Tracing the lives and afterlives of cars in development aid projects in Mozambique’s health sector

Vehicles are a staple of the ‘international development aid project’. A basic logistical need, allowing for the movement of project staff and materials, the white, logo-branded SUV is often one of the first items procured by ‘the project’ and has become a symbol of the ‘aidworld’ (Smirl 2008, 2015). In some sectors, such as health or disaster relief, transport and logistics are considered an integral and essential part of the system or mission. In rural Africa settings, for example, where healthcare systems operate in vast geographical areas with challenging terrain, scattered healthcare centres and poor road infrastructure, transport is a key enabler of healthcare provision (Beale, Mashiri, and Chakwizira 2014).
Nonetheless, while donating cars is a common fixture of health system support provided by international donors, transport management interventions are not a donor nor health system administrator priorities, and often face resistance from local actors. For this or other reasons, car remains in various states of decay are a familiar sight to those who visit healthcare facilities in Mozambique, where the health sector, damaged after the civil war and struggling with HIV/AIDS since the 1990s, has been central to international donor support in the past two to three decades (Garrido 2020).
What can a dusty minibus with flat tires or the half-destroyed body of an old ambulance repurposed as a shed in a hospital compound tell us about past and current donor interventions in that site, about the politics of aid, and about the dreams of the Mozambican state for the health sector? Which creative methods, such as object biography or visual ethnography, are best suited to study car ruins as traces of past development projects? This paper proposes a methodology to investigate health sector support interventions across several sites in Mozambique, with car remains as the starting point.