Residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) have appealed against a government decision to cut basic services to those living in the reserve. Heard on 11 July, the appeal by Roy Sesana and 247 other residents, against a previous High Court ruling against them, was referred back to the High Court in Lobatse.

Dotted around the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, there are at least 14 camps for internally displaced people (IDPs). They house more than 17,000 people, and disease is rife.Now, however, the government wants them to move on. Already the police and local authorities have cleared three camps.

Zambia is expected to import genetically modified maize (corn) from the United States to feed its 2.3 million starving citizens, according to the Biotechnology Trust of Africa, a regional charitable trust.

A conference on the United Nations and the protection of human rights in post-conflict situations will be held at the Human Rights Law Centre at the University of Nottingham in the UK on 12 and 13 September. The conference will consider the UN and human rights protection in post-conflict situations. As the largest provider, as well as the organisation that, to a large degree, has the responsibility for setting the standards in this area, a critical evaluation of the UN's involvement should be a significant contribution to the development of best practice in this area.

Galillee College, the leading management institute in Israel training senior managers from developing countries, is offering tuition scholarships to attend the Environmental Management Program, scheduled for October 9 - 28, 2002.

Whether it is army officers smuggling gems, government officials demanding multi-million-pound bribes for oil contracts or teachers wanting money for exam certificates, millions of pounds are being misappropriated every week. And with more than one million of its 11 million population in need of food aid after the end of decades of civil war, corruption in Angola means yet more human suffering.

Bad water supply and trash disposal in fast-growing cities in poor nations is increasing the risk of a potentially fatal mosquito-borne disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday.

Without rapid progress towards achieving a comprehensive power-sharing agreement that includes Congolese civil society, the climate of mistrust and uncertainty prevailing in the DRC may undercut the political momentum generated by the peace deal Tuesday between the DRC and Rwanda, an NGO grouping has warned.

In southeastern Ethiopia, a woman like Sedo Osman is a rare sight. She is one of a handful of women teachers striving to get more girls into schools.

Exploitative child labour is still rampant in cocoa-producing communities of West Africa, fresh findings from a joint study by the region's governments, the United States and other stakeholders of the international cocoa industry, show.

On 23 July, Robert Sebufirira, Elly MacDowell Kalisa, and Emmanuel Munyaneza, all journalists with the independent weekly "Umuseso", were sentenced to 30 days of "preventative detention" by a court in Rwanda's capital, Kigali. They are currently in the city's central prison.

Reporters Without Borders says it is shocked at the murder on 26 July of Algerian TV presenter Mourad Belkacem and called on the authorities to investigate at once the circumstances and motives for the killing.

Is there a role for computers in secondary education in the South? While most schools in the world still lack electricity and phone connections, should pedagogy precede technology? What are the costs of ICT provision? What should schools and education planners consider before trying to join the e-revolution?

Communities play a vital role in Nigeria's primary schools, helping to build, maintain and run them. But is the 'social capital' of community participation in education being eroded? How far can parents and communities fill the gap when government provision of services is lacking?

A total of 225 Eritreans left Ethiopia Tuesday for home under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said the ICRC in a press release.

For those attending the World Summit on Sustainable Development or planning any sort of visit to Johannesburg, South Africa, this book will make interesting reading. Johannesburg has become the imagined spectre of our urban future - catastrophic urban explosion, social fracture, environmental degradation, escalating crime and violence, and rampant consumerism alongside grinding poverty.

WSSD listservers carrying information about the Summit include:
*http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/csdlistserver.htm - UN Summit Secretariat listserver;
*http://iisd.ca/enb/2002summit-l.asp - International Institute for Sustainable Development's 2002 Summit list;
*http://www.worldsummit2002.org/ - Heinrich Boell's WSSD newsletter;
*http://lists.healthdev.net/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?join=earthsummit2002 - Stakeholder Forum's EarthSummit2002 list;
*http://earthsummit.open.ac.uk - Earth Summit for All features discussions on education for sustainable development.

Hacktivismo (http://hacktivismo.com), purported human rights hacker group, have released a free steganography program which allows activists to exchange banned content over the Internet. This article contains links to the software and various articles about it.

Repression in Swaziland is being ignored by the international community because of a misguided perception that its people live in traditional peace and harmony, an opposition activist says. "We have not resorted to violence and it would be our choice not to do so," Ignatius Dlamini, the secretary general of the banned Peoples United Democratic Movement (Pudemo), told a seminar at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.

We are writing on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, which represent 18,000 publications in 100 countries, to express our serious concern at the imprisonment of journalist Christopher Mwoki Kyandi.

With cut-and-run industrial logging now running roughshod across the world's last remaining rainforests, old-growth stands, and other intact forest ecosystems - along with the many indigenous peoples and communities that depend upon them - the need to shift to sustainable ways of relating to forests has never been more urgent.

Thousands of Angolans continue to spontaneously return to their homeland following the end of that country's decades-long civil war, said the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Another malaria outbreak could hit the country by the end of the year, the Ministry of Health has warned. This comes in the wake of predictions that East Africa will experience El Nino.

In the debate over justice and reconciliation after the Rwandan genocide, the question has been raised of how best to restore health to a society smashed by devastating violence. One prescription — substituting therapy for justice — ventures into dangerous moral territory.

Township dwellers in South Africa are fighting for basic services, such as water and electricity. On 9 June, Soweto residents marched to the home of the Mayor of Greater Johannesburg, Amos Masondo. Their organisation, Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC), led by Trevor Ngwame, had been set up several weeks before. SECC reports that twenty thousand more houses are being disconnected from electricity in Soweto every month.

The international campaign to improve access to treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS has seen some recent successes. But the battle is not yet won. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) has joined Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA) in a new campaign phase to lobby the British government to secure more assistance in the battle against AIDS through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which was set up in 2001. Join the campaign and write to Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development.

As this book shows, the People of the Congo have suffered throughout the past century from a particularly brutal experience of colonial rule, and a series of post-independence political conflicts. But as this insightful political history of the Congolese democratic movement of the 20th century decisively makes clear, its people have not taken these multiple oppressions lying down. Instead, they have struggled both to establish democratic institutions at home and to free themselves from exploitations abroad.

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 labor 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 neoliberal onslaught, and shows the human faces of the struggle against the corporate model of globalization in a Third World country.

I have recommended that other colleagues subscribe as I find the information you send very useful and enlightening. Keep up the good work!

Although globalization has vastly expanded the demands on global institutions, it has also heightened a crisis of legitimacy and effectiveness. Large parts of the public no longer believe that their interests are represented in institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, UN Security Council and WTO or that the institutions are adequately accountable for what they do. Representation and accountability have always been weak in these multilateral institutions. But today the weaknesses are glaring because the institutions are being called on by their powerful members to intrude much more deeply into areas previously the preserve of national governments especially in developing countries. Over the past two decades these institutions have increasingly prescribed and required structural and institutional reforms. For example, in the 1980s countries that borrowed from the IMF and World Bank were required to meet 6-10 performance criteria  and in the 1990s, some 26. 

Efforts to deepen democracy in international institutions must confront the realities of global power. Powerful countries will inevitably invest more energy and political capital in institutions that enable their power to be exercised. Once they are members of an elite club, countries are reluctant to lose that power or see it diluted by opening to new members. This explains why proposals for reform always encounter stiff resistance. And that is why broad acceptance of the principle of democratization has translated into so little progress at the level of specific proposals.

Although developing countries are deeply affected by the decisions of institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO, they have little power in their decision-making. There is an unavoidable democratic deficit in international organizations because people do not get to directly elect (or throw out) their representatives. This would be true even if all member countries of international organizations were flourishing democracies. [...] That said, however, the democratic deficit does not rule out improving the representativity of international organizations.

The role of developing country governments in global governance needs to be bolstered through changes in formal representation. This is a necessary (albeit insufficient) condition to redress the existing bias in international organizations. [...]

What is needed is to rewrite the way seats and votes are allocated within international organizations, to better recognize the increased stake of developing countries. Their cooperation and commitment to international agreements is vital if any international organization is to succeed in managing globalization.

For this reason the old rules about representation are no longer viable or desirable. Put bluntly, the IMF and World Bank will not be able to do their jobs effectively if they remain tied to structures that reflect the balance of power at the end of the Second World War. In the past 55 years their roles and duties have changed beyond recognition, as have the expectations of their vastly increased membership.

Nearly half of the voting power in the World Bank and IMF rests in the hands of seven countries (the U.S., Japan, France, U.K.,Saudi Arabia, Germany, and the Russian Federation) . This voting power is exercised in the formal decision-making bodies - the executive boards  - of each institution.

Equally important are the informal influences and traditions that shape the work of these organizations. These informal processes further weight the scales in favour of industrial countries. For example, the heads of the World Bank and IMF are chosen according to a political convention whereby the United States and Europe nominate their candidate for each, respectively. Other countries and critics rightly brand the process as undemocratic and insufficiently accountable.

Yet more profoundly, the institutions are often criticized by academics, industrial country NGOs and developing country analysts for basing their economic advice and policy conditionality on a narrow worldview that reflects the interests of their most powerful members. In particular, they are widely perceived as being overly accountable to their largest shareholder, largely through informal influences such as the location and staffing of the organizations and their susceptibility to pressure on select issues.

These concerns about who the IMF and World Bank represent have been heightened as the institutions have begun to prescribe policies over an ever broader range of issues. [...] The new role of the IMF and World Bank highlights the need for deeper participation by their borrowers: developing countries.

A primary source of contention relates to the shares of developing and industrial countries in decision-making. Members of the IMF do not have equal voting power. Voting weights are based on two components. Each member has a set of 250 basic votes that come with membership. The second component is determined by economic power. Votes accompany country quotas that reflect the economic strength of countries. Since the formation of the IMF there has been a major imbalance in the evolution of the two sources of voting power.

Basic votes have declined dramatically as quotas have increased. The share of basic votes in voting power has declined from 12.4 % to 2.1% . At the same time, an additional 135 countries have become members, including many transition economies.

During this period the basic nature of the IMF and World Bank has changed. They were created at the end of the Second World War as institutions of mutual assistance. The IMF would provide resources to any country facing temporary balance of payments difficulties. The World Bank would help channel investment to countries for postwar reconstruction and development. This sense of mutual assistance has changed in the intervening years.

Today the IMF and World Bank lend exclusively to developing and emerging economies. Furthermore, their loans are linked to conditions that increasingly impinge on the domestic policies of the state. The result is a new kind of division between creditor countries on one hand, who enjoy increased decision-making power and have used it to expand conditionality, and borrowing countries on the other, who view conditionality as externally imposed. This can be particularly worrisome when there is considerable division of opinion on that policy advice, and when the risks associated with the policy advice are borne almost exclusively by the people of the borrowing country. [...]

There is now greater recognition of the need for the World Bank and the IMF to increase the representation of developing countries. They could do so in a number of ways.

First, by increasing the proportion of basic votes allocated to each member.[...] Second, by enhancing the voice of developing countries within the institutions. Formally, all members of the IMF and World Bank executive boards are supposed to appoint the institutions  presidents.  But by convention, Europeans select a candidate for director of IMF and the U. S. government selects the head of the World Bank.[...] A selection committee for such a post would enable broader participation and transparency.

Another step would be increasing the number of seats for developing countries on the executive boards. At present executive directors from developing countries represent large constituencies and have minimal input on policy formation. [...] Third, by making the institutions more accountable for their actions, not just to their board members but also to the people affected by their decisions. Governments are held accountable through a variety of social, political and legal institutions. These institutions must also be used to make global financial institutions more accountable. Specifically, this means ensuring transparency and monitoring and evaluating their rules, decisions, policies and actions. [...]

To be effective, the results of all of these evaluations must be published, followed up and investigated, and necessary changes undertaken. This is particularly important for large organizations suffering from considerable inertia.

Without publication of independent assessments of what organizations are doing, it is not only difficult for the public to judge how well or poorly an organization is undertaking its responsibilities, it is also impossible for outsiders to offer support to insiders who recognize the need for change. By publishing critical reports, institutions can catalyse public attention and external pressure for change, helping to overcome inertia or vested interests within the organization. [...]

* Extracts from Chapter 5 of the Human Development Report 2002
*For more information and press releases on the Human Development Report, visit Africa Action at

Heavy fighting continued raging on Wednesday for the second consecutive day in Baidoa town between the forces of the president of the southwestern regional government of Somalia and those of his deputy chairmen in the Rahanwein Resistance Army faction.

Women were noticeably absent from the structures of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), with virtually no positions of influence within the continental body during its 39-year existence. That is set to change in the OAU's successor, the AU, says Frene Ginwala, South Africa's parliamentary speaker.

The Ethics and Anti Corruption Commission has asked for charges to be withdrawn against former top government officials and for new charges to be formulated. This after the accused have been detained for 14 months without bail.

Registered political parties in the self-declared republic of Somaliland have agreed on conditions necessary for holding free and fair elections in the region, IRIN reports.

The dispute between the South African government and the Global Fund to Fight Aids over funding to KwaZulu-Natal was an “unnecessary controversy” that was damaging South Africa's reputation with the Fund and the international community. More importantly, it was causing a delay in the implementation of programmes to prevent further AIDS deaths and new HIV infections. This is according to a statement signed by a host of organisations and individuals, including the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the South African Medical Association and Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane.

In a show of support for the country's new administration, international donors at the weekend pledged US $2.3 billion in aid to Madagascar over four years.

Burundi and the World Bank signed a US $36-million agreement last Thursday to support a multisectoral project to combat HIV/AIDS in the war-torn country.

In a show of support for the country's new administration, international donors at the weekend pledged US $2.3 billion in aid to Madagascar over four years.

Rwanda is to receive a US $14-million grant from the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Health Minister Ezechias Rwabuhihi said. Under the proposal Rwanda submitted to the fund, the government would use the money to expand health services to all the country's districts, the radio reported. Specifically, it reported, the services would include treatment of selected opportunistic infections associated with HIV/AIDS, and the programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus.

The EU has agreed to provide Burkina Faso with 16 million euro (US $15.9 million) for water management activities aimed at reducing rural poverty, and to support the private sector.

Rwandan backed rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have stepped up a crackdown on fellow ethnic Tutsis led by a dissident commander, rebels and aid workers said on Thursday.

If the international community does not act now, then between now and the next main harvest in April/May 2003, nearly 13 million people in Southern Africa will face extreme food shortages. Famine-related deaths will occur. The big question is how many. Read about Oxfam's response to this growing emergency, donate online, and find out the reasons behind the food crisis in a Southern Africa briefing paper.

The Sudanese Government and the country's rebels have been urged to grasp the opportunity offered by a recent breakthrough in negotiations and end their 19-year conflict.

Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has broken ranks with the African Union on the issue of Madagascar by formally recognising Marc Ravalomanana as president of the island state.

Liberian government forces committed scores of war crimes and other serious abuses against civilians between April and June 2002 in the northwest of Liberia, according to Human Rights Watch, who have called for decisive action to end the bloodshed in the country.

At least 500 people are reported to have died of hunger and disease since April in demobilisation camps set up for former rebels and their families.

Zambia's High Court has issued an injunction that temporarily blocks authorities from arresting and prosecuting former President Frederick Chiluba, who stands accused of misusing public funds.

Ever thought of creating a mini-community in your area? This discussion on Slashdot provides ideas about internet cost-sharing that can make net access affordable for you and your neighbours.

TB is the single biggest killer in Ethiopia's Somali Region and clinics are few and far between. In the squalid conditions of the camps which dot the region, disease spreads like wildfire.