Tens of thousands of people in over 700 villages
in Kano State, northern Nigeria, may be infected by onchocerciasis (river
blindness), The Guardian newspaper reported the state governor, Rabiu Musa
Kwankwaso, as saying at the weekend.

Senior United Nations humanitarian officials
have called on both parties to the conflict in Sudan to lift all flight bans and to grant full access to people in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Irish rock star Bono will tour four African nations next month to assess a "variety of development projects," including some aimed at HIV/AIDS, Reuters reports (Reuters, 4/23). According to a Treasury Department statement, the trip, which begins on May 20, will "highlight efforts to enhance the effectiveness of development assistance, the importance of increasing productivity through investment in human capital and the role of the private sector as an engine for economic growth."

Former South African President Nelson Mandela has said that he was "relieved" that the South African government may implement a national nevirapine program to prevent vertical HIV transmission by year's end, Agence France-Presse reports. "These are responsible people who could not allow babies to continue to die," Mandela said. But Mandela "dismissed" reports that the government changed its stance on antiretroviral drugs because "he entered the fray".

Sudan announced a "new era" in relations with Ethiopia on Thursday and said it wanted to improve ties with all its neighbours. Speaking at the end of a four-day official visit to Ethiopia, Sudanese First Vice President Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha said that closer relations would be "conducive" to all countries in the Horn of Africa. He said both countries had reached a "common understanding" on many issues.

Changing the South African army's contentious ban on recruiting HIV positive combat soldiers could be seriously costly and compromise the army's effectiveness as a force, warned deputy director of the centre for military studies Lindy Heinecken on Wednesday.

The need for land reform is among the new hurdles facing Angola as the country moves to a post-conflict phase of reconstruction and development in the wake of this month's ceasefire agreement.

The Mozambican army hopes to destroy the more than 30,000 landmines it still has in stock by next year, the National Institute for Demining (IND) said on Friday. A batch of 2,500 of the killer devices was destroyed on 19 April and
immediate plans are to destroy another 10,000 in the central and southern
regions, IND national director Artur Verissimo said.

The international community must give greater
attention and support to internally displaced persons (IDPs) around the
world, according to the nongovernmental refugee advocacy organisation
Refugees International (RI). In a statement issued on Thursday, the group
stated that its recent assessment missions "suggest that the international
community continues to struggle to provide protection and assistance to
IDPs".

Ever since 140 countries launched a new round of global trade talks in Doha last November, the backroom boys at the EU have been busy running a fine-tooth comb over their trading partners' economies. Just how busy they have been was revealed recently, when the extent of the concessions the EU is demanding from some of its trading partners was leaked to the Guardian.

"An intellectual disinclined to be a leader, but who was pervasively influential all the same." This is how, some years ago, Federico Caffè summed up the figure of James Tobin, underlining the noteworthy contrast between the American economist's shy and soft character and his extraordinary, trailblazing influence on the development of economic research. This contrast has been greatly accentuated in recent times with the rise to prominence of the Tobin tax on the international political scene. With his good manners and sense of balance, Tobin has tended to treat the fame that this has brought him with self-deprecating irony. This gracious humility is of a different era to that of today¹s brimming narcissism, but it never went so far as to affect his civic passion and political commitment.

President George W. Bush has proposed a huge increase in U.S. foreign aid, potentially reversing years of declining aid budgets. His new push for aid has only two parallels in modern U.S. history: John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and Harry Truman's Marshall Plan. In those cases, the fear that poverty would breed communism, in the developing world in the 1960s or in Western Europe in the late 1940s, was the motivating factor. Today Americans have found a new reason to take poverty abroad seriously: It will breed terrorists who will strike them at home. Developmentalists, who have long pushed for greater foreign aid on various moral and practical grounds, are not entirely comfortable with the anti-terrorist rationale. But after years of losing arguments about the importance of foreign aid, proponents of aid are not about to look this gift horse too closely in the mouth.

One of Liberia’s most prominent human rights lawyers, Tiawan Gongloe, has been brutalized in police custody and is hospitalized as a result, Human Rights Watch has said. Police guards remain near his hospital bed, and the police director has announced that Mr. Gongloe remains in police custody without charge pending an investigation.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is alarmed that Kenyan attorney general Amos Wako has reintroduced a repressive media bill in Parliament.

Madagascar's High Constitutional Court has ruled that challenger Marc Ravalomanana won the presidency in December's election. The court said Monday that its recount showed Ravalomanana's KMMR party gained 51.46% of total ballots cast against 35.9% for Ratsiraka's Arema party. Four other candidates shared the remainder of the votes.

Militants in southern Nigeria have freed 43 oil
workers after holding them hostage for four days on an offshore oil rig,
ChevronTexaco, the US transnational for which the hostages worked, said on
Friday. "The youths left the rig on Wednesday night and the hostages were freed
unharmed," a senior company official told IRIN.

1. Decisions made by GF Board re. fifty-eight of the proposals submitted
as part of the first round application process.
2. Countries NOT receiving grants (or fast-track responses) in this round,
but where CCMs were understood (by BTS) to be preparing proposals.

Is "clean technology" an oxymoron . . . or the future of our planet? Does it represent one of the great business opportunities of the new millennium . . . or will it rise and fall like so many over-hyped technologies of the past? Will it engender a revolutionary shift in how we live, work, and play. . . or a more evolutionary shift largely transparent to the masses?

This report tries to advance one of the most important tasks before the International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD)in March 2002 by attempting to answer a single critical question: What will it take, in resource terms, to meet the universal human development goals of the Millennium Declaration – the Millennium Development Goals? Prepared specially for the Conference, the report takes one step further the work that UNDP — as chief “scorekeeper” for the goals — has undertaken in conjunction with other agencies of the UN system to prepare progress reports on the MDGs in every country.

The latest edition of the London-based newsletter Africa Confidential says there are "growing business ties between Tanzania's and Zimbabwe's elites, particularly over the supply of arms, military logistics and the smuggling of Congolese diamonds and other precious stones.

Horseshoe - "War vets" and settlers on Nyamsewe and Rungudzi, have taken possession of the owner's tractors, lorries and other equipment and are using them as they please. Matabeleland, Mashonaland East and Masvingo report numerous incidents throughout the region, indicating an escalation of activity.

The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a multinational programme to promote economic and social development, is setting up a Commission on Science and Technology to explore ways of stimulating activity in both fields across the African continent. In particular, the new commission will follow a two-prong strategy of identifying centres of research excellence in different African countries, and establishing an African Science Fund to fund them.

Efforts to save animals from extinction will fail unless human poverty is tackled as a part of conservation strategies, one of Britain’s leading environmental scientists has said. “Effective conservation of the earth’s biological riches will not happen without sustainable development and greater equity in the distribution of wealth and resources across all nations,” John Lawton, head of the UK National Environment Research Council told a group of industrialists and environmentalists at the Gerald Durrell Lecture 2002 in London.

President Moi once again censured the key donor agencies, accusing them of insincerity over aid. He said the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund kept "shifting the goal posts" on the conditions they have set for funding. The President lamented that the bank and the IMF were still adamant in not releasing aid despite Kenya efforts to meet conditions set in the past decade.

Mozambique has invited Norwegian businessmen to invest in the country, especially in the energy sector. In Maputo the energy sector is considered a strategic instrument in the fight against poverty and corruption.

WITHOUT international financial support, Zimbabwe faces a "resource gap" which will prevent the country from achieving meaningful economic development, economists told a meeting of top executives of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators in Zimbabwe. Dr Phineas Kadenge, an economist at the University of Zimbabwe, said that by embarking on an economic development programme in which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and their member countries have stopped providing financial support, Zimbabwe was unlikely to achieve economic growth and development.

The United Nations Security Council will Tuesday vote on a new United States sponsored autonomy plan for the Western Sahara. The proposal is seen by observers in the Moroccan capital city of Rabat as a ''victory'' for Morocco, while the Polisario Front - who are fighting for the independence of the Sahara - believe it will plunge the North African region back into war.

Millions of southern Africans will starve unless emergency relief efforts are stepped up, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. The WFP, which is already feeding 2.6 million people in the area, says a combination of natural and economic disasters is threatening millions more, and has asked for 69 million dollars to avert tragedy.

A high-profile debt relief programme for the world's poorest countries is mired in implementation problems and faces tougher times ahead as it moves to deal with conflict-riddled countries, say World Bank officials.
"We have difficult cases ahead of us," Jacob Kolster, Programme Manager for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, said Thursday. "Progress is going to be very slow and very difficult as we move forward to bring more countries on board." The next stage of the initiative will cover Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sudan, Somalia, and other countries still subject to intense political and communal tension and, on occasion, violence.

MSF has finally gained access to the "grey areas" in Angola where, for years, people have been living without any international aid. Malnutrition is far above emergency thresholds with 30% of the children examined in a state of severe malnutrition.

Twenty-six Members of Parliament (MPs) who have not yet declared their interests, assets and liabilities now risk being prosecuted under the Parliamentary and Ministerial Code of Conduct Act.

Women worldwide lag overwhelmingly behind men in the access to and use of ICTs. This newly developing gender gap is being argued to be a major source of gender inequality and one of the major obstacles to mainstreaming a gender perspective in development. To address the need for sharing of knowledge and learning about gender aspects of ICTs, INSTRAW is initiating a collaborative research programme and inviting the submission of Papers to be used as background information for the Virtual Workshops that will be held online through INSTRAWís Gender Awareness Information and Networking System (GAINS).

More than 90 countries mobilized for global EFA week(22-26 April). The week celebrates the second anniversary of the World Education Forum (Dakar, April 2000) and is an annual opportunity to renew the momentum generated in Dakar and to provoke public debate on Education for All.

The Special Session on Children, to be held 8-10 May 2002, is an unprecedented meeting of the UN General Assembly dedicated to the children and adolescents of the world. It will bring together government leaders and Heads of State, NGOs, children's advocates and young people themselves at the United Nations in New York in 2002. The gathering will present a great opportunity to change the way the world views and treats children.

ABC titles and authors feature on the list recently announced by the 16-person Jury to select Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century. Sosu's Call by Meshack Asare features in the top twelve books; and included in the 100 is History of the Yorubas by Samuel Johnson and Kiswahili. Past, Present and Future Horizons by Rocha Chimerah . ABC also stocks a new translation of Song of Lawino by Okot p'Bitek entitled The Defence of Lawino by Taban lo Liyong. The original is in the top 100. Other ABC authors feature on the list: Ama Ata Aidoo, Amina Mama, Charles Mungoshi, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, Yvonne Vera and Ngugi wa Thiongo. The initiative was inspired by the noted scholar, Ali Mazrui, as a way of directing the spotlight of the world on the achievements of African writers published in the 20th century. The Jury said it was time to celebrate a century of superb achievement in African creative writing, scholarship and children's literature.

Duly humbled and amazed by your continued breadth and depth of coverage of African affairs, I would once again congratulate you on a most interesting and worthwhile publication.

Two Limpopo schools are still closed after mayhem broke out in Tshivhase village two weeks ago. Pupils at a primary and high school in the sprawling village's Mukula section will be urged to attend afternoon and weekend classes to catch up on their work.

The Horn of Africa Regional Conference on Women and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is to raise awareness on ICT amongst women in the Horn of Africa region and to explore opportunities for harnessing the technology to work as a tool for their development. The conference will provide an opportunity for participants to hear what is happening on the ground for the purposes of learning and replication. The conference is organised by the African Centre for Women, Information & Communications Technology (ACWICT), a non-governmental organisation in Kenya committed to promoting the use of ICTs amongst women in the African Region.

With the support of Global Fund For Women (GFW), NVIWODA Centre for Entrepreneurship and Career Develoment has since 1998 to-date, been able to train 377 women entrepreneurs, who are now engaged in various enterprises. 0ur 12th programme is scheduled for 10th June - 28th June and 25 participants are expected to benefit from the programme.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on 30th April called on the speaker of the Gambian parliament, Sheriff Mustapha Dibba, to do everything he could to block passage of a new press bill that it said would seriously endanger press freedom.

1. From the 23 to 26 April, 2002, we, African scholars and activist intellectuals working in academic institutions, civil society organisations and policy institutions from 20 countries in Africa, as well as colleagues and friends from Asia, Europe, North America and South America met at a conference jointly organised by the Council for Development and Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and the Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa) to deliberate on Africa's developmental challenges in the new millennium.

2. Our deliberations covered such issues as Africa's initiatives for addressing development; Africa and the world trading system; mobilising financing for development in Africa; citizenship, democracy and development; education, health social services and development, and gender equity and equality in development.

Challenges to the space of Africa's own thinking on development
3. In our deliberations, we recalled the series of initiatives by Africans themselves aimed at addressing the developmental challenges of Africa, in particular the Lagos Plan of Action and the companion African Alternative Framework for Structural Adjustment. Each time, these initiatives were counteracted and ultimately undermined by policy frameworks developed from outside the continent and imposed on African countries. Over the past decades, a false consensus has been generated around the neo-liberal paradigm promoted through the Bretton Woods Institutions and the World Trade Organisation. This stands to crowd out the rich tradition of Africa's own alternative thinking on development. It is in this context that the proclaimed African initiative, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which was developed in the same period as the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa's Compact for African Recovery, as well as the World Bank's Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?, were discussed.

4. The meeting noted the uneven progress of democratisation and in particular of the expansion of space for citizen expression and participation. It also acknowledged the contribution of citizen's struggles and activism to this expansion of the political space, and for putting critical issues of development on the public agenda External and internal obstacles to Africa's economic development
5. The meeting noted that the challenges confronting Africa's development come from two inter-related sources: (a) constraints imposed by the hostile international economic and political order within which our economies operate; and (b) domestic weaknesses deriving from socio-economic and political structures and neo-liberal structural adjustment policies.

6. The main elements of the hostile global order include, first, the fact that African economies are integrated into the global economy as exporters of primary commodities and importers of manufactured products, leading to terms of trade losses. Reinforcing this, secondly, have been the policies of liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation as well as an unsound package of macro-economic policies imposed through structural adjustment conditionality by the World Bank and the IMF. These have now been institutionalised within the WTO through rules, agreements and procedures, which are biased against our countries. Finally, the just mentioned external and internal policies and structures have combined to generate unsustainable and unjustifiable debt burden which has crippled Africa's economies and undermined the capacity of Africa's ownership of strategies for development .

7. The external difficulties have exacerbated the internal structural imbalances of our economies, and, together with neo-liberal structural adjustment policies, inequitable socio-economic and political structures, have led the to disintegration of our economies and increased social and gender inequity. In particular, our manufacturing industries have been destroyed; agricultural production (for food and other domestic needs is in crisis; public services have been severely weakened; and the capacity of states and governments in Africa to make and implement policies in support of balanced and equitable national development emasculated. The costs associated with these have fallen disproportionately on marginalized and subordinated groups of our societies, including workers, peasants, small producers. The impact has been excessively severe on women and children.

8. Indeed, the developments noted above have reversed policies and programmes and have dismantled institutions in place since independence to create and expand integrated production across and between our economies in agriculture, industry, commerce, finance, and social services. These were programmes and institutions which have, in spite of their limitations, sought to address the problems of weak internal markets and fragmented production structures as well as economic imbalances and social inequities within and between nations inherited from colonialism, and to redress the inappropriate integration of our economies in the global order. The associated social and economic gains, generated over this period have been destroyed.

9. The above informed our reflections on the NEPAD. We concluded that, while many of its stated goals may be well-intentioned, the development vision and economic measures that it canvases for the realisation of these goals are flawed. As a result, NEPAD will not contribute to addressing the developmental problems mentioned above. On the contrary, it will reinforce the hostile external environment and the internal weaknesses that constitute the major obstacles to Africa's development. Indeed, in certain areas like debt, NEPAD steps back from international goals that have been won through global mobilisation and struggle.

10. The most fundamental flaws of NEPAD, which reproduce the central elements of the World Bank's Can Africa Claim the 21st Century and the ECA's Compact for African Recovery, include:

(a) the neo-liberal economic policy framework at the heart of the plan, and which repeats the structural adjustment policy packages of the preceding two decades and over-looks the disastrous effects of those policies; (b) the fact that in spite of its proclaimed recognition of the central role of the African people to the plan, the African people have not played any part in the conception, design and formulation of the NEPAD; (c) notwithstanding its stated concerns for social and gender equity, it adopts the social and economic measures that have contributed to the marginalisation of women (d) that in spite of claims of African origins, its main targets are foreign donors, particularly in the G8 (e) its vision of democracy is defined by the needs of creating a functional market; (f) it under-emphasises the external conditions fundamental to Africa's developmental crisis, and thereby does not promote any meaningful measure to manage and restrict the effects of this environment on Africa development efforts. On the contrary, the engagement that is seeks with institutions and processes like the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the United States Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, the Cotonou Agreement, will further lock Africa's economies disadvantageously into this environment; (g) the means for mobilisation of resources will further the disintegration of African economies that we have witnessed at the hands of structural adjustment and WTO rules; Call for Action
11. To address the developmental problems and challenges identified above, we call for action at the national, continental and international levels to implement the measures described below.

12. In relation to the external environment, action must be taken towards stabilisation of commodity prices; reform of the international financial system (to prevent debt, exchange rate instability and capital flow volatility) as well as of the World Bank and the IMF; an end to IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programmes; and fundamental changes to the existing agreements of the WTO regime, as well as stop the attempts to expand the scope to this regime to new areas including investment, competition and government procurement. Most pressing of all, Africa's debt must be cancelled.

13. At the local, national and regional levels, development policy must promote agriculture, industry, services including health and public education, and must be protected and supported through appropriate trade, investment and macro-economic policy measures. A strategy for financing must seek to mobilise and build on internal and intra-African resources through imaginative savings measures; reallocation of expenditure away from wasteful items including excessive military expenditure, corruption and mismanagement; creative use of remittances of Africans living abroad; corporate taxation; retention and re-investment of foreign profits; and the prevention of capital flight, and the leakage of resources through practices of tax evasion practised by foreign investors and local elites. Foreign investment while necessary, must be carefully balanced and selected to suit national objectives.

14. Above all, these measures require the reconstitution of the developmental state: a state for which social equity, social inclusion, national unity and respect for human rights form the basis of economic policy; a state which actively promotes, and nurtures the productive sectors of the economy; actively engages appropriately in the equitable and balanced allocation and distribution of resources among sectors and people; and most importantly a state that is democratic and which integrates people's control over decision making at all levels in the management, equitable use and distribution of social resources.

The Challenge for African scholars and activist intellectuals
15. Recognising that, by raising anew the question of Africa's development as an Africa-wide concern, NEPAD has brought to the fore the question of Africa's autonomous initiatives for development, we will engage with the issues raised in NEPAD as part of our efforts to contribute to the debate and discussions on African development.

16. In support of our broader commitment to contribute to addressing Africa's development challenges, we undertake to work both collectively and individually, in line with our capacities, skills and institutional location, to promote a renewed continent-wide engagement on Africa's own development initiatives. To this end, we shall deploy our research, training and advocacy skills and capacities to contribute to the generation and dissemination of knowledge of the issues at stake; engage with and participate in the mobilisation of social groups around their interests and appropriate strategies of development; and engage with governments and policy institutions at local, national, regional and continental levels. We shall continue our collaboration with our colleagues in the global movement.

17. Furthermore, we call, (a) for the reassertion of the primacy of the question and paradigm of national and regional development on the agenda of social discourse and intellectual engagement and advocacy;; (b) on Africa's scholars and activist intellectuals within African and in the Diaspora, to join forces with social groups whose interests and needs are central to the development of Africa; (c) African scholars and activist intellectuals and organisations to direct their research and advocacy to some of the pressing questions that confront African policy and decision making at international levels (in particular negotiations in the WTO and under the Cotonou agreement), and domestically and regionally; (d) upon our colleagues in the global movement, to strengthen our common struggles, in solidarity. We ask our colleagues in the North to intervene with their governments on behalf of our struggles, and our colleagues in the South to strengthen South-South co-operation.

18. We pledge ourselves to carry forward the positions and conclusions of this conference. And we encourage CODESRIA and TWN-Africa to explore, together with other interested parties, mechanisms and processes for follow-up to the deliberations and conclusions of this conference.

Accra, April 26, 2002.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the United Nations Security Council to extend its arms embargo against Liberia, saying the army has committed war crimes. These atrocities, HRW said, included the execution of scores of civilians, widespread rape of women and girls, some as young as 12, and systematic burning of villages.

At the invitation of Dr. Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), African Heads of State and Government of the NEPAD Implementation Committee will seize the opportunity of their presence in Rome at the World Food Summit: five years later (10-13 June 2002) to prepare the Kananaskis meeting from 26 to 28 June in Canada, which will focus on partnership between the G8 and Africa.

Women's human rights activists in Kenya have urged the government to take action against recent threats by a controversial sect to forcibly circumcise women in central Kenya. On Wednesday, Kenyan newspapers reported that some members of the Mungiki sect, had issued an ultimatum to women aged between 13 and 65 in the Kiambaa and Kikuyu divisions, both in central Kenya, who had not undergone the ethnic Kikuyu traditional operation to submit to it.

President Robert Mugabe has declared a state of disaster throughout Zimbabwe in the face of a government report that estimates that about 7.8 million people - over five million of them children - will need humanitarian help for the next 18 months.

South African Migration Project will convene an international workshop in Southern Africa in July 2002 on the subject of gender and migration. The aims of the workshop are: to assess the current knowledge base on gender and migration in Southern Africa; to set out a research agenda for future research into gender and migration in the region
to discuss and develop appropriate theoretical and methodological tools for a gender analysis of cross-border migration; to establish contacts and build networks for knowledge sharing and collaborative research; to raise the profile of gender in the debates on national and regional migration policies.

Umhlaba Development Services is a development consultancy company providing a range of support services to NGOs, donors, and government departments. It is looking for a Financial Services Consultant.

The Electoral Institute of Southern Africa is holding a seminar series entitled The Role of Observer Missions in the SADC Region.

The Australian Agency for International Development (Pretoria) is seeking a short-term gender consultant to assist with the selection process for the 2002 round of the Addressing Gender Violence Fund (AGVF), a program that provides grants to South African civil society organisations engaged with combating gender violence.