The five-year anniversary of the Kimberley Process marks an important time to assess how the Kimberley Process is working to prevent the trade in conflict diamonds, and what more needs to be done to ensure that the process is credible and effective. This briefing document from Global Witness and Partnership African Canada reflects on some of the accomplishments of the Kimberley Process while highlighting that much more work remains to be done to ensure that it is effectively implemented and strengthened to prevent diamonds from ever again fuelling conflict.

Lobby group Jubilee SA has accused Johannesburg police of harassing its demonstrators outside the Barclays head office in Sandton on Friday. "Jubilee SA demonstrators had been peacefully voicing their dissent of the Barclays-ABSA deal - within the bounds of the Gathering Act - for over 45 minutes, when a police van drove up to the demonstration with its siren wailing," said Tristen Taylor, spokesperson for the organisation.

The Egyptian government stifles academic freedom in universities by censoring course books, outlawing research about controversial issues and intimidating student activists, Human Rights Watch says in a new report. The authorities also fail to protect citizens from Islamist militants who publicly attack professors and students.  “The government’s persistent violations of academic freedom have badly undermined Egypt’s standing as the educational leader of the Arab world,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities should end their excessive and arbitrary interference in the activities of scholars, students and universities.”  

Urgent Action Fund-Africa was established in Kenya in August 2001. The basic aim: to support the work of women in Africa through rapid response grantmaking and unique initiatives that support women’s leadership in peace-building and justice processes. UAF-Africa thus aims to provide women with the resources required to respond effectively in conflict situations. Will it be possible to build a philanthropic base in Africa to support these activities, Caroline Hartnell, editor of Alliance, asked Betty Murungi, Director of Urgent Action Fund-Africa. And where is support most likely to come from?

CH: Why was the decision made to set up Urgent Action Fund-Africa? And what does it hope to achieve?

BM: Urgent Action Fund (UAF) was established in 1997 by three women’s rights activists who were strongly committed to the idea of making small grants to enable women activists to respond effectively in unanticipated situations. UAF priorities include conflict areas and situations of escalating violence. With many armed conflicts currently raging in Africa, UAF-Africa was established in 2001 to enable UAF to respond better to the needs of African women in conflict situations. UAF is an activists’ fund run by an activists’ board, some of whom live in conflict countries.

The basic aim of UAF-Africa is to promote the human rights of women and girls by making grants to activists. Our three thematic areas are peace-building and transitional justice; promoting understanding of regional instruments for the advancement of women’s rights; and rapid response grantmaking. But UAF’s core programme globally is rapid response grantmaking. Here the three categories of grant are situations of armed conflict; precedent-setting legislative or legal action, and protection of women human rights defenders.

CH: These rapid response grants – what are they and what are they for?

BM: Rapid response grants are basically grants that don’t take nine months to make. When the women who founded UAF sat around a table in early 1997, they realized that the biggest gap in funding for women human rights activists related to the lack of readily available small grants to enable them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities that may advance the rights of women or respond to unanticipated situations that threaten to undermine such rights. The actions that UAF rapid response grants support are often very strategic in their effect and reach.

This lack of funding is certainly a problem for activists in Africa. You make an application for a grant and it’s reviewed by a board which reviews applications perhaps twice a year. But in situations of conflict, you cannot wait for the twice-yearly review board to meet. So the UAF board came up with the idea of the rapid response grant, which would enable them to make money available very quickly, within a week in fact. And we are very proud to be able to say that we respond to requests within 72 hours. The board works very quickly, consulting each other by email and phone. A decision is communicated to the group or activist within a week.

Consider our protection grants for women human rights defenders. If somebody’s life is in danger, waiting six months is obviously not going to be any good. The same is true of our precedent-setting legal action grants. If you’re going to file a legal action, you’re taking advantage of an unanticipated opportunity that has presented itself. You need a decision quickly otherwise the opportunity passes.

That is what rapid response grantmaking is all about. Our grants are quite high risk but we are aware that you have to take risks in this kind of grantmaking.

CH: Does this level of urgency apply to all your grantmaking?

BM: No. At UAF-Africa we have other programmes where the grantmaking supports more the ‘strategic’ intervention where the time urgency is not necessarily so great.

Take our peace-building and transitional justice programme – an area that is unique to UAF-Africa. This is based on our strong belief that women should be able to participate freely in all aspects of conflict transformation and post-conflict reconstruction. You hear a lot about the need for women to be in parliament, but women also need to be in the places where peace is being negotiated – which are often also where the political arrangements are negotiated that determine how women are going to be placed in emerging societies. We feel it’s really important for women activists to be able to be present at these events. But a grant in this area won’t necessarily have to be made in a matter of a week.

CH: Going back to the issue of risk, what do you mean when you say your grantmaking is quite high risk? Are you referring to the risk that the grant will be misused, or that it won’t do any good in the end?

BM: The high risk is directly related to the rapidity with which grants are made. We do due diligence like every other grantmaker, but we don’t have six months to examine every detail of a proposal.

We also consider the grants to be high risk because they are sometimes made to unknown entities – UAF doesn’t often fund large, well-established, well-known groups that have sizeable international funding already. The good things that happen in our communities often happen because women who are not known are doing the work. When you’re making grants to unknown entities, you obviously run the risk that your grant is not going to do what was set out in the grant proposal.

However, even with some of the more known groups that we make grants to, we normally like to have two endorsements. We rely heavily on our network of advisers all over the world for these endorsements. We also try to go on outreach missions ourselves as much as possible, to enable us to meet the people who are working on the ground. But of course you can never get to all of them, so to a certain extent you do run a risk.

CH: Do you make grants to individuals, or is it always to a group, however unknown?

BM: Yes, we do make grants to individuals. These are usually protection grants to women human rights defenders, and these grants are always confidential. If you are making a protection grant to an individual, you don’t want to broadcast it to the whole world and so put the life of the activist in danger. But this applies only to the protection grants to individuals.

CH: In practice, have you had many bad experiences or does this high risk grantmaking on the whole work?

BM: In seven years of making grants – and this is globally because UAF-Africa started making grants only in May last year – I think we have had one, at most two, experiences where evaluation has shown that perhaps the money has not been applied for the reasons for which it was requested. What we have done to try to deal with these situations is to come up with a really good evaluation system. From our grantee reports, it is clear that the money so far has gone to really deserving cases and causes.

CH: Can I move on to the funding and where it’s going to come from? I assume at the moment it’s going to be coming from UAF in the US, but are you also starting to fundraise in Africa?

BM: We started fundraising in Africa even before the independent office was established in 2001. UAF and UAF-Africa are one organization with one board of directors, so this has been joint fundraising. But because UAF-Africa has additional programmes, we have been fundraising from here in Kenya too.

So, for example, we have received a lot of support from the Ford Foundation’s East Africa Office since 2000, and since 2003 we have received support from the Ford Foundation’s Special Initiative for Africa, now Trust Africa, which has supported our work around transitional justice and regional instruments for advancing women’s rights. We have also received support from, among others, HIVOS, OSI and Cordaid; from the UK Department for International Development, and from the Dutch Government, which is very interested in peace-keeping in the Great Lakes Region.

But we haven’t received any money from African governments yet. Perhaps we should approach some of them, perhaps the South African government or the Nigerian government. These are rich African governments that should support our work.

CH: What about individual donors? And what about individuals in Africa?

BM: Yes, we do receive funds from individuals, mainly in the US, some of whom support the work of UAF-Africa. Individuals were very instrumental in supporting the work of UAF at the beginning. We receive support from some smaller family foundations as well as faith-based funders.

We have established a fundraising programme here in Kenya. Right now, we’re interested in funding work to address issues of conflict, and I’ve decided that we must target individuals. And not just individuals – we’re also interested in getting support from corporations working in the region.

One of our fundraising strategies has been to set up donor circles. Our first donor circle is meeting to discuss ways of supporting programmes in Kenya that reduce violence against girls – members want to make sure that the funds they donate to UAF-Africa are used within East Africa.

CH: What about raising money from corporations?

BM: Raising money from multinational corporations working here and from African-owned businesses is work in progress at the moment. We are concerned not to raise funds from businesses that themselves abuse the rights of women and girls in their employment practices or otherwise, so this is something that will need a little more thought.

CH: In the long run, do you feel there are sufficient resources in Africa to support the kind of grantmaking you want to do?

BM: I am completely confident that there are enough resources here. We just have to do a bit more work to set out what we’re doing and why it is so important. I think people on this side of the world have seen the kind of damage that conflicts do to communities, so yes, I think this is going to be successful. We have received small amounts of money and volunteer time from some individuals in Kenya as well as from the donor circle.

CH: Going back to the donor circle, does it on the whole consist of very wealthy people? And are they women only or women and men?

BM: Well, our first donor circle is actually made up entirely of men! Women have been giving of their time and money without being in a donor circle – we have a lot of women volunteers – and a lot of the in-kind donations that we receive are from women, but this first donor circle consists of men. They are not extremely wealthy; they’re just well-off, middle-class men, mainly professional people, and they’ve decided to conduct the meetings and run the group themselves.

Eventually we hope to create other donor circles, perhaps with young feminists as well. UAF has been receiving support for a couple of years from a group of high-school girls, which is really inspiring. These are the kinds of things that we want to build on and encourage in this country and see where it goes.

CH: What do you see as the main barriers to raising funds in Africa?

BM: One thing you must understand is that Africans have a very philanthropic nature. We in this country have always given money to educate children, finance weddings, pay hospital and funeral bills, build schools and hospitals. It has been very informal but it’s not something that is new or alien. In Kenya, this philanthropy was abused by state interference and corruption. So even in philanthropy we must uphold democratic practice and free will.

CH: But are there barriers to raising money for the particular work that you’re doing?

BM: Yes, one barrier is that even as we discuss philanthropy we have to take into account the economic injustices that exist in Africa. Social justice philanthropy addresses injustice and the causes of injustice – UAF specifically tries to address the injustices that women continue to suffer. If you want to raise funds to deal with that kind of issue, you have to increase the understanding of the society in which you want to raise the funds. We have to raise issues of cultural extremism, fundamentalism and patriarchy, and we have to be really sensitive in the way we deal with them. Some of these issues have now become global: the whole question around fundamentalism is not an African issue, it’s a global one. Cultural extremism is a global concern. Discrimination against women exists everywhere and there is sometimes a sense of fatigue when one raises these issues.

So there’s all this resistance. ‘OK, you want to raise money so you can give it away to advance the rights of women and girls. How come? Why now?’ So we have to do a lot of sharing of knowledge and working to create a sense of how important the work is. And that sharing of knowledge of course adds to whatever financial capital this philanthropy brings in because it is not just about the money, it’s about raising the understanding of the community in which you are working and breaking down barriers. This will eventually make it easier for us to activate the philanthropic nature of our community members.

The need to raise funds to reduce or prevent conflict is very easily understood by communities in which conflict has occurred, so fundraising for this is the really easy bit. But in countries where there hasn’t been open all-out war, there is a sense in which people want to bury their heads in the sand and not get into conflict prevention discussions. But they identify with general women rights protection.

CH: Sometimes you hear of organizations doing social justice grantmaking that try to play down what they’re doing when they’re fundraising so that it doesn’t sound too threatening to people. But that doesn’t sound like something you’d do?

BM: Oh no, we don’t do that at all. All our materials and brochures come out with examples of the most cutting edge grantmaking we’re doing. We’re not making any apologies for being activists ourselves, nor for being feminists, and we’re not shying away from the fact that we make grants to groups that are engaged in sexual rights work. For example, we recently made a grant to a group of commercial sex workers in Uganda for their advocacy for better treatment by the law. And it’s all out there in our materials. So we’re really up front about the work we’re doing. Women’s rights advocacy is often threatening, but so is the reality of dealing with legal discrimination, sexual violence during conflict, effects of patriarchy, bad governance and lack of democracy, which are what make the advocacy necessary in the first place.

CH: If you looked say five years ahead, where do you see your best prospect in Africa for fundraising? Companies? Individuals?

BM: I think that our best prospect is individuals. They are more likely to get sold on programmes for change because they have more to lose if things break down. We’re talking about corruption, war and destruction, poverty. We’re doing work around women. You speak to men about their daughters and all of a sudden they sit up and listen very carefully. So I think we have a great opportunity to raise funds from individual men. Of course I realize that we cannot at this time do without foundation funding and bilateral donors, but we must try and wean ourselves from this, diversify our funding base to include the local community.

As far as women are concerned, they have everything to gain by ensuring that laws and constitutions that do not discriminate against them are adopted in their various countries, and making sure the world roots out the kind of violence we have seen and continue to see every day. Just yesterday (16 March) 38 people were murdered, most of them young children and women, murdered as they slept in their homes in northern Kenya because of a boundary dispute. This is how conflict begins in this part of the world – battles over natural resources egged on by political interests. After the murders yesterday, some of our volunteers called me in the office and said, ‘What can we do? Can we go over there in teams and speak with the elders and community leaders?’ That’s the kind of interest they have in peace-building.

For me in five years I’m looking at a situation where Urgent Action Fund-Africa is being sustained by African individuals and African corporations who have realized it is about their own life, about their own continent, about every conflict in Africa.

CH: And do you see this support coming equally from men and women?

BM: Yes, I do. I have a feeling that women will do a lot more of the work, but they will also be able to mobilize resources. Men need to get a lot more information but there are very many concerned men here in Africa. Obviously they control more of the resources, so we are targeting them to make sure they give to these things that affect their daughters, wives and mothers.

BIOGRAPHY

Betty Kaari Murungi is a feminist lawyer with expertise in international human rights law. Since 1998, she has been a consultant and legal adviser to the women’s rights programme at Rights and Democracy on gender-related crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She currently serves as Director of Urgent Action Fund-Africa.

Betty Murungi serves on the Board of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice – formerly the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice – for the International Criminal Court. She is a member of the Kenya Bar and received the national honour of the Moran of the Order of the Burning Spear (MBS) in December 2003 for her work in human rights. She can be contacted at [email][email protected]

See www.urgentactionfund.org

* Please send comments to [email protected]

* This article was first published in the June 2005 issue of Alliance Magazine, which has a special feature on 'Funding Social Justice', for which Firoze Manji and Gary Craig are guest editors. To find out more, visit

After the resounding success of the Send My Friend to School campaign in April, GCE and ANCEFA member coalitions are aiming to hand over a million cut-out ‘friends’, made by children around the world, to the G8 leaders in Scotland. On or around 16th June, the Day of the African Child and the GCAP Africa’s White Band Day, 12 countries will hold high-profile ‘send-off’ events to launch the ‘friends’ on their journey to take young people’s demands to Scotland.

Social justice is a political issue as well as a humanitarian one; consequently social justice philanthropy is a political act. This can pose formidable difficulties for donor agencies and activists everywhere, especially in an area as politically complex as the Arab region where human rights activism tends to be interpreted by authoritarian regimes as a direct challenge. Many local philanthropists shy away from such confrontation, leaving organizations in the field dependent on foreign funding. But this raises the problem of agendas and priorities as well as the independence of grantees and their accountability to local stakeholders. One answer, feel the organizers of a new fund, the Arab Human Rights Fund, is to articulate strategies that can build local support for human rights activities in the region and at the same time create bridges between the local and the international to minimize problems and promote international social justice philanthropy.

In most countries, laws preclude the use of public or tax-exempted funds for overtly political work. The politics of social justice are more subtle, however, and it is important to acknowledge the fundamental tension between the political and humanitarian motivations and perceptions involved in working for a more just world. Many funders around the world are unwilling to deal with the political implications of fighting injustices; to see themselves as being on one side or another of a political rather than a humanitarian question; or to occasionally confront those with vested interests in a status quo that perpetuates injustice.

This is also reflected in the relationships between international grantmaking organizations and the local activists they support. Are those who are most effective on the ground and deserving of support politically ‘acceptable’, asks the grantmaker, and is association with them politically safe? The enthusiasm and political perspectives of the recipient can conflict with, and be moderated by, the caution of the grantmaker.

Changing political dynamics

These questions have a particular urgency in the Arab region. The changing dynamics of both the international and Arab political scenes since the turn of the new century, especially the sharp shift to the right in US policies and the after-effects of 9/11, have produced a radicalizing response in the region as well, raising the levels of suspicion and making the debates more complicated. The new ‘due diligence’ procedures set in place by international grantmakers and the governments to which they are legally accountable are the clearest example of these complications. Most grant recipients in the region working in the field of human rights and social justice consider themselves to be on the side of democratization and the promotion of more open and just societies, yet they are being asked to prove this on the grantmakers’ terms. At the same time, they are deeply suspicious of the politics behind increased governmental and non-governmental funds pouring into the region for those same stated purposes.

The local dimension

The tension between politics and philanthropy is evident in local philanthropy as well. In the Arab region, philanthropy has been of a strictly charitable and often religious nature, taking comparatively little account of development approaches, let alone social justice activism. The preponderance of authoritarian regimes makes the philanthropic community very skittish vis-à-vis, for example, human rights activities, which are perceived as being a direct challenge to such regimes, and philanthropists generally will not consider putting themselves on such a crash course. Consequently, local human rights funding is almost non-existent, and groups active in the field must rely on foreign funds which in turn raises questions in the region about their legitimacy, independence and accountability.

The problems of reliance on foreign funding

Reliance on foreign funding gives rise to doubts as to whether or not human rights activists are wittingly or unwittingly implementing donor-defined agendas. Who sets those agendas, it is asked, and on what basis? Similarly, questions are raised over wider NGO accountability to other stakeholders: the individuals and communities they purport to help. How careful are activists to define their agendas in accordance with the immediate and long-term needs of their communities? How open are they in articulating their programmes and priorities? Who challenges them on the decisions they take?

Finally, there is the question of sustainability. The foreign funding that human rights and other social justice activists continue to rely on is, more often than not, project-oriented, with short-term measurable goals and benchmarks rather than strategic approaches based on a long view of social change. If anything, international grantmaking mechanisms are becoming tighter, more careful and more short-term than a decade ago. More alarming is the ease with which funding patterns respond to the changing currents of the political environment. Today, it is very easy to find support for any project at almost any level that has anything to do with ‘democratization,’ but not so for advocacy for refugee rights, for example.

The Arab Human Rights Fund

The nascent Arab Human Rights Fund (AHRF) is an effort to respond to some of these concerns, both within the region and between the region and the international arena, by providing an indigenous, independent and sustainable source of support for human rights activities in the Arab region and by articulating principled, clear and practical strategies.

Over the past two years, a volunteer Preparatory Committee of five individuals from the Arab region, in cooperation with Ford Foundation staff and with support from the Foundation, has been preparing the ground for the establishment of the AHRF. This has involved carrying out research and holding consultative meetings throughout the region, hammering out approaches and strategies based on a commitment to universal standards of human rights with the long-term goal of developing capacity for their protection and promotion. Whether in its grantmaking strategies, fundraising efforts or operating principles, human rights standards remain the primary guidelines for the proposed AHRF.

By implementing transparent, inclusive and participatory processes for agenda and priority setting, and by ensuring indigenous decision-making in its programmes and activities, the AHRF hopes to strengthen local participation, and consequently respond to some of the legitimacy questions raised above. In the planning of the Fund, broad participatory and consultative mechanisms are being developed for nearly every aspect of the work, from Board recruitment to priority setting to the grantmaking process itself.

Promoting indigenous social justice philanthropy

The AHRF is hoping to harness local, regional and international sources of support for human rights and to promote Arab social justice philanthropy in the Arab region as one of its main strategic goals. This will take time, and many political fears within the region will have to be confronted. This is why the AHRF is planned as an endowment, eventually with assets of at least $50 million, in order to become an effective donor with tangible impact and a sustainable source of support for human rights work. (One positive trend is that NGO laws in the region are liberalizing, though very slowly.)

Bridging the local and the international
At the same time, the Preparatory Committee sees the Fund as a potentially important player in the international philanthropy field, and a bridge between the local and the international. It can help articulate priorities, funnelling international funds to the region where funds are most needed. At the same time, it can bring new Arab and regional players into the international philanthropy scene and into discussions of global social justice. This bridging function is desperately needed in today's divided world, especially where the Middle East and the Arab region are concerned.

A political choice
By establishing the Arab Human Rights Fund, the Preparatory Committee is making a significant political choice for the region. It implies a willingness to take risks in a difficult political environment and it will need the support and encouragement of like-minded individuals and organizations within the region and around the world. Today, more than at any other time in the past, we must recognize that local communities know what’s best for them, that human rights are universal values shared by activists and philanthropists alike, and that they form the basis of international cooperation in the promotion of social justice. The challenge is to build the trust necessary for such cooperation and to have the courage to confront each of our own societies and to move them towards the achievement of social justice.

After four years of planning and more than two years of research and investigation, the first meeting of a founding Board of Trustees will take place this summer. As the Fund begins its operations in Beirut, Lebanon, which will happen by the end of the year, it is hoped that the AHRF, and its perspectives on social justice, cooperation and participatory approaches, will be welcomed into the international philanthropic community.

* Fateh Azzam is Director of the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program at the American University in Cairo and a member of the AHRF Preparatory Committee. He was Program Officer for Human Rights at the Cairo office of the Ford Foundation when the idea for the AHRF began. He can be contacted at [email protected] For more information on the Arab Human Rights Fund, see www.ahrfund.org

* Please send comments to [email protected]

* This article was first published in the June 2005 issue of Alliance Magazine, which has a special feature on 'Funding Social Justice', for which Firoze Manji and Gary Craig are guest editors. To find out more, visit www.allavida.org/alliance

More than ten years after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, apartheid’s social and economic legacy remains. The majority of its nearly 45 million people continue to live in conditions resembling those of a decade ago. The bulk of the country’s wealth remains in the hands of a small percentage of the population. Though corporate giving is one of the largest sources of funding for civil society,[2] companies remain reluctant to address inequalities and take on social justice grantmaking.

Ironically, it was apartheid, and its consequent social unrest and threat to the economy, that provided the first real stimulus for corporate social investment (CSI). After the 1976 student uprisings in Soweto, several companies banded together to establish the Urban Foundation, which focused on urban development, housing and education in black townships. At about the same time, the Sullivan Principles were introduced, requiring American companies to justify their presence in the country by contributing to local communities, which encouraged more formalized giving by the private sector in general. In 1984-85, the groundswell of the liberation movement against apartheid and the international attention it brought provided a further stimulus to corporate giving.

However, while the Urban Foundation supported community centres, education and training in black townships, it disposed of relatively small financial resources, and did little to dismantle the system that kept black people in those townships in the first place. Other efforts to pool company funds (the Joint Education Trust (JET), formed in 1992, and the Business Trust, formed in 1999) similarly focused more on service delivery than on attacking the root causes of problems. While JET did contribute to the development of government policies and programmes throughout the 1990s, it focused primarily on educational service delivery. The Business Trust’s main focus was on job creation, education and crime. Although it was established jointly by the private sector and government, it appears as yet to have focused little on policy reform.

CSI in South Africa today

Overall, the picture has changed little. The 2004 CSI Handbook covers issues such as knowledge management, employee involvement, evaluation, communications and sustainability, but there is no discussion of policy reform or advocacy. As of 2003/04, CSI funds have gone predominantly to education and training (46 per cent) and health and social development (24 per cent), with the remainder going to a combination of job creation, sports, environment, arts and culture, safety and security, and housing (in descending order of size of contribution).

Over the past four years, with companies recognizing the impact of HIV/AIDS, there has been a significant increase in funding for health and social development. One example is provided by Anglo American’s programme, principally directed towards its 13,900 employees. Initially focused on education and prevention, this has now grown to include voluntary testing and counselling as well as anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy, a controversial stance in South Africa, given the government’s initial reluctance to recognize the need for ARVs (see p58). Another example is Absa Bank, which has over 2,500 employees participating in its ‘give as you earn’ campaign, which deducts contributions from employees’ monthly salary. The contributions are then matched by the Absa Foundation (the separate organization responsible for the bank’s CSI) and given to NGOs focused on HIV/AIDS treatment and care.

These HIV/AIDS programmes represent some of the most creative and forward-thinking elements of CSI, but they hardly amount to social justice grantmaking. The private sector has been hesitant to fund advocacy organizations such as the Treatment Action Campaign. In general, the emphasis is on service delivery. Relatively few CSI initiatives advocate major policy reform or fund organizations that provide a voice for those who are usually outside the arena of policy formation. CSI has not tended to promote public debate on issues such as economic policy and the development of a social safety net that could result in greater attention to social justice. Nor has it paid much attention to rural areas or the needs of women.

Why is CSI not focused on the most marginalized?

An urban focus
Most companies are urban-based and their development efforts reflect this. In 2003, two-thirds of CSI spending was targeted towards urban and peri-urban areas, with only 34 per cent targeted towards rural communities. Given the high levels of poverty in rural areas, this funding pattern is in almost inverse proportion to need.

An insular focus
Fifteen per cent of funds from CSI programmes focus on company employees and their families and another 49 per cent on the communities in which the companies operate. While this may seem logical, it also means that those people and communities who have little or no connection to corporate South Africa, as employees or customers, are badly underserved. With the broadly defined unemployment rate at over 40 per cent, CSI is not reaching those who are most marginalized with least access to resources and information.

Promoting the government line
The new government has promoted the concept of public-private partnerships to address social needs and implement government programmes. Companies are encouraged to support this trend in order to achieve greater exposure and win government favour. It is unlikely, therefore, that companies will publicly criticize government policy or support local communities and organizations that do so. Promoting a social justice agenda would inevitably involve this.

Internal considerations
The majority of CSI budgets in South Africa are not determined through a formula, as they are in the UK and the US, which makes them more vulnerable to the arbitrary decisions of management and less likely to be strategically focused. When it comes to evaluation, companies tend to focus on inputs and anecdotal evidence, with little effort to assess developmental impact, lessons learned and implications for policy reform.

CSI in South Africa is thus limited in scope, often unstrategic, and emphasizing service delivery not structural reform. Without giving attention to the areas of weakness outlined above, it is unlikely to make any significant contribution to social justice. A set of initiatives that have encouraged greater reflection and improved reporting are described below. They are not specifically aimed at promoting social justice programmes, but it is possible that the greater reflection on the role of companies in society that they encourage could lead in this direction.

Broader corporate accountability needed

CSI needs to be complemented by broader corporate accountability in regard to workplace conditions, approach to the environment and sustainable development. In recognition of this, the UN Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) encourage a ‘triple bottom line’ approach. There are several developments in South Africa that have built on this approach.

* The King Report on Corporate Governance (King II) Launched in 2002, this provides a South African voluntary code of conduct, which embraces the ‘triple bottom line’ concept.
* The Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Index Launched in 2004 on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, this assesses companies on a range of social, environmental and economic issues.
* Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Initially focused on extending black equity participation, predominantly to a small black elite, government now encourages BEE to take a broader approach to empowerment that includes guiding government’s procurement decisions to benefit black-owned companies, development of small businesses, skills development, etc. Unfortunately, to date, BEE has focused on redistribution at the apex rather than at the base.[3]
* Industry charters Developed by several industries (banking, mining and finance), with government encouragement, these provide a scorecard for transformation, featuring issues such as black ownership and control, skills development, financing and procurement, and CSI.

Working through other grantmakers

Working through other types of grantmaker, especially those that focus on human rights and reaching the most marginalized, offers a potential way for companies to give their CSI activities a social justice focus. Possible partner organizations include community foundations and women’s funds, two new institutional forms of philanthropy in South Africa in recent years.

Community foundations
A community foundation pilot programme led by the Southern African Grantmakers Association (SAGA) resulted in the creation of the Greater Rustenburg Community Foundation (GRCF) in Northwest province and the Uthungulu Community Foundation (UCF) in KwaZulu Natal. Both serve populations that are predominantly rural with high levels of poverty. Local corporations have shown great interest in the idea. Billiton (a mining corporation) provided UCF with R5 million in endowment support and Impala Platinum provides support to GRCF. Community foundations can channel CSI funds in a way that permits greater community control and influence on how the funds are spent. It remains to be seen, however, whether this will help shift funds away from charity towards social justice.

Women’s funds
There is even greater potential in the WHEAT (Women’s Hope Education and Training) Trust, a women’s fund in Cape Town, with an explicit social justice agenda. WHEAT focuses on issues of violence against women, women’s rights as human rights, HIV/AIDS and support to local women’s community organizations. WHEAT has tapped corporate funding from the retail and IT industries as well as building a R1 million endowment with contributions predominantly from individuals.

Other local grantmakers
Corporates have also begun to partner with other local grantmakers such as the Social Change Assistance Trust (SCAT) and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund (NMCF). SCAT is a grantmaking development agency that funds rural, community-based organizations focusing on human rights, gender equity, HIV/AIDS and local economic development. It has received money from the De Beers Fund and has helped develop Ditikeni, an investment company that is building assets for a set of non-profit organizations, SCAT included. Given its name and profile, NMCF has received numerous corporate contributions. The organization has been affected by political influences but, given its R250 million endowment, may develop greater independence and a stronger social justice emphasis in the future.

Working through local grantmakers such as these could enable companies to reach those communities outside their immediate ambit. If that greater outreach combines with well-designed advocacy campaigns driven by local communities, there is the potential to influence corporate grantmaking for the better.

1. This article is part of a longer paper by Christa Kuljian commissioned by the Global Equity Initiative (GEI) at Harvard University as part of a series on philanthropy and equity in China, India, the Philippines, Brazil and South Africa. The full paper will be available later this year at www.fas.harvard.edu/~acgei/philanthropy.htm. For the purposes of this paper, social justice is defined as promoting advocacy and policy reform to benefit those who are most marginalized in society.

2 According to Mark Swilling and Bev Russell, ‘The Size and Scope of the Non-profit Sector in South Africa’, linked to the Johns Hopkins international comparative study, private sector funding accounts for 25 per cent of all non-profit income in South Africa compared to an average of 11 per cent in 28 other countries in the study.

3 For those interested in a longer analysis of BEE, see ‘Black Economic Empowerment: Elite enrichment or real transformation?’ by Frank Meintjies in the Isandla Development Communique at www.isandla.org.za

* Christa Kuljian is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg. She can be contacted at [email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

On 1 June, Professor Kenneth Good, a political science lecturer at the University of Botswana for the past 15 years, was deported from the country by legal order and a decree from President Festus Mogae. Good's deportation came only hours after the Lobatse High Court upheld the government's right to deport him. In their judgement, the three High Court Judges dismissed the arguments of Good's lawyer given on 3 May and said the deportation order and presidential decree should be allowed to stand.

You will be working in close cooperation with the Central and Horn of Africa Project teams to examine the roles played by women in war and its aftermath including their contributions as peacemakers. The aim of the proposed study is to examine the relationship between war and the status of women, with specific reference to political, social and economic leadership roles.

The Project Director will head a team of researchers and analysts. (4 - 6 staff members in total). She/He reports to the Africa Program Director and to the President of the organisation. The Project Director will supervise the work of a small team of specialists responsible for producing high quality research, analysis and reporting. The Project Director will also oversee the preparation of report drafts. She/ He will be based in Nairobi conducting research and advocacy work in Great Lakes region and surrounding countries. Extensive travel will be required.

Radio presenter/producer team Ann Mikia and Sammy Muraya from the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation’s (KBC) weekly HIV/AIDS program, 'A Stitch in Time', played a key role in the launch of a government HIV/AIDS program among public taxi drivers. In August 2004, Mikia and Muraya decided to tackle a difficult topic which was not being addressed by Kenya’s government AIDS program. The radio team focused on matatu touts (public minibus taxi drivers) and schoolgirls who exchange sex with the drivers for free rides or money.

The World Health Organization in December 2004 urged all member countries to consider mechanisms for pooling financing for healthcare, including Social Health Insurance, in order to achieve universal coverage. The Health Economics Unit at the University of Cape Town offers a 5-day short course addressing the changing role of health insurance in low- and middle-income countries. The course focuses on the financial management of risk pools in diverse settings covering a broad spectrum of insurance arrangements including community-based health insurance, private voluntary insurance for the formal sector and social or national health insurance.

Learning Development Kenya (LDK) is a national non-governmental and non-sectarian development organization founded in June, 1998. Its mission is to respond to the needs of communities and its children, with a primary objective of improving the quality of life of those in need, as defined with words such as extreme poverty, destitution, oppression, deprivation and austerity.

A workshop, held between May 23 and 26, marked the beginning of a partnership between UNESCO, Open Knowledge Network/Jamana Multimedia Cooperative and local communities in research sites across Mali to use ethnographic action research as part of efforts to use combinations of traditional and new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to empower rural women and youth. The methodology is based on the use of ethnographic tools, such as participant observation, field notes, diaries and in-depth interviews, as part of a process of action research, in which participatory investigation forms part of a continuous cycle of ‘planning’, ‘observation’, ‘reflection’ and ‘doing’.

When historians look back over the past 25 years, one of the great crimes they will identify is the Third World debt crisis. Now, finally, the rich countries have agreed to cancel the debts of the poorest countries to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. But they continue to differ over how to do it. It is now clear a compromise agreement among the rich countries over cancellation of IMF debt can only be reached if the sale of IMF gold is a component of the financing package for debt cancellation. But a decision to sell some of the IMF's stock of gold is being blocked by the gold industry.

This report from the World Development Movement is concerned with democracy; a complex issue at the best of times, made even more complex not only by the many local, regional and national struggles for self-determination across the globe but also by the development of supra-national decision-making bodies that are many times removed from individual citizens. It is this latter complexity, and in particular the actions of the two principal International Financial Institutions (IFIs) - the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) - that provides the focus for this report.

Flooding continues to plague the Horn of Africa, with the number of dead and missing in Ethiopia rising and heavy rains washing away shelter for 25,000 Somali refugees in Kenya. Most of the refugees’ shelters in Ifo – one of the three camps in Dadaab – collapsed or were swept away by torrential rains on the same day. Ifo hosts more than 53,000 refugees, mainly from neighbouring Somalia. There are fears of an outbreak of water-borne diseases as large numbers of pit latrines in the camp have also collapsed.

The Roman Catholic Church in Francistown has offered to assist refugees at Dukwi refugee camp to access anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs. The refugees have been excluded from the government- funded ARV programme because it is exclusively for Batswana only. The under Secretary for Political Affairs in the Office of the President, Ross Sanoto, appreciated the gesture by the church, but added that sustaining the programme would be a challenge. The bishop said his church would work along side the UNHCR to ensure that the refugees continued accessing the drugs even when they would have returned to their countries.

On June 16, GCAP coalitions across Africa are organizing joint actions to mark the Day of the African Child. The Day of the African child is an annual event to mark the 1976 massacre of Soweto children by the apartheid regime. GCAP coalitions have chosen this date to have an African White Band Day and to make a regional plea for leaders to take immediate action to end the extreme poverty that leads to a child dying every three seconds.

A weekend raid into Mauritania by Algerian Islamic militants illustrates why north Africa needs the U.S.-led joint counterterror exercises launched this week, a U.S. military spokeswoman said Wednesday. The training exercise began Monday in Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Niger and, for the first time, Algeria, from where Islamic insurgents linked to the al-Qaida network began a raid into Mauritania that left two dozen dead. Five other countries will take part by the time the program finishes in two weeks.

United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan has said the world will not achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) unless environmental planning is incorporated in urban management. And tourism, environment and natural resources deputy minister Nedson Nzowa has expressed sadness that big businesses in Zambia were making huge profits at the expense of protecting the environment.

The Mozambican government launched on Tuesday a literacy programme by radio to benefit initially about 20,000 people in Maputo, Manica and Cabo Delgado provinces, respectively in the south, centre and north of the country. The radio programme, that involves 45 lessons and takes three months, as well as the production of manuals for the teachers and the students, was first experimented with in Manhica.

On January 10, 2005, the Sudanese witnessed the signing of a peace agreement after many years of war. It was a day that Sudanese living in Kenya had awaited for a long time, but many viewed it with trepidation. Having lived in Kenya for a long time, many have mixed reactions about going back home. Will they be foreigners in their own country, having adopted a new lifestyle in Kenya?

It's common courtesy to clean up after yourself, but some refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have gone one step further by greening their camps before repatriation. More than 17,000 out of a planned 60,000 seedlings have so far been planted in the villages of Nkondo and Kilueka in the Bas Congo province of south-western DRC. The area hosted more than 23,000 Angolan refugees for six years, but fewer than 3,000 of them are left now after the majority headed home to Angola.

Scholars and the general public have not paid much attention to non-rape forms of sex discrimination, such as sexual harassment. The concept is seen to suffer from ambiguity, and is often confused with courting or playful flirting. When it finally did receive attention sexual harassment was seen almost exclusively as a workplace phenomenon. The main objective of the study was to generate insight into Ghanaian perspectives on sexual harassment in relation to the definition, sites of harassment, experiences and perspectives on redress.

This article, from Development Update, asks why, despite our knowledge of women’s vulnerability, little has been done to overcome the social and political determinants of HIV infection in women. The authors argue that the failure of governments and international agencies to adequately address the issues of gender and HIV is due to an over-emphasis on developing technical solutions, rather than underlying social factors. Moreover, they highlight the failure of the women’s movement of Southern Africa to contest gender inequality in private spaces. This movement has focused on the needs of the middle class and has not dealt with issues of poverty and sexuality that concern poor and working class women.

Basic sanitation must reach 138 million more people every year through 2015 – close to 2 billion in total - to bring the world on track to halve the proportion of people living without safe water and basic sanitation, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF warn in a new report. Meeting this Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target would cost US $11.3 billion per year, a minimal investment compared with the potential to reduce human illnesses and death and invigorate economies.

In his commentary on Live Aid, Mr. Abdul-Raheem rhetorically asked why Fela Kuti, among others, was not invited to perform at one of the upcoming benefit concerts. The primary reason is that Mr. Kuti has been dead for eight years. If he wishes to embark on a critique of Live Aid (much of which I agree with), he should at least get his facts straight.

TAJUDEEN ABDUL-RAHEEM RESPONDS:In Yoruba Femi will be known as Femi Fela kuti. So calling him Fela Kuti is not off the mark!

Kenya last week became the first African country other than South Africa to plant genetically modified (GM) maize in open fields. The seeds, modified to resist insect pests called stem borers, were planted in the first in a series of confined field trials at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) station in Kiboko on Friday (27 May).

A South African political party has asked parliament to debate claims that relatives of cabinet members benefited from a controversial oil deal. The Freedom Front said it sought "an urgent debate about apparent conflicts of interest" around the "Oilgate" case. Two weeks ago, the Mail & Guardian newspaper reported that the governing ANC received $2m from a state oil deal. A week later, a firm involved in the purchase won an interdict barring the paper from printing further details.

A split has developed in the African Union, with its chairman publicly rebuking the head of its commission. The row between chairman Olusegun Obasanjo, the Nigerian president, and Alpha Oumar Konare is the union's most public since its formation in 2002. It concerns who has the final say on Togo, which has been in turmoil since controversial elections in April. President Obasanjo was reportedly angry he had not been consulted over the appointment of a special envoy.

The continuous existence of such high levels of abject poverty in Africa and elsewhere in the world in its very nature is an affront to God and humanity and thus can never be justified. You, the leaders of the G8, have an opportunity in the coming weeks to begin to reverse this inhumanity and injustice, once and for all, and leave your mark on history. This open letter is a message from Africa, the Africans, in association with their non-African brethrens who recently attended an international conference, Africa: the Quest for Justice and Peace, which was held in Kenya.
(http://www.commongood.info/programme2005.html).
Conference Declaration:

* Please click on the URL provided to read the rest of this letter.

Today is my first time to learn about Pambazuka and I have really liked it. It is quite informative.

Part of the African Social Forum and the World Social Forum, the 4th Edition of the People’s Forum will take place in Fana in Mali from the 6th to the 9th of July, 2005. It is a counter summit of the G8 planed from the 6th to the 8th of July 2005 in Gleneagles, Scotland, United Kingdom.

The World Starts With Me is a web-based/CD-ROM curriculum on information technology (IT) and sexual and reproductive health and rights for young people in Uganda. It is a sex education and HIV/AIDS prevention project that simultaneously gives Ugandan youth the opportunity to acquire Internet and computer skills.

The Government of the Republic of Botswana, in collaboration with the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), will host this second World Information Technology Forum (WITFOR). According to the organisers, WITFOR 2005 will address issues critical to developing countries, such as the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in fighting HIV/AIDS, poverty, access to education, environment, as well as social, ethical and legal consequences of IT.

International debt payments are draining poor countries of resources desperately needed to address health, education and many other pressing needs. After years of offering nothing more than half-hearted measures and worse, the rich countries have agreed to cancel the debts of the poorest nations to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. But they continue to differ over how to do it.

The government of Guinea has finally agreed to open up the airwaves to privately owned radio and television, but not to political parties or religious groups, according to a government statement read out on television. Although the government allows private newspapers to operate, Guinea is the only country in the region to ban private radio and TV, and the issue has long been at the centre of demands for more democracy by the opposition and the international community.

Swaziland now has a national enforcement agency to ensure that its environmental laws are implemented: the kingdom, known for its lush forests, this week reconstituted the Swaziland Environmental Authority (SEA) and equipped it with some teeth. "The previous board did not have the power to take action against offenders - we do not want to close down businesses, we only want them to comply with environmental regulations," said Minister of Environment and Tourism Thandi Shongwe.

Chadian President Idriss Deby is expected to be cleared to stand for a third term after a referendum next week but diplomats, human rights activists and opposition parties have already alleged massive fraud and say the result has been fixed in advance. The people in this arid land-locked country will vote on Monday on whether to abolish the constitutional clause that stipulates that a president can only be re-elected once. Deby's second term in office is set to expire in 2006.

Some foreign companies in Africa are as guilty of corruption as the nations in which they invest, planning minister Anyang’ Nyong’o told an economic summit. The minister said that while African corporate dealings were becoming cleaner, the bribes were higher because of increased risk of getting caught. Global business leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit said Africa was winning the war on graft, often cited as a major barrier to trade and investment in the continent.

Thousands of Ebonyi women protested against the maltreatment of women and the inability of government agencies to enforce the laws aimed at stopping the evil practices against widows in the state. The women, who were led by the out-going state Commissioner for Women Affairs, Mrs. Ugo Nnach, and the wife of the Deputy Governor, Mrs. Catherine Ogbu, marched to Ebonyi Government House, the state House of Assembly and the headquarters of the judiciary to draw the attention of the heads of the three tiers of government. Addressing the women, Governor Sam Egwu promised to give immediate assent to any bill that would be passed by the House of Assembly on the rights and protection of widows in the state.

Twenty years after Live Aid Sir Bob Geldof will take his charity music show to the stage again in multi-city concerts scheduled for Paris, Berlin, Rome and Philadelphia. Tajudeen Abdul Raheem is amazed that 20 years after Live Aid events like these are still being planned and executed without visible participation of Africans. The whole process, he says, is “like trying to shave someone’s head in their absence”.

Sir Bob Geldof (aka Saint Bob) on Tuesday ended speculation about staging a repeat of his 1985 Live Aid concert that raised global awareness about Famine in Africa. The successful re-release last Christmas of the record ‘Do they Know its Christmas time’, 20 years after the original release, fuelled speculation that Live Aid could be repeated in 2005.

Further pressures for this restaging had to do with the politics that led to the prominent role Geldof played in instigating Blair to set up his Commission for Africa (CfA). The CfA report committed the British government to making Africa a centre-piece of British Chairmanship of both the EU and the G8 from next month.

A number of campaigns by NGOs and development lobbyists in the UK culminating in the yearlong ‘Make Poverty History’ coalition are also contributing to shaping the British agenda.

The symbolism and propaganda value of these orchestrated coincidences were just overwhelming. The NGO world, but the very big international ones in particular, are more and more media-driven. Therefore packaging misery and targeting critical national and global events have become necessary tool kits for massive fundraising. In that context it was difficult to see how Geldof could resist the pressure for ‘another show’.

Despite initial declarations to the contrary the announcement Tuesday showed how Bob, despite being the global face of this humanitarian effort, is also driven by its opportunistic dynamics. The campaign has been so successful that even if he had refused to cooperate they would have manufactured another media saint to front it. It has become a global brand for sleek missionary activity on Africa. And there are plenty of mega stars and their publicists and assorted moguls of the entertainment industry who will do anything to harness the global good will and market that such a huge concert bring. Just as it is difficult for any big name to say no to Bob so it has become impossible for St Bob to say no to ‘one more time’.

The compromise show that may still be regarded by many as Live Aid 2 despite it being launched as LIVE 8. Despite the fact that it will bring together all the big names in Western music the concert will not be just about music and charity. Geldof and his colleagues, learning from both their two decades experience of doing charity and criticisms of opponents of Aid, have come to accept that charity (while still important as human demonstration of empathy and solidarity) is not the way forward for helping Africa. This is a very important shift. LIVE 8 will focus on the G8 leaders meeting the same week as the concert is being held in London and other 4 Western cities; Paris, Berlin, Rome and Philadelphia. In Britain the organisers are hoping that they will be able to mobilise a million protesters to converge on Edinburgh to demand an end to poverty in Africa, fair trade, debt write off and more aid for Africa. Similar protests are supposed to take place simultaneously in all G8 countries.

As one of those people critical of aid-addicted Africans and the Western aid pushers what can I possibly have against the proposed concert, especially the shift to some form of direct action? I welcome the shift and salute the courage of those building this solidarity movement for Africa. In particular shifting the debate away from aid may help to recover some of the loss of self-respect and attacks on the dignity of Africans consequent to constant negative images of starving Africa in order to extract Western sympathy. It may help to stop seeing Africa and Africans as victims but agents of our own fortunes and misfortunes, even if often in collaboration or collusion with others. More importantly the shift should help focus on the structural linkages between our mass poverty and the riches of the West. So pervasive has been the humanitarian disaster ideology about Africa that many westerners do not know that critical components of their computers, mobile phones, jewellery, motor cars, museums, and many of their day to day comfort items began life in Africa as precious metals and raw materials. While all these mental shifts are both desirable and necessary I cannot help being troubled by the processes of engagement. Even good things can be done in the wrong ways.

How is it defensible that 20 years after Live Aid and all the sea changes that Africa and the rest of the world have witnessed these activities are still being planned and executed without visible participation of Africans? It is like trying to shave someone’s head in their absence. Who are the big or small African artists, Musicians, cultural workers, etc, involved in this concert? Did they ask Hugh Masekela and was he too tired? Did Miriam Makeba say she was too busy? Is Fela Kuti unable to break an engagement? Where is Baba Maal? What about Yousou Ndor? What of Yvonne Chaka Chaka or Angelica Kidjo? Where are the Congo Musicians? We can go on and on. Could there not have been a symbolic African venue for this multi-city concert? Surely even if many African countries do not have the facilities South Africa does have the infrastructure to broadcast to the whole world?

Even the wider anti-poverty campaigns essentially use Africans as colourful canvasses to legitimise the narratives. They are wheeled on and off as the propaganda demands.

These omissions are not because of ignorance but the result of a mindset that “infantilises” Africans and cannot trust Africans to do anything for themselves including even telling the world where our shoes are pinching us. That’s why you see so many well-fed foreign ‘experts’ and increasingly their junior African partners getting huge sums of money to do poverty assessment and workshops across Africa. We are not even experts on our own poverty. Africans are the only people doomed to be perpetual students of their own condition and further condemned to be perpetually taught by outsiders as experts, consultants, activists, defenders or spokespersons!

It is a repackaging of the ‘white man’s burden’ ideology. The only way we can reverse this colonial mindset is for us to relearn the Uhuru spirit of doing things for ourselves and unlearn the mental slavery that makes us so vulnerable to outsiders.

Statistically, head for head, there are probably many millions more poor people in both India and China yet no western power dares suggest that they will create a commission for India or China. While India is seen as being able to solve her problems China is now even more feared as a serious global power.

Neither the Chinese nor the Indians will want to be invited by others to seek solutions to their problems.

No amount of marches in Europe and global concerts for Africa will end poverty in Africa if Africans are not marching in their millions demanding and enforcing pro poor and pro people policies and governance from their own governments and institutions. We cannot be spectators in our own affairs.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa. ([email protected] or [email][email protected])

* Please send comments to [email protected]

OneWorld Africa is seeking motivated, qualified and experienced individuals to fill in the vacancies of Web Development and Technical Operations manager and Digital Opportunity Channel Africa editor. OneWorld Africa (OWA) is part of the OneWorld network (www.oneworld.net) an international not-for-profit organisation founded to promote the effective use of ICT media for poverty alleviation, promotion of sustainable development and human rights.

Mango and Fahamu are delighted to announce the publication of a new CD ROM: "Practical Financial Management for NGOs". Developed in collaboration with Oxford University, the CD has been enthusiastically reviewed. Owen Koimburi from Nairobi says: "If you only buy one book or CD to help you get to grips with all the financial management techniques you need for accountability and sustainability, this is it!"

With little time left before the end of the school year and exams, 1,600 Togolese refugee children went back to school on Monday in camps set up in Benin for refugees who have fled Togo’s post-election unrest. Children of all ages, from nursery school children to teenagers hoping to complete their final secondary-school exams, flopped down on mats laid out on floors of makeshift classrooms provided by the UN children’s agency UNICEF at the Lokossa refugee camp, which lies 18 km away from the Togolese border.

A last convoy of Angolan refugees has returned home from the southern Congolese region of Kisenge, ending a refugee programme that ran for more than 20 years. As the heavy trucks rumbled across sandy tracks in Katanga's savannah landscape, they left clouds of dust in their wake. They also left mixed feelings among the people who had hosted the refugees and aid agencies for so long. Mainly farmers by profession, the Angolan refugees have contributed many products to Kisenge's economy.

How is education faring in Africa five years after the World Education Forum? This is the question posed at a regional conference organized by UNESCO Dakar from June 13-15 in Dakar, Senegal. The Conference is expected to: Review and analyse the state of the art of educational development in Africa; Highlight and discuss policies, practices and interventions that work, analyse factors behind them; Identify the nature of problems and constraints hindering the Education for All process and propose ways and means of moving the process forward; and Define concrete proposals on how to move the EFA process forward.

"The Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD), a socio-economic justice network of Civil Society Organisations in Zimbabwe, joins the many Global Social Movements in protest against the nomination and confirmation of Mr Paul Wolfowitz, as president of the World Bank Group. Wolfowitz was foreign policy advisor to the president of the United States. Wolfowitz’s recent past is well known: he is one of the architects of the “pre-emptive” war strategy used in Afghanistan and Iraq beginning in October 2001."