ realities. Second, The practical/technical aspects of managing this project seeks to show how the official diplomatic decision had an impact on the evolution of the project, and also how the project had been adapted throughout the years to address the demands of Mozambique’s government and society. It also describes how Brazil, via FIOCRUZ mainly, could offer to overcome possible challenges. Finally, the last section, The Challenges and Aftermath of SMM, offers conclusions and answers to practical day-to-day questions. It seeks to map institutional agency, as well as the ideological and economic issues that play, as argued here, the most significant roles in influencing the final result and the SMM stage nowadays.

SMM: Chronology

Many scholars claim that the diplomatic encounters between Brazil and Mozambique that led to the creation of Sociedade Moçambicana de Medicamentos took place in 2003, during President Lula’s official state visit to Joaquim Chissano, in Maputo, Mozambique (Cabral et al., 2014, p. 180). Yet, this section also highlights that the consolidation of the countries’ intentions to exchange technology and know-how had been established prior to that visit.