PAMBAZUKA NEWS 147: OPEN LETTER TO NKOSAZANA DLAMINI-ZUMA

The United Nations will need US $5.8 million to help over 600,000 Namibian orphans, vulnerable children and women suffering the combined effects of erratic weather, severe poverty and a worsening HIV/AIDS epidemic. On Wednesday the World Food Programme (WFP) and UN's Children's Fund (UNICEF) launched an emergency appeal, noting that "tens of thousands of children and their families will face severe difficulties in the coming months, unless international assistance is forthcoming".

What does it mean to a town to have 10% of its children lose parents? Sarah Crowe from Unicef visited a school in Thaba Tseka, one of the worst hit districts in Lesotho. Residents blame large-scale development projects and road construction that have brought migrant workers to the area for the increasing HIV/Aids prevalence rates.

The Central African Republic became the 100th Member State to sign the United Nations Convention against Corruption. The new international treaty - worked out through a two-year negotiating process supported by the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) - was adopted by the General Assembly in October 2003. At a special signing conference held in Mérida, Mexico, last December, 95 countries signed the new Convention.

The Ecohealth Training Awards encourage graduate-level students to examine the relationships between the environment, human health, and development from a holistic perspective through field research that contributes to understanding these relationships as inter-related. The focus of this year’s competition is health in an urban context. Applicants are asked to submit proposals that use ecosystem approaches to human health to analyse the links between human health and urban ecosystem condi...read more

The Research on Knowledge Systems (RoKS) initiative of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation (www.rockfound.org) is launching a competition to support research on the social equity and public policy challenges of transformative technologies faced by developing countries. The focus is on how social equity and the human condition is being affected by emerging technologies, as well as on what mec...read more

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