Global Knowledge Partnership, OneWorld Africa and the Open Knowledge Network (OKN) have announced the Africa category winner of the inaugural Yeomans Award for Local Content as The Southern Africa Drought Technology Network (Sadnet), Zimbabwe. (http://www.safireweb.org) Sadnet is a project of the Southern Alliance For Indigenous Resources (SAFIRE) and seeks to establish an information network that links sources of agricultural technical and marketing information with development practitioners and rural communities in drought prone regions of Southern Africa.

Around the world representative democracy is no longer the agency of popular will. In the US, elections are controlled by big money. In developing countries, the undemocratic imposition of neo-liberal economic policies has forced governments to dismantle basic services like health and education. But Porto Alegre presents an apparent alternative to the world. With its experiment in participative budgetmaking over the past decade, this city has institutionalised the direct democratic involvement, locality by locality, of ordinary citizens in deciding spending priorities.

In August 1993, Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl was killed in Cape Town by a group of black youths incited by an upsurge of ´anti–white´ sloganeering. Mother to Mother was provoked by that tragedy. The killer´s mother addresses the mother of the victim and tries, through speaking to her pain, to gain an understanding of her son by recalling both his life and hers within a world of apartheid. The graphic account of life and culture in a black township is both poignant and at the same time, in Sindiwe Magona´s vibrant style, extremely lively. Magona, who grew up in a black township of Cape Town, now lives in New York and works for the United Nations. She has published her autobiography and collections of short stories.

What are the sources of 700,000 dead in AIDS yearly in Zimbabwe? I´m referring to article by N. Reynolds (Pambazuka News 200, Letters)

Norman Reynolds responds: The death figure is correct for that year. It comes from an MDC paper written by Eddie Cross in July 2002. He, in fact, predicted that in 2003 one million would die of AIDS given the sharp turn down of the economy, hunger and the already high infection rate. Of these, 750,000 deaths were easily prevented in a normal country. The background data is that, from 1984 to 2001, one million Zimbabweans died from Aids. Since the collapse of the economy, 2001 to 2004, the rate was 170,000 rising sharply each year with poverty and the growing lack of or inability to buy food to around 700,000. That has added another 1.5 million to the total deaths from AIDS. This rising number is awful but has been held back by migration.