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Six years of study, a Portuguese-only website, an Ordem dos Médicos certification exam and no entry in CNAQ's published 2023 list: the due-diligence file on ISCTEM in Maputo
According to Lusa, citing the Ordem dos Médicos de Moçambique in June 2025, Mozambique trains more than 200 doctors a year at six universities, about 6,100 doctors are registered and only about half are active. CNAQ, the national quality council, accredits courses for five years, or two conditionally, according to an EU-funded review dated June 2025. The Ordem's 2022 edital says Medicina Geral graduates of any Mozambican school, public or private, who finished from 1 June 2016 onward must pass its certification exam.
ISCTEM, the Instituto Superior de Ciências e Tecnologia de Moçambique, is a private institute in Maputo. Its website says it was founded in 1996 and authorised by Decree 46/96 of 5 November. The Licenciatura em Medicina Geral lasts six years; applicants need secondary-school Biology and Chemistry and at least 15 valores in the institute's own entrance tests. The medicine page names no specific teaching hospital and makes no accreditation statement, and the admissions page says nothing about foreign-certificate equivalence, language requirements or international quotas. Nothing here is an allegation against ISCTEM; the gaps are in what a student can find in public.
Fees first. ISCTEM publishes no tuition amount for medicine. Its 2023 Student Kit says only that fees are paid in meticais over ten months, with late-payment surcharges of 10 and 20 per cent, and that exams require fees fully paid. Accreditation second. CNAQ's published 2023 list contains one accredited medicine degree, at the Universidade Católica de Moçambique in Beira, and neither it nor CNAQ's 2023 annual report mentions ISCTEM. That is not evidence of a problem: the EU-funded review found that 1,564 of Mozambique's 2,524 courses had never been evaluated, about 65 per cent by its own estimate. ISCTEM may hold accreditation from another year; we could not find it in the 2023 results.
Third, portability. ISCTEM's website and course material are in Portuguese, and the medicine page states no language of instruction. India's Foreign Medical Graduate Licentiate Regulations 2021, as reproduced by Medical Dialogues, require a degree taught in English, a 12-month internship at the same institution and a licence in the country of study, and on 8 August 2023 the NMC's undergraduate board warned, Medical Dialogues reported, that any variation may lead to disqualification from registration in India. An agent selling this degree as an India-registrable MBBS is selling something the rules do not support.
Before paying a deposit, ask ISCTEM in writing for its CNAQ accreditation certificate and date, the medicine fee schedule and the hospital used for clinical training. The Ordem's most recent published fees were 1,000 MT to register and 7,300 MT on passing, and foreign-trained doctors need an embassy-authenticated Portuguese translation of the diploma and a Ministry equivalence certificate. Pay the institute, never the agent, and keep your original documents.
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