PAMBAZUKA NEWS 76
PAMBAZUKA NEWS 76
This is a senior position with responsibilities for technical support to governmental and non-governmental organisations within the South-
ern African Development Community.
Zambia has stepped up military patrols on its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after several raids by rebel bandits over the past few weeks.
Women's Day, which takes place on 9 August, celebrates the heroics of more than 20 000 women who 45 years ago, marched to Pretoria against the extension of pass laws to African women.
Nearly 3,000 white farmers in Zimbabwe will have to leave their homes by midnight Thursday if they decide to obey new rules brought in by Robert Mugabe’s government.
The South African drug safety board is considering reversing a decision that would have allowed the AIDS drug nevirapine to be used to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to newborn babies. The prospect of a reversal is stirring outrage among advocates for AIDS patients.
Health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala Msimang sent a letter this week to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria requesting that its R720-million grant to KwaZulu-Natal be channelled through the SA National AIDS Council to be disbursed throughout the country.
Amnesty International has called on the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/ Army (SPLM/A) and on all facilitators and participants to the peace process on Sudan to put human rights at the heart of any future agreement.
As one of Africa’s poorest countries, Mozambique’s efforts to close the digital divide face the "what comes first, the chicken or the egg?" question. Without content to drive usage, the internet remains largely the tool of the wealthier urban elite ... without content that is useful to the poor majority ... the user base is likely to grow very slowly. But for these people to be able to use content it needs to be free or at a price they can afford. Use at free or low price by people with little or no disposable income does not produce a business model that generates money that can finance content. Artur Manhica looks at the dilemma of Mozambique’s content providers and the wider issues they raise.
South Africa's internet professionals have accused the government of trying to hijack the worldwide web.
This site contains many useful links to a wide variety of topics that may interest African development workers. Take a look.
Read more at edazzle about creating a googlebox for your web site. Googleboxes produce the top 10 results for any google search.
"One of the biggest problems with being a web-junkie, is that there is just so much to keep track of. If you read more than a few sites a day, making the rotation everytime you hop online can be quite a chore. And also time consuming." Keep track using fyuze >> read on
The World Wide Web Consortium, which specifies the standards for HTML, amongst other things, has just released the working draft of XHTML 2.0. An overview is available from the web site featured below.
An economic report released last month was “cautiously optimistic” about Africa’s economic prospects, but growth projections are not sufficient to meet poverty-reduction goals. Questions may also be raised about possible changes in the prognosis given global economic developments this year and the continued spread of the AIDS pandemic.
Issues found to impede access to treatment for over 90 percent of the population living with HIV/AIDS include: drug price; patents; limited supply; import duties; taxes; distribution; and lack of accurate information, research on how a selected number of countries have responded to guidelines on HIV/AIDS and human rights shows.
President Bakili Muluzi on Wednesday sacked his Minister Responsible for Poverty Alleviation, Leonard Mangulama, following revelations of his involvement in the sale of strategic grain reserves ahead of a massive food shortage.
A three-day seminar aimed at informing members of Burundi's minority Batwa community on their human rights, democracy and the country's peace process ended in the central province of Gitega on Wednesday.
Dear Friends,
It seems necessary to write to everyone possible about our impending famine. The situation is complicated by a number of factors. The rains have been bad. The total maize crop was less than 400,00 tonnes, between a half and a third of what the peasant farmers usually produce in a year. The commercial farmers, of whose problems you hear so much, normally produce much less than that; about 30-40% of the total crop. Removing them from the scene need not cause any problem in direct food production in a good year, but this was not a good year - in fact the worst since 1947. The disruptions caused by the land takeovers and the violence associated with the presidential election campaign must have contributed to the present problem.
Countries in East and Central Africa may move to ban the civilian ownership of small arms in a bid to fight insecurity in the region.
The Matabeleland region is the area worst hit by drought, with 978,000 people affected by the food crisis, according to the World Food Programme.
Ethiopian President Girma Wolde-Giorgis on Monday at the opening of a four-day conference in Addis Ababa said that women have a "formidable" and "irreplaceable" role in fighting HIV/AIDS in the country.
A call has gone out for African countries to skip their debt obligations under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt repayment initiative and reinvest the money into health systems buckling under the strain of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Advocates of the plan argue for an “overwhelming practical and conceptual case” for re-cycling the remaining post-HIPC debts – those debts of HIPC countries after the completion of the HIPC process. This money would then be used in emergency grant relief for AIDS.
OneWorld and Eurodad have launched a new DebtChannel.org Discussion Forum: "From Monterrey to Johannesburg". This online event will discuss issues such as sustainable development strategies, aid and debt, and the way the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development Summit (WSSD) should tackle them.
The Global Campaign for Refugee Health is a campaign to increase public awareness and funding for programs to prevent and treat infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria that afflict refugees and other displaced people worldwide.
The Global Campaign for Refugee Health is a campaign to increase public awareness and funding for programs to prevent and treat infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria that afflict refugees and other displaced people worldwide.
Changes in South African society and family structures are responsible for the increase in teenage violence in the country, experts believe.
Zimbabwean woman Angeline Mugwendere narrates her story of how she overcame her gender, rural background and poverty to get education and become successful. Now she helps people from her community set up businesses and establish themselves.
Zimbabwean woman Angeline Mugwendere narrates her story of how she overcame her gender, rural background and poverty to get education and become successful. Now she helps people from her community set up businesses and establish themselves.
Rough diamonds will be allowed into the European Union only if they have a certificate stating they do not come from conflict zones, according to new rules from the European Commission. The planned requirement for a certificate of origin for each gemstone is part of a global effort to crack down on "blood diamonds", whose proceeds go to rebel forces in African conflicts.
Former chief justice Matthew Ngulube has appeared before the task force probing corruption under the Chiluba regime. Sources said he was asked about the US $168,000 he received from former president Frederick Chiluba in suspicious circumstances.
This issue contains:
* Water, energy and sustainable economic development in South Africa p. 369 Mike Goldblatt, Glynn Davies
* Economic reforms and the prospect for sustainable development in Tanzania p. 389 Kassim Kulindwa
* Short-term effects of policy reform on tourism and the macro economy in Zimbabwe: applied CGE analysis p. 419 Ramos Mabugu
Zimbabwe has started preparing for a final withdrawal of all its troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they have been fighting since 1998.
The interior minister of the Central African Republic (CAR), Joseph Mounzole, has issued a message of reassurance to Chadians living on CAR territory following clashes along the common border on Tuesday.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has confirmed that Simret Seyoum of the banned private weekly Setit has been in detention since early January 2002.
A state of alert imposed in Niger on Monday could threaten freedom of expression, according to Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), which has urged President Mamadou Tandja to repeal the decree through which he instituted the measure.
Namibia's leading human rights organisation on Wednesday slammed the armies of both Namibia and its neighbour Angola for ongoing extra judicial executions in the north of the country.
Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) has called for the release of journalist Pa Ousman Darboe, who has been held since 2 August following an article in the Banjul biweekly The Independent reporting that the vice-president had remarried. The article referred to the legal problems of the vice-president’s late husband.
The International Federation of Journalists has called on the Government of Ghana to take "urgent and immediate steps" to secure the safety of Kweku Baako, Editor-in-Chief of Crusading Guide, following two death threats.
The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN has condemned the custodial sentence handed down to Christopher Mwoki Kyandi on 24 July on charges of "publishing false news". The editor of the scandal magazine The Truth was given a nine-month prison sentence on the basis of a sex-related article published in early July which caused a furore in the capital Nairobi.
The International Federation of Journalists, the world's largest journalists' organisation, has called on Ugandan rebels to lift the death threat issued against a Belgian journalist who is reporting on the plight of child soldiers.
A BBC analysis of the famine situation in seven southern African countries which includes a clickable map.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) opened in Durban at the International Convention Centre (ICC) on 5 June 2002. I managed, on the strength of an SABC interview, to enter the portals of the ICC. As the day unfolded I moved between a passionate band of protestors outside and the soirée happening inside. It gave a wonderful insight into the unfolding transition in the country. Inside Jay Naidoo, the former Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) general secretary and Minister in charge of the RDP, wandered around. He wore a beautiful green suit and a pair of brogues with an extra layer of leather on the heel. Working the other side of the expansive foyer was former chief of NEDLAC and Arms Acquisitions czar now Executive Director of the J&J Group Jayendra Naidoo. As they moved closer, I watched from the balcony with bated breath. Without taking their eyes off future contacts and contracts they passed each other in choreographed moves reminiscent of the O'Jays. Outside the protestors were being pushed behind barricades some 300 metres from the ICC. At the previous year's WEF conference they were right outside the ICC but this time the police would have none of it. Undeterred, the protestors were busy rigging up a speaker system and giving out pamphlets condemning Thabo Mbeki's New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) as a home-grown form of structural adjustment.
INSIDE THE TRANSITION
The integration and deracialisation of the economy with accompanying liberalization and marketisation has wrought significant economic changes. The African middle class and professional class have grown considerably while a small economic elite is furiously consolidating. […]
Central to the transition also is the impact on the composition of the South African working class wrought by the macroeconomic strategy of the ANC. A recent Reserve Bank report has shown that wages for skilled workers have steadily grown as well as productivity. The report also discerned a growing gulf between the unionised and better skilled on the one hand, and marginalized South Africans on the other.[…]
Alongside this one has spiralling unemployment. In 2001 University of Cape Town economist Haroon Bhorat wrote that "the job creation performance of the formal economy has been abysmal". This conclusion has been supported by later studies that have pointed to escalating job loss and unemployment. […]
According to the 1996 Census the poorest 40 percent of our population got less than 3 percent of the national income, while the richest 10 percent enjoyed over 50 percent. The poorest 40 percent of African households' economic situation has progressively worsened over the last decade. […]
Ironically inequality has been exacerbated by the lack of state support (like a social wage) with South Africans aged between seven and 59 (women) or 64 (men) totally cut-off from any form of social security. This translates into over 13,8 million people in the poorest 40 percent of South Africa's households not qualifying for any social security transfers. This means that the poor have had to largely come to rely on themselves for survival. […]
This then is the economic location of the Poors - the unemployed and lower working class. […]
THE NEO-LIBERAL SQUEEZE AT THE ‘LOCAL’
The Poors have been spewed out by the transition. It is the Poors who have opposed the water and electricity cut-offs and evictions and who have begun making connections between their situation and that of people first in Soweto and Tafelsig but then also in Bolivia, South Korea, America's prisons, Zimbabwe and Chiapas. But the Poors have no grand ideology. They are actors on a local stage, squaring off against home-grown villains like Operation Masakhane. The latter is touted as "part of a drive to normalise governance and the provision of basic services at the local level. It aims to persuade people across South Africa that they must contribute to this process through participation and by paying for housing and services". But where would the money come from to pay for services?
In the most comprehensive study of affordability David McDonald found a serious crisis. "If for example, 18 percent of the seven million people who are reported to have been given access to water since 1994 are unable to pay their water bills 'no matter how hard (they) try', then 1.26 million of these new recipients are unable to afford this water and an additional 1.2 million have to choose between paying for water and buying other essentials like food. Similar percentages apply to the 3.5 million South Africans who have been given access to electricity". […]
RISE OF COMMUNITY MOVEMENTS
As the ANC's assault on the poor resulted in more and more evictions, disconnections and retrenchments a variety of new community movements began to arise. Hesitantly at first, movements began to arise to challenge the water and electricity cut-offs, the evictions and lack of land redistribution. The rise of these movements based in particular communities and evincing particular, mainly defensive demands, was not merely a natural result of poverty or marginality but a direct response to state policy.
The state's inability or unwillingness to be a provider of public services and the guarantor of the conditions of collective consumption has been a spark for a plethora of community movements. While the movements mobilize around diverse demands like land titles, water and electricity supplies, access to housing and health facilities, the general nature of the neo-liberal emergency concentrates and aims these demands towards the state.
[…]
The Poors, or what others have variously called the "multitude", "the unwaged", "slaves-in-waiting", the "metropolitan militant", "the mob" and "the wretched of the earth" have come to constitute the most relevant social force post-1994 from the point of view of challenging the prevailing political economy. The community movements of the Poors have challenged the very boundaries of what for a short while after the demise of the apartheid state was seen exclusively as "politics". […] The poor are not just involved in recognition, or the discovery of the right policies, or the creation of the right administrative framework, or even the goodwill of power-holders. They are challenging the very distribution of power in society and are doing so in ways that do not stick to the gradualist, corporatist, and nation-building script.
UN-CIVIL SOCIETY
The new social movements were strong enough to put 20 000 on the streets at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban. They have fought off the state's hired guns to prevent evictions and disconnections. They have reconnected water and electricity. Although they are still fragmented and largely without money for transport and printing and legal fees they have made one thing very clear: the Poors will not take the neo-liberal assault on their lives lying down. They will fight and the fight has begun. This is a struggle that already has heroes, legends and martyrs. Already the ANC flag is being burnt and spat at outside the Martin West Building that houses the debt collectors of the eThekwini Council in Durban.
Their actions have achieved a number of successes. The Council in Durban announced the writing off of arrears to the tune of R17 million in June 2002 soon after 5000 residents marched onto their offices. In Cape Town and Johannesburg the reconnection of water and electricity by community movements has reached 'epidemic' proportions, reappropriating basic needs and creating no-go zones of decommodification. […]
If community movements are to grow and spread and build a culture of revolutionary confrontation, they have serious challenges to confront in the immediate. The Poors face an ANC which, sensing the growing combativeness of the Poors, have started to differentiate the ANC from government and the ANC as a liberation movement, not to challenge the former but to try and head off challenges emanating from outside corporatist structures. […]Alongside this there has been increased repression. The Regulation of Public Gatherings Act of 1993 gives police and civic authorities far reaching powers in preventing and even banning mass demonstrations. The recent arrest of National Land Committee and Landless People's Movement members in Ermelo is a particularly graphic example of the repressive use of this Act.
Beyond the immediate challenges, the Poors have serious questions, which strike at the heart of a longer-term project. How do they link up with the militant unions like SAMWU? How do they broaden their movement into rural areas that are either marked by a absence of basic services or when they do arrive are commodified in a manner putting it out of reach of the intended consumers? […] What is to be their relation to the formal institutional sphere of 'politics'? In particular should they contest elections at least at a local level? How are connections to be made with similar struggles in Zimbabwe, in Mexico, in Argentina, in Indonesia and with those movements directly taking on the IMF and the World Bank on the streets of Seattle and Genoa? How do the Poors turn their actions that have remained defensive (fighting bloody battles to stay in the apartheid ghettoes) into demands that take the offensive against the neo-liberal state? One of the dangers is that the very success of campaigns like Operation Khanyisa is that it leads to demobilization because once people have their lights switched on, they do not see the need for the collective. It also serves the purpose of reducing anger because people now have lights and water. This has certainly been the case in Mpumalanga, Chatsworth and Wentworth. This is the danger of remaining localized, particularistic and single issue. The state faced with collective resistance and exposes at a public level, simply retreats from the more militant areas and moves to areas less organized. […]
WE ARE THE POORS
Ashwin Desai
We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most unexpected of community movements, beginning in one township of Durban, linking up with community and labour struggles in other parts of the country, and coming together in massive anti-government protests at the time of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001. It describes from the inside how the downtrodden regain their dignity and create hope for a better future in the face of a neo-liberal onslaught, and shows the human faces of the struggle against the corporate model of globalization in a Third World country.
PAMBAZUKA NEWS 75
PAMBAZUKA NEWS 75
Rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have killed 42 civilians in an attack in northern Uganda, says the Ugandan army. The army said the rebels attacked a village near the northern town of Kitgum last Wednesday and used machetes and clubs to cut and beat their victims to death.
The Ethiopian government has warned that over eight million people are in need of food aid after failed rains in the country.
Police in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)last Monday shot dead 14 demonstrators demanding autonomy for Bas-Congo Province, in southwestern DRC, media sources and a civil society group reported.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has set up an early-warning satellite-communication system and plans to establish two military bases to facilitate rapid deployment of peacekeeping troops in conflict situations.
Volcanic eruptions and other activity continued last Saturday on mounts Nyamuragira and Nyiragongo, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, but still posed no immediate danger to the nearby city of Goma, Kalendi Sadaka Kavotha, director of the Goma Volcano Observatory, told IRIN.
Voting ended on Sunday in the final round of Mali's parliamentary elections, with low turnout to decide most of the seats in the impoverished West African country's assembly.
Zimbabwe has denounced the UK authorities after a senior figure in President Mugabe's party was stopped in London for defying an EU travel ban. Joseph Malinga, Deputy Secretary for the disabled in Zanu-PF, was held - along with his wife - on his arrival at London's Gatwick airport by British officials as he attempted to get on a plane to New York.
Liberia's Court Martial Board has ordered the Liberian government to produce by 7 August the “living bodies” of three men who were arrested a month ago. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, had accused the government of violating the men's constitutional rights by refusing to bring them to court.
As Walter Kansteiner, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, traveled to Angola and Nigeria this week, Human Rights Watch urged him not to overlook serious human rights concerns in both countries. Human Rights Watch said that this Africa visit was an opportunity for the Bush administration to integrate human rights into its meetings.
Former African National Congress (ANC) chief whip Tony Yengeni asked Michael Woerfel to get him a luxury car at a 50 percent discount, the businessman said last Friday.
African National Congress (ANC) president Thabo Mbeki has come out against the concept of treating "avarice as legitimate sin".
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has asked his justice minister for an explanation after legal proceedings against a top official accused of corruption were dropped.
The United Nations Children Fund (Unicef) has begun a major campaign to vaccinate thousands of women against tetanus in Mali in an attempt to halt the passing of the disease to newborn babies. Last year tetanus killed 30,000 women in developing countries across the world.
Since 1 July, 11 of the 21 people in Burundi's Ngozi Province suspected to have contracted meningitis have died - with the first cases occurring in the communes of Kiremba, Mwumba, Busiga, and Ruhoro; the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported last Thursday.
The coming of the rains in Southern Africa in the next few months will end the region's drought but usher in a new threat - an upsurge in malaria, Africa's number one killer.
After a one-month postponement due to a series of political elections, the Republic of Congo (ROC) launched on Thursday this year's nationwide campaign to vaccinate 682,640 children aged five years and under against polio, with assurances of access to all districts of the troubled Pool region, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has mobilised 10 mt of emergency relief supplies worth US $64,000 to fight a cholera outbreak in Kalemie, in the north of Katanga Province, southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to a UNICEF press release issued last Wednesday.
Most of the children at the Saint Theresa Charity Centre in Ngaoundere, some 622 km north of the Cameroonian capital, Yaounde, were taken there at an early age. "We receive children abandoned in the streets or in garbage dumps as well as newborns who lost their mothers at birth," said Sister Agnes Nana, who was temporarily in charge of the centre when IRIN visited it in late June. "We've received newborns who were still carrying their umbilical cord."
This is the second in a planned double issue collaboration focusing on Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Africa. The first installment included just some of the all-embracing, bilateral and multilateral Africa initiatives, and some of the policy frameworks developed on a country level. This issue focuses on some of the regional, community, issue-specific and "on-the-ground" ICT initiatives and resources in Africa. We have found such a wealth of resources, we will be publishing a third installment later. It will focus on youth/child initiatives, radio/internet initiatives and information, bulletins and journals, prizes and additional resources and portals.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) expressed concern last Friday over claims that several hundred homeless children have been rounded up from the streets of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
In Security Council Resolution 1325, member states urge the incorporation of a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations and urge the Secretary-General to include gender components in field operations. In the same resolution, the Security Council calls on all actors to adopt a gender perspective in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction, and expresses its willingness to ensure that missions take into account gender considerations.
The last of a series of sieges by women protesters on facilities of ChevronTexaco in southeastern Nigeria's Niger Delta has ended following an agreement between representatives of the protesters and the US transnational, company officials said last Friday.
In the context of the Know How Conference 2002 held last week in Kampala, Uganda, on the collection and dissemination of information relevant to women, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has denounced the limited access by rural women to the new information technologies.
During a recent site visit to West Africa, the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) spoke with more than 30 Sierra Leonean women and girls—refugees, internally displaced, and returnees—about their experiences and the reintegration obstacles they face in Sierra Leone. Many of the women and girls had lost spouses, parents, children and other family members in the fighting or had suffered or witnessed atrocities.
HIV/AIDS is an "increasingly important cause" of mortality in children under five in sub-Saharan Africa, according to an analysis in the 27 July issue of the Lancet.
Namibia's fight to conserve its endangered Cheetah population has been boosted by support from internationally acclaimed conservationist, Kuki Gallman. The Italian-born poet, conservationist and founder of the Gallman Memorial Foundation (GMF) pledged botanical expertise to help protect the cheetah during a gala dinner and auction in Windhoek aimed at raising N$100 000 for the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF).
The International Community of Women living with HIV/AIDS (ICW) developed a project encouraging HIV positive women to share and document their experiences of living with HIV, particularly in relation to sexual and reproductive health and needs. In Zimbabwe, Positive Women: Voices and Choices has been quite outstanding in its process and outcomes. HIV positive women, from resource-poor mainly rural communities, were elected by their support groups to be trained to collect data and analyse the findings. The process of teamwork gave the women skills and self-confidence and they are now strong advocates from their communities, representing the issues of HIV positive women in many fora and making presentations at high-profile, national and international events.
Some 93,000 people displaced by fighting in Liberia now depend on supplies provided by the World Food Programme (WFP), according to the UN agency, which said some 43,000 of the beneficiaries were living in camps near the capital, Monrovia.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) will provide aid to some 39,000 people displaced by war in northwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo. WFP Regional Director for Central Africa Holdbrook Arthur arrived in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, last Wednesday to meet with government authorities on matters of food security and WFP aid.
Hungry UNITA soldiers and their families who have crossed into Namibia are being transported back across the border to quartering areas in southern Angola by the Namibian Defence Force (NDF), which has only a limited amount of food to spare the former rebels.
International campaigners have joined the government in asking why Nigeria is ineligible for debt reduction under the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) programme set up in 1996 by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and extended three years later. Nigeria is excluded even though its per capita income levels and ratio of debt to gross national product are comparable with those of the 42 countries included in the HIPC initiative, which covers every other state in mainland west Africa south of the Sahara.
The Anti-Corruption Police Unit has established a secretariat to oversee training of personnel in the fight against the vice.
The House of Representatives has written to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) and the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) to furnish it with names of commercial banks in the country involved in financial crimes.
A large plume of ash over Mount Nyimuragira, which erupted last Thursday, poses no immediate danger to man, but may hurt animals in the Masisi area, west of the volcano, Dario Tedesco, the resident volcanologist of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said on Sunday.
South African President Thabo Mbeki on Thursday criticized officials in charge of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for approving a $60 million grant to KwaZulu-Natal province that had not received clearance from the central government, as stipulated in the fund's rules.
Does privatisation effectively encourage development and reduce poverty? Should the World Bank's approach to privatisation be re-examined? Research by the University of Greenwich analyses the fundamental areas of privatisation policy and practice, focusing in particular on Africa, where the World Bank has keenly supported privatisation in many countries.
Rural development should be central to poverty reduction. Three quarters of the 1.2 billion people surviving on less than one dollar a day live and work in rural areas. Rural people are twice as likely as their urban counterparts to be poor. However, rural development faces a loss of confidence: funding has been falling, and governments and donors are scrambling to rethink policy. What new directions should rural development policy take?
How can farmers improve their soil fertility management strategies? Does extension work aid this process and help address problems faced by smallholders? Are alternative approaches providing effective advisory services to resource-poor farmers with a focus on inclusion and willing participation needed?
As Africa emerges from decades of authoritarian rule, what role should donors play in fostering democracy? Are democratisation programmes working? Are they based on an analysis of how civil society functions in Africa or are donors creating a new elite to promote economic liberalisation and limited forms of procedural democracy?
How is the HIV/AIDS epidemic affecting children and young people? What is being done to address the consequences of the epidemic and what are the possible ways forward? Save the Children UK research suggests that HIV/AIDS is now the greatest threat to child development in many parts of the world and that it is only by combating the root causes of poverty that the HIV/AIDS epidemic can be tackled.
How do poor people view poverty and wellbeing? What are their problems and priorities? What is their experience of the institutions of states, markets and civil society? How are gender relations faring within poor households and communities?
The Chadian Parliament has passed a law guaranteeing protection for the reproductive health and rights of its citizens. The new law, adopted on 20 March, draws mainly from a regional document prepared at a meeting of West African parliamentarians in Dakar in 1999. Under the terms of the new law, it would be an offence to engage in any form of sexual violence, including female genital cutting, forced marriage, domestic violence or sexual slavery.
Dual method use is featured in South Africa's new reproductive health policies as an important means of family planning as well as of prevention of infection with HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). However, little is known about current levels and predictors of dual method use in South Africa or about interventions that might promote dual protection.
Religious leaders in the country have made denunciations against what they called the indiscriminate application and distribution of contraceptive devices, which are designed to check population growth at the national level.
Government officials say a controversial song, in the national language Swahili, contains a verse that has been inciting people to go out and catch the disease. Music lovers insist the song was meant to scare people from forced marriages, a practice prevalent among the Wazaramu ethnic group living in Tanzania's coastal region.
Although the government has criminalised female genital mutilation, it must still go the extra mile to eradicate the outdated practice from the 55 districts where it is prevalent.
This network is an initiative of the Dimitra Project coordination unit in West Africa, which covers seven countries. The network has been established in Senegal with the mission of expanding throughout these various countries. The fields of action of this network range from training and information for women,Äôs associations, to the creation of links between development partners, the development of local knowledge, action to promote solidarity amongst associations, and measures to support income-generation activities.
The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University has announced, as part of their international initiative, the creation of the African Women Public Service Fellowship. The fellowship was established to expand the opportunity for African women to prepare for public service in their home countries. The fellowship awards for these programs will support tuition, housing, travel to and from the United States, and a small stipend to cover books and miscellaneous expenses.
Nigeria's court of appeal last Friday invalidated the grounds on which the country's electoral body denied applications by 27 groups for registration as political parties, IRIN news reports.
At least 15 people died when an armed group launched an attack on policemen deployed to trouble spots in Nigeria's central Plateau State, police sources said last Saturday.
Burkina Faso and Niger are to conduct a joint campaign to vaccinate at least 500,000 children aged 12 months to five years, officials of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou, told IRIN.
Zimbabwe's Minister of Home Affairs John Nkomo has dismissed the impact of expanded European Union (EU) sanctions on the country's ruling elite, despite five government officials being denied entry to Europe last weekend.
Peace efforts in Africa suddenly seem to be making progress, with major breakthroughs toward ending fighting in Congo, Sudan and Burundi in less than week.
Uhuru Kenyatta, who appears to be President Daniel arap Moi's chosen heir, now has three cabinet ministers racing with him to be the ruling party's presidential candidate. Raila Odinga, Katana Ngala and Musalia Mudavadi have said they will fight Mr Kenyatta, son of Kenya's first president, for the Kenya African National Union (Kanu) nomination ahead of the elections due later this year.
US NGOs, citizen and public interest groups are asking for your signature to a statement addressing critical priorities and concerns about the positions and actions of the U.S. government at the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa this month. Originally produced and delivered at a press conference last month in Bali, Indonesia at the final preparatory meeting for the Summit, the statement responds to the question asked throughout the two weeks of the meeting: "What are we going to do about the United States?"
Cheikh Kone, a journalist from the Ivory Coast, is one victim among many languishing in Australia's detention camps. His detention without charge or trial, with no accusation even that he has committed any crime at all, is now entering its twenty-first month. Armed robbers and those guilty of violent crimes often fare better. Please write letters to the Australian authorities politely asking that Cheikh Kone be released from detention and that he be given adequate legal representation.
The World Bank has released its long awaited draft policy on forests. The proposed policy threatens most of the world's remaining forests with environmentally damaging industrial forest management financed by taxpayers through the World Bank. It is inappropriate for the World Bank to subsidize rainforest destruction. Please tell them so by registering your concern.
A green pock-faced monster with red eyes and fangs is depicted as the HIV virus in a new children's book that seeks to explain the science of AIDS to South African children.