The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) will hold a five day ICT policy advocacy workshop in Nairobi from 19th - 23rd July. The workshop intends to galvinise the growing interest there is in ICT policy into a network of policy advocates working in their home countries. It will be the first of two regional ICT policy advocacy workshops, the second being held in Dakar, Senegal later this year. "Through the workshop, we hope to kick start concerted policy actions at the national level," says APC executive director, Anriette Esterhuysen. "There's a lot of interest and concern and a lot of expertise out there but not enough collaborative action. We want to do more than just build capacity."

By 2010, about 50 million children in sub-Saharan Africa will be orphans, more than a third of them having lost one or both parents to AIDS, says a biennial report on orphans released by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS and UNICEF. According to Children on the Brink 2004, the number of AIDS orphans worldwide has increased from 11.5 million to 15 million, most of them in Africa. In Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the number of orphans has decreased by about one-tenth since 1990.

"...the tenth anniversary of South African freedom is no cause for celebration by the oppressed whether at home, elsewhere in Africa, or across the Third World. It is, rather, a moment for us to examine the contradictions associated with a decade of worsening class apartheid and to challenge victimist rhetoric about global inequality when it disguises status quo elite ambitions. Given the ability of South Africa’s progressive activists to consistently identify and protest the hypocrisy of their government talking left while walking right, it is fair to say that Pretoria’s strategy will soon be overtaken, not only by failure from above but by resistance from below." This is the conclusion of an article on the Foreign Policy in Focus website by Patrick Bond, who teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.