This is a two-week training course organised by the Institute of Cultural Affairs Ghana and ICA:UK that will equip participants with the practical group facilitation methods developed and practiced globally by ICA over the past 30 years and give participants the opportunity to practice those methods in a "safe" environment.

The International Secretariat of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) has expressed “deep concern” about the fact that copies of a report published by OMCT and Nigerian NGO the Centre for Law Enforcement Education (CLEEN), entitled "Hope betrayed? A Report on Impunity and State-Sponsored Violence in Nigeria," based on the input of some 60 local NGOs, have been seized by the customs office in Lagos.

The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights has released a paper outlining a set of guidelines produced by the United Nations in collaboration with several organisations for the implementation of a human rights-based approach into poverty reduction strategies, contained in international and national developmental policies and practice.

This is a regional strategic communications training course aimed at equipping NGO activists with skills in health promotion, advocacy and general publicity for development programmes and projects.

There is little evidence to show that HIV/AIDS education in schools has achieved significant behaviour change, despite a good level of knowledge among students. A lack of time, resources and training mean that curriculum based education as well as counselling and peer education are inadequate, says a report by the African Symposium on the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the education sector in Botswana, Malawi and Uganda.

At least 627 teachers have been fired in Zimbabwe for taking part in an illegal strike, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) TV News has reported. Hundreds of teachers across the country went on strike last week to press for higher wages.

The United Nations has warned that an upsurge of fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is putting the country's peace process under severe strain, heightening fears that the recent withdrawal of foreign occupying forces without sufficient international safeguards will leave the region in chaos.

Sudan's government signed an agreement with rebels on Tuesday to suspend fighting during talks to end their 20-year-old war, an official with the mediation team said.

Ted Reilly, founder of Swaziland's wild animal park systems, surveys the green early spring hills of October, noting that "the Southern African region enjoyed some good rains this past week, but meteorologists tell us not to think a few showers can break this drought. We are in for more of the same next year.”

Partnerships between NGOs based in the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ have become a key part of international development processes. Whilst NGOs are drawn to the concept of partnership as an expression of solidarity that goes beyond financial aid, in practice the power relations of donor-recipient often skew this potential.

Gately Rotary Club has donated a resource centre costing R86 000 to the community of Kwetyana in Newlands. The resource centre boasts new toilets, a fence, water, and electricity and it will also house a clinic and library.

American actress Miss Angelina Jolie over the weekend made a personal donation of Sh15.6 million (US$200,000) to refugees in Kenya.Of this sum, Sh3.9 million is to go to training for refugee girls. The Hollywood star could not hold back her tears when she described her encounter with refugee girls and women at Kakuma refugee camp where she spent her Sunday.

Lead IMC's activities in Angola, while assuring positive implementation, effective coordination, and appropriate support for IMC programs. Oversee project logistics, finance and administrative support and actively prioritize standards for monitoring and evaluation. Graduate degree in Public Health, Public Policy, or related field preferred.

The Information Systems Electronics and Telecommunications Technologies' (ISETT) Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) has made a grant worth R11.7 million available to the Siemens Information and Communications Training Institute in Pretoria.The institute, launched in April, aims to develop highly skilled manpower for the telecoms industry.

South Africa's financial contributions to international relief programmes in Africa had halved during the past three years from R12,1-million to R6-million, according to the foreign affairs department's annual report for the year ending March 2002.

Zambia is to receive $50-million in credit from the World Bank (WB) for current drought and food shortages in the country.The funds will be released under the Emergency Drought Recovery Project (EDRP), and will go towards logistical and humanitarian support in ongoing food distribution.

The silence around HIV/AIDS has been surprising for the few HIV/AIDS activists present at the AWID (Association for Women's Rights in Development) 9th Conference in Mexico. Mainly voices of African women, and of those working in Africa, raised the issue of HIV/AIDS.

In June the South African government passed a set of acts to allow local and municipal government councillors, as well as provincial and national members of parliament to change political parties without losing their seats. The acts have important short-term implications for coalition politics and the control of local and provincial governments in South Africa, and they address issues at the heart of the country's debate over electoral system reform, according to a report from the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa.

A study report on Land, Gender and Poverty Eradication commissioned by the Ministry of Lands, Water and Environment revealed that unequal domestic land tenure relations contributed significantly to instability in families, thus customary protection for women has weakened contributing to large numbers of intra-familial disputes related to land.

Tanzania parliamentarian Ambassador Getrude Mongella has urged Kenyan women to fight it out with men in the political arena. The country still lacks a woman Cabinet Minister after 40 years of independence.

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), ARTICLE
19 and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) will be holding a five-day information and communications technologies (ICT) policy and civil society workshop from November 6th to 10th, 2002 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Kara Counselling and Training Trust is a leading NGO in the fight against the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. Its services include free counselling and testing services to the general public, training in psychosocial counselling skills and Home Based Care. The Agency is requesting materials related to it’s services to enhance and improve its resource centre.

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, the UN-backed scheme to tackle the epidemic in the developing world, has thrown its weight behind the use of generic copies of AIDS drugs. The fund, which is also designed to address malaria and tuberculosis, said last Friday that the programmes it financed should seek to buy the lowest-priced drugs they could find, whether they were patented or generic.

Half a million children under the age of five die each year in Ethiopia because of illnesses such as malaria and measles, as well as pneumonia, diarrhoea, and malnutrition.

Reforms and squeeze on education funds has hit education in developing countries as teachers' morale dips to an all time low. Research in Papua New Guinea, Zambia and Malawi highlights a crisis in education because of poor motivation amongst teachers.

Almost 500 Namibian refugees, who fled to Botswana during unrest four years ago, are to be repatriated early next week, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said last Friday.

Some 7,000 Congolese refugees have arrived in Burundi in recent days, with more expected to follow if fighting escalates between rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The impeachment notice served on President Olusegun Obasanjo by the House of Representatives in Nigeria on August 13, 2002 is yet the greatest indication of the frustration which the democratic government inaugurated on May 29, 1999 has created among many Nigerians. In fact it can be said that there is even a crisis of confidence in the country and its system of government.

Hers was a dramatic burst into the nation's literary scene sometime around the mid 1990s. Though relatively young and unheralded, she brought with her something that was radically different. She sought attention not by going or swimming with the multitude but by being daring and different. And it was only natural in being uncommon, it became difficult if not impossible to ignore her.

The UN refugees agency, UNHCR, said on Tuesday it was "extremely worried" that a possible battle for the eastern Democratic Republic of Congolese town of Bukavu or a counter attack to take Uvira could lead to more population displacement into Burundi and southwestern Rwanda.

A new study by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Ministry of Planning and Reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has shown that the condition of women and children in the country has not improved since the last such study was carried out in 1995.

At least 16 people were killed in renewed violence that erupted on Monday in Plateau State, central Nigeria, according to officials and residents.

The Central African Republic needs 100,000 mosquito nets to undertake a major effort soon to fight malaria in the capital. "With 100,000 mosquito nets, we hope to protect 60 percent of the population of Bangui," Dr Etienne Dolido, head of the Anti-Endemic Disease Programme in the Health Ministry, told IRIN on Wednesday.

Progress in reducing world hunger has virtually come to a halt, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in its annual report "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2002". As a result of hunger, millions of people, including 6 million children under the age of five, die each year. The report was released on the occasion of World Food Day, 16 October.

Amid the chaos of conflict, an agency worker was recently overheard remarking: "We are too busy with the war to worry about HIV/AIDS." His position is understandable. Indeed, it is shared by many other agency workers. But they are not looking at the big picture. By the end of this decade, ten times more sub-Saharan Africans will die of AIDS than will be killed by fighting. For this reason, we need very much to worry about HIV/AIDS, even amid the confusion of a war zone.

The Zimbabwe government has announced that it will soon take to parliament a Bill to amend the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). The amendments are meant to plug what the government call loopholes in the media law. The Bill will however result in more powers being accorded to the Mass Media Commission and many of the so-called loopholes amount to nothing in offering a reprieve to media houses and journalists.

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) on Thursday, October 9, 2002, circulated a notice calling on Namibian media practitioners to give their input to the formulation of a new Information Policy for Namibia. The workshop is currently in progress in the Blue Room at the Continental Hotel in Independence Avenue, Windhoek.

On 9 October 2002, the privately-owned national daily newspaper "The Daily News" reported that a group of youths from the National Youth Service programme destroyed 450 copies of the paper in the eastern border town of Mutare.

The World Organisation Against Torture has expressed concern over the sentencing to death by stoning in Nigeria of 32 year-old Fatima Usman and 35 year-old Ahmed Ibrahim and requests concerned parties to write to the Nigerian authorities voicing their disapproval.

WWF, the conservation organization, has applauded the decision by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to endorse the Africa Stockpiles Programme (ASP), which aims to clean-up and safely dispose of over 50,000 tonnes of obsolete pesticide waste stockpiled throughout Africa.

A meeting of organisations working on HIV/AIDS, human rights, law and policy in Africa will take place on 25 and 26 October 2002 in Windhoek, Namibia. This meeting will be hosted by the AIDS Law Unit of the Legal Assistance Centre of Namibia, in partnership with the AIDS Law Project of South Africa. The purpose of this meeting is to revisit the importance of a human rights based response to HIV/AIDS; to share the experiences of organisations working on these issues in Africa and to explore the establishment of a network of organisations working on HIV/AIDS and human rights in Africa with a view to providing an ongoing forum for the sharing of ideas, experience, materials and expertise on human rights, law and policy in the context of HIV/AIDS.

In this new CD-ROM African ICT entrepreneurs talk about what it means to start up a company, what kind of personal qualities you need and the type of mistakes they made that you can easily avoid. The CD-ROM looks at the kind of ICT ideas that have fuelled the growth of the ICT sector across the continent and highlights a number of recent examples to give you a flavour of what you might come up with. It contains information on how to plan a business idea, how to mobilise finance and the role of partnerships.

South African President Thabo Mbeki, his top government ministers and a grouping of international corporate heads dubbed the International Investment Council gathered last weekend at a luxury game lodge to discuss the country’s economic growth path. The situation in Zimbabwe and its impact on regional investor confidence featured prominently in their discussions. In a briefing, Mbeki, previously criticised for his softly-softly approach, defended his stance towards South Africa’s troubled neighbour in the north. Mbeki said he was committed to working with the Zimbabwean government on an “urgent” basis to resolve problems of land reform, famine and a collapsing economy. Echoing Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy, Niall Fitzgerald, chairperson of multi-national Unilever, said he believed the situation in Zimbabwe had to be dealt with “privately and urgently” and that there was no point in “shouting”. “The more things are done quietly and urgently, the more encouraged I will become that we will achieve some progress,” he said.

Far to the north of Johannesburg in Harare, it’s unlikely that Raymond Majongwe, leader of a striking Zimbabwean teachers’ union, would have had much faith in Mbeki and Fitzgerald’s foreign policy on Zimbabwe. About the same time that South African Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma arrived in Zimbabwe last Thursday for a meeting with Robert Mugabe, Majongwe’s lawyer was alleging how his client had been “seriously injured” in policy custody. “He has been beaten up and when I saw him yesterday (Wednesday) night he couldn’t sit on his own. I think he has broken ribs and internal bleeding,” said lawyer Tererayi Gunje. Zuma landed back in South Africa on Saturday to hand out a pasting to the South African media for presenting Zimbabwe in a bad light. Dlamini-Zuma said the South African media was “very negative” and had “failed to paint a balanced picture of events both in Zimbabwe and South Africa”.

Also at the time of Dlamini-Zuma’s visit to Zimbabwe was the emergence of two reports compiled by the Zimbabwean Human Rights NGO Forum, one documenting political violence for September and the other reporting on intimidation of Zimbabwean teachers. Combined the reports run to nearly 50 pages and most of these pages are filled with the harrowing stories of people whose lives have been destroyed by a vicious cycle of beatings, burnings, torture, stonings, harassment and threats. Both reports convey the impression of a society at ransom to mob rule in an atmosphere of violence and intimidation where the police are unlikely to rush to the rescue. These are two random examples drawn from the report:

· OM, a youth secretary for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was taken to Chitungwiza police station and interrogated on the wherabouts of an MDC activist being sought in connection with a murder. He was then taken to Harare Central Police Station. On professing ignorance, he was assaulted under the feet whilst in leg irons. He was ordered to undress and taken underground where more assaults were perpetrated. He was blindfolded, had a gun poked into his mouth and was taken to Goromonzi Police Station where he was forced to confess to the whereabouts of Kitsiyatota under the application of electric shocks.

· AK, a pregnant teacher, was assaulted by Zanu-PF youths because her husband was the District Secretary for the MDC. The baby was born on June 29 but passed away on July 5. Medical reports attributed the death of the baby to the assault.

Nor can these accounts be dismissed as isolated incidents. Although political violence peaked around the March general election and September local election, according to the Human Rights Forum, between the beginning of the year and the end of September there have been 1057 cases of torture, or 117 per month. In the same time period, there have been 358 cases of political violence and intimidation, 223 abductions, 170 unlawful arrests, 110 unlawful detentions, 62 death threats, 58 murders, 29 assaults and seven rapes.

The report dealing with the attack on teachers says the violence has been ongoing since June 2 000 in the context of a campaign against civil servants by ruling party supporters, war veterans and the youth militia. “Violence against teachers has been concentrated in the rural communities where teachers are rightfully considered to be a group that has considerable influence on the communities in which they live. The reported attacks on teachers who support or are suspected of supporting the MDC seems to be a way of limiting their political influence on the rural populace,” says the report. “This report documents 238 individual cases of human rights abuses against teachers for the 18 month period between January 2001 and June 2002. The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum believes the documented evidence that it has collected is merely the tip of a much bigger iceberg, and would wish to draw attention to the many previous cases reported in earlier reports.”

The assault on all sectors of society is in line with what is seen as the intent by the government of Zimbabwe to close down all social and political spaces available to the opposition in their attempt to hold on to power. This is implemented not only through a system of centralised control, but also through a situation of organised chaos that allows groups to operate that destroy the opposition and are increasingly likely to target groups such as churches, NGO’s and journalists.

Legislation has previously been used by the Zimbabwean government to control sectors of society that may be opposed to it. Most recently, civil society has expressed concern about an instruction from the government for all NGOs to register under the controversial Private Voluntary Organisations (PVO) Act. Last month the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare published an advertisement instructing all NGOs not registered to do so in terms of Section 9 of the PVO Act. Section 6 of the Act does not allow such a “body, institution or association to operate without being registered”, the notice said. Section 25 of the same Act makes it a criminal offence to operate without being registered. This is seen as an attempt by government to crack down on the activities of NGOs and civil society in the same way that the government has cracked down on other critical sectors like students, workers, the judiciary, the media and political parties.

At the same time as a deteriorating human rights situation, hunger is stalking the countryside, with reports indicating that up to six million people could be at risk from starvation. Recent SADC Food Early Warning system and World Food Programme reports confirm this picture of hunger. An August/September report of the National NGO Food Security Network (FOSENET), consisting of 24 organisations covering all districts of Zimbabwe, said that almost all area reports indicated that whole communities were now becoming vulnerable. “This is attributed to collapse of the harvests, the breakdown of supply through the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), the absence of meaningful levels of relief, the scarcity of commercial supplies and political interference and corruption in distribution of scarce supplies.” Almost all areas were reported to have had food stocks for only one month, with some provinces like Matabeleland North and South having totally run out, and others like Masvingo, Midlands and Manicaland approaching the same situation.

What does the future hold for Zimbabwe? Just after the disputed March elections, analysts warned that the prospect of serious internal conflict in Zimbabwe was imminent, with grave consequences for the entire southern African region. At the time Zanu-PF had just withdrawn from talks with the MDC, whose leader Morgan Tsvangarai was talking about mass action as a way to pressure the government into new elections. Since then the crisis has deepened and those inside Zimbabwe speculate that there may be a number of small scale and spontaneous “explosions” as a result of frustration at the current crisis. This would manifest itself through food riots, lootings, increased criminality and a resultant clamp down by the army and the police.

Increasingly, there are calls for greater international awareness of the urgency of the situation in Zimbabwe and for the international community to move away from seeing the crisis only through the eyes of white farmers and the land crisis. Geoffrey Nyarota, the editor of the Zimbabwe Daily News, said in a recent interview: “Their (the white farmers) rights are important, but the situation is not limited to the plight of those farmers. This is a much bigger situation: the rural population is totally without food. The plight of the opposition parties, the journalists, the judiciary - these are all groups who have been targeted …”

Meanwhile, Mugabe has shown a determination to cling to power and a corresponding unwillingness to compromise, leaving the MDC unable to engage meaningfully on a political level. The political gamble that the opposition would disappear and that things would ‘normalise’ in Zimbabwe has not paid off. Escalating violence by state agencies signals an escalating need to suppress the unwillingness of Zimbabweans to accept or normalise the current political situation. The violence and state control that has now penetrated areas of industrial relations, food security, civic life, residential areas and workplaces is not a sign of a system that fears only a few white farmers or foreign forces- it is a sign of fear of the people. Violently stopping opposition candidates from registering through violence in 700 local government election wards is not a sign of a leadership that is confident of its popularity with the people. The question for South African political leaders must therefore be whether they remain loyal to and enable President Mbeki’s statement - ‘Let the people of Zimbabwe decide their future’. And the test of their conduct will not be what they did and did not do towards supporting not one party or another. It will be in what they did and did not do to support the opportunities for ordinary Zimbabweans to have the political space and the basic rights to solve their own problems.

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One of the ruling coalition parties in Ethiopia - the Southern Ethiopian People's Democratic Front (SEPDF) - has replaced its chairman and purged more than 30 members in a bid to wipe out corruption.

The private sector, largely perceived as ethical in its business dealings, is as corrupt as the public sector, a new report says. The report by the Centre for Law and Research, accuses the sector of devising cunning strategies to evade the payment of tax.

The Sudanese government and southern rebels have agreed to a cessation of hostilities and the resumption of peace talks to end the country's 19-year civil war. This followed the suspension of talks after rebels took the key southern garrison town of Torit early in September.

Rightwingers behind a suspected plot to overthrow the government do not represent white opinion in South Africa, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said last Saturday.