Maternal mortality is a major challenge to global public health. But it is difficult to measure true maternal death rates at the community level, particularly in societies where most deliveries occur at home. What is the most accurate way to estimate maternal mortality in countries with limited resources and infrastructure?

The collection of household refuse - or the lack thereof - is one of the most powerful visual benchmarks of inequality in South Africa. Municipal governments in South Africa have been turning increasingly to commercialisation (i.e., privatisation, outsourcing, corporatisation) as a way of addressing this refuse collection backlog. Why this has happened, and how successful it has been at addressing the problem, are the subjects of the two papers in this collection.

The fifty-eighth session of the UN Commission on Human Rights will be be held from 18 March to 26 April 2002 in Geneva. The International Catholic Commission on Migration and December 18 encourage all ECOSOC accredited NGOs to prepare a written statement on the human rights of migrants from their own perspective. Written statements submitted by NGOs and government delegations are issued as UN documents and made available as such to member and observer governments and NGO participants.

Evidence of terror cells active throughout Europe is strengthening the position of anti-immigration advocates throughout the Continent. This will lead to greater calls to tighten immigration policies and restrict the free movement of labor. But such policies would have negative implications for long-term European growth and integration.

Transport minister says that the problems of inefficiency, fraud and corruption should be addressed immediately.

This article in Linux Journal has some exciting new ideas for those interested in cheap, high-bandwidth internet connectivity: 'Here's a challenge for the practical hackers and entrepreneurs of the world: how do we make public wireless access ubiquitous, easy, and as free as speech, beer or both. Kevin Werbach has some ideas.'

Ask your questions here this week! The hosts of this event, Greg Beuthin (CompuMentor's Technology Consultant and TechSoup's Hardware guide), Joe Cancilla (TechSoup's Content Developer and Open Source guide), and Michael Schrecker (CompuMentor's Technology Consultant and Systems Administrator) will discuss the alternatives to the Windows operating system.

Six international organisations have joined forces to create ItrainOnline, a technology resource centre for people who want to learn how to use the Internet effectively for social justice and sustainable development.

Umhlaba Development Services is a private company that services the NGO sector in effecting delivery of development programmes and policy. Umhlaba offers a comprehensive Financial Management Service to address all aspects of financial management of an NGO.

Wits University Sociology Department invites applications for its Honours degree courses in General Sociology, Industrial Sociology and Development Sociology.

Kenya’s government has halted the privatisation process of Telkom, its key asset. Despite widespread government corruption, a severe economic downturn, high crime and the lack of a clearly articulated ICT policy, Kenya has already become one of Africa’s larger middle league players in connectivity terms. But will things change and let real growth occur?, asks Russell Southwood after a recent visit.

Mzwakhe Mbuli has one last chance to appeal against his 13-year prison sentence. The Mail & Guardian re-examines the evidence and suggests that there has been a miscarriage of justice.

The new apartheid museam next to Gold Reef City in Johannesburg, is both shocking and brilliant says AFP's Jan Hennop.

Southern African states show a blatant lack of democratic awareness, says Henning Melber in the Mail & Guardian.

A summit aimed at resolving the crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) will be held this month in Khartoum, Sudan, according to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Thabo Mbeki is seen as Africa's most legitimate, self-confident and fundamentally pro-Western leader. If anyone can shake down the World Bank in Washington for debt cancellation, or the WTO in Geneva for trade concessions, it's the primary architect of the miracle transition in recently-liberated South Africa.

Africa needs enormous concessions, thanks to what Mbeki has termed "global apartheid" and what Washington/Geneva technocrats prefer to laud as the "Washington Consensus"--or just "globalisation." Africa generates nearly 30% more exports today than in 1980, yet their value has crashed by more than 40% because of falling terms of trade.

Likewise, Sub-Saharan Africa's foreign debt rose from US$60 billion to US$206 bn over the same period notwithstanding 1980s-90s debt repayments of US$229 bn, thanks to the tyranny of compound interest rates and the near-universal failure of intervening structural adjustment programmes. Over the past three years alone, debt repayment by Sub-Saharan African countries was US$16 billion greater than incoming new loans.

Can Africa's leaders finally, vigorously campaign against such extreme uneven world capitalist development? Should we draw hope from a "New Partnership for Africa's Development" ("Nepad"), launched in Abuja, Nigeria by several African heads of state on October 23? And first of all, what background should we have about the Nepad process?

From the late 1990s, Mbeki embarked upon an "African Renaissance" branding exercise with poignant poetics. The contentless form was somewhat remedied in the secretive Millennial Africa Recovery Programme (with the acronym "Map"), whose powerpoint skeleton was unveiled to select elites in 2000, during Mbeki's meetings with Bill Clinton in May, the Okinawa G-8 in July, the UN Millennium Summit in September, and a subsequent European Union gathering in Portugal.

The skeleton was fleshed out in November 2000 with the assistance of several economists. It was immediately endorsed during a special South African visit by World Bank president James Wolfensohn "at an undisclosed location," due presumably to fears of the disruptive civil-society protests which had soured a Johannesburg trip by new IMF czar Horst Koehler a few months earlier.

Thanks to work by a co-author of South Africa's own disastrous 1996 homegrown structural adjustment programme (Stephen Gelb), the content of the 60-page working document was becoming clearer: more privatisation, especially of infrastructure (no matter its profound failure as a strategy, especially in South Africa); more multi-party elections (typically, though, between variants of neoliberal parties, as in the US) as a veil for the lack of thorough-going participatory democracy; grand visions of a developmental kickstart via ICT (hopelessly unrealistic considering the lack of simple reliable electricity across the continent); more trade with the North; and a self-mandate for peace-keeping (which South Africa has subsequently taken for its soldiers stationed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi).

In short, Mbeki dreamed of more globalisation, not less.

By this stage, he had managed to sign on as partners two additional rulers from the crucial West and North regions of the continent: Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Olusegun Obasanjo from Nigeria. Unfortunately, both continued to face mass popular protests and widespread civil/military/religious bloodshed at home, diminishing their utility as model African leaders.

Later, to his credit, Obasanjo led a surprise revolt against Mbeki's capitulation to Northern pressure at the World Conference Against Racism in September 2001, when he helped generate a split between EU and African countries over reparations due the continent for slavery and colonialism. Tellingly, even loose talk of such reparations cannot be found in the Mbeki's document, and the South African host delegation was furious at Obasanjo's outburst because it nearly scuppered a final conference resolution.

But that incident aside, 2001 has been a successful year for selling Nepad. Another pro-Western ruler, Tanzania's Benjamin Mkapa, joined the New Africa leadership group in January 2001. Mkapa's government suffers a dreadful recent human rights record, but he and Mbeki gave the world's leading capitalists and state elites a briefing in Davos, Switzerland, which was very poorly-attended. A few days later, an effort was made in Mali to sell West Africans to the plan, with on-the-spot cheerleading by Wolfensohn and Koehler.

Then, the July 2001 inaugural meeting of the African Union in Lusaka provided the opportunity for a continent-wide leadership endorsement, once Mbeki's plan was merged with the "Omega Plan"--offered by the neoliberal Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade--to become the New African Initiative. For a few months until late October, observers termed Mbeki's initiative "the Nai."

The Genoa G-8 summit offered soothing encouragement. With 300,000 protesters outside the conference accusing the world's main political leaders of running a destructive, elitist club, Mbeki was a useful adornment. Likewise, Mbeki's October visits to Japan and Brussels confirmed his elite popularity, perhaps because there was no apparent demand for formal monetary commitments at this stage.

A recent surge of enthusiasm from Johannesburg corporations, Washington multilateral banks, and European capitals deserves much more consideration than I have space for here, particularly given the geopolitical give-and-take associated with George W. Bush's "anti-terror" coalition-building. But to sum up the ideological partnership that Mbeki proposes, consider the way that the 1980s-90s recolonisation of African economic policy is explained on the website version of Nepad:

"The structural adjustment programmes provided only a partial solution. They promoted reforms that tended to remove serious price distortions, but gave inadequate attention to the provision of social services. As a consequence, only a few countries managed to achieve sustainable higher growth under these programmes."

Slippery, this line of analysis, and worth unpacking briefly, to conclude, for one test of robust analysis is to pose the opposite premise, and to see whether the subsequent hypotheses are worth exploring:

--What if structural adjustment represented not "a partial solution" but instead, reflecting local and global power shifts, a profound defeat for genuine African nationalists, workers, peasants, women, children, manufacturing industry and the environment?

--What if "promoting reforms" really amounted to the IMF and World Bank imposing their cookie-cutter neoliberal policies on desperately disempowered African societies, without any reference to democratic processes, resistance or diverse local conditions?

--What if the removal of "serious price distortions" really meant the repeal of exchange controls (hence allowing massive capital flight), subsidy cuts (hence pushing masses of people below the poverty line), and lowered import tariffs (hence causing widespread deindustrialisation)?

--What if "inadequate attention to the provision of social services" in reality meant the opposite: excessive attention to applying neoliberalism not just to the macroeconomy, but also to health, education, water and other crucial state services?

--And what if the form of IMF/Bank attention included insistence upon greater cost recovery, higher user-fees, lower budgetary allocations, privatisation, and even the disconnection of supplies to those too poor to afford them, hence leading to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people?

If these hypotheses are reasonable, and if the logical implication is to proceed no further with structural adjustment, then a central task of Nepad must be to slip around such arguments without reference to their relevance. By doing so, Nepad fits right into the globalisers' modified neoliberal project, which now insists even more incongruously that economic integration solves poverty.

Apparently, the notion that South Africa might "naai"--translated from Afrikaans as "totally screw over"--the rest of Africa through Mbeki's New, Almost-African Initiative led those gathered at Abuja to revise the name. Still, cheeky commentators are already observing that if prounced "kneepad," the document signifies its merits as the cushion African leaders will need, as they stoop and grovel for more handouts.

But that would be unfair, for Nepad is worth reading even if merely as an ambitious attempt to bring a spirit of "engagement" by at least three African leaders to a world economy which is still totally screwing over Africa. True, like all top-down policy formulations, Nepad reeks of technicism--a scent which could dissipate partially if exposed to the fires of popular debate, protest and participation. But that would risk the transformation of Nepad into a partnership with Africans themselves. And Mbeki's AIDS interventions provide enough evidence of his intentions to keep millions of Africans alive, much less in partnership.

The alternative to Nepad begins with African activists building up networks within and between diverse social movements, visionary trade unions, Jubilee chapters, women's organisations, environmental groups and the progressive intelligentsia. These are already taking seed across the continent via anti-neoliberal protests and longer-term strategic work (e.g., in this subregion, the Southern African Peoples Solidarity Network, at and across the continent flowing from the Dakar 2000 process to promote an African People's Consensus instead of a Map/Nai/Nepad).

A recent precedent for rejection and reformulation was the World Bank's Global Development Gateway, which was repelled in March by creative South/ern African civil society groups, and which instead initiated the Africa Pulse information community. That kind of African partnership, based on a human-rights culture, a decommodification strategy and durable cross-border alliances, is far superior to Pretoria's new gambit.

Indeed, Nepad belongs with many of South Africa's other regional economic strategies: deindustrialising neighbours because of relectance to give the same duty-free preferences to SADC imports that even the apartheid regime had offered; imposing EU and US free-trade regimes on unwilling neighbours; demanding debt repayments from impoverished Mozambique for loans that resettled dissident rightwing Afrikaner farmers and that rebuilt electricity lines which were destroyed by apartheid destabilisation; kicking out 15,000 Zimbabwean farmworkers with no compensation; or treating informal economic migrants like meat for dogs (not merely in extremist SA Police Service training exercises but on a day-to-day basis at the Department of Home Affairs).

To expand this sort of subimperialist project via a warmed-over Washington Consensus, Nepad, means that Mbeki is content merely polishing, not abolishing, global apartheid.

Patrick Bond's new book is Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance (University of Cape Town Press). Ordering information from [email][email protected]

The HIV/AIDS Search Engine is a tool for searching the internet for news on medications, treatments and vaccines. People can log in privately and chat with a counselor or get answers to questions from an online forum. Users can search through links using major search engines and news headlines sites. This online service is particularly targeted at rural locations where HIV/AIDS information and support is limited.

In the northern Nigerian state of Sokoto, a woman is awaiting the outcome of an appeal against a conviction for adultery by an Islamic, or Sharia, court. If the appeal fails, Safiyatu Huseini will be stoned to death.

Opposition parties in the Central African Republic (CAR) have rejected a plan to send a regional peacekeeping force to the country.

The United States House of Representatives has passed legislation which urges President George W Bush to impose targeted sanctions on Zimbabwe's leadership.

Malian police arrested genocide suspect Paul Bisengimana on Tuesday at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the organisation's spokesman Kingsley Moghalu told Internews in Arusha, Tanzania.

UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Mary Ann Wyrsch on Tuesday stressed the need for the Kenyan government to enact national refugee legislation to ensure the rights of some 218,00 refugees being housed by the east African country are upheld.

The US Committee for Refugees has recommended measures designed to boost aid for refugees worldwide, especially in Africa.

Francis Deng is the Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Displaced Persons. In an interview with IRIN after a recent visit to Sudan, Deng said that the government had agreed to hold a workshop which he hoped would result in a clear strategy on internal displacement.

Opposition political parties have strongly criticised the government's HIV/AIDS programme labelling it ineffective and calling on the government to declare a state of emergency as the only way to combat the spread of the disease.

A German military delegation arrived in Djibouti on Sunday for talks with top Djibouti officials, a senior government official told IRIN on Tuesday. He said the 17 member military delegation was in the country to "set up a base camp for German naval forces participating in the fight against global terrorism". The Germans are part of a group of nine nations patrolling the Indian Ocean from Oman to Somalia, looking for suspected terrorists.

Recently released government land reform proposals, which prohibit the foreign ownership of land, have received a cautious welcome in Malawi.

Schools are teaching pupils about sex and sexual diseases in an attempt to curb the spread of HIV/Aids.

Third World farmers suffering from falling commodity prices are set to be offered a new international scheme to shield them from financial collapse.

The government of Zimbabwe has approved the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Bill, which seeks to regulate the operations of the media in Zimbabwe and purportedly give access to information held by public bodies.

As governments meet in Bonn, Germany, this week to discuss means for conserving and managing the world's freshwater resources, nonprofit groups are warning that failure to come up with detailed plans for action will lead to "a global freshwater catastrophe."

In June the Global AIDS and Health Fund was launched with great fanfare. The fund should have been up and running by now, but six months on, the $10bn target proposed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stands at just $1.5bn. Administrative structures are not in place and no money has been disbursed. Since the fund was announced, it's estimated 1.5 million people - equivalent to almost the entire population of Northern Ireland - will have died from AIDS. Among them will be over a quarter of a million children.

Zimbabwe's Supreme Court has ruled that President Robert Mugabe's land reform programme complies with the constitution.

The intended de-gazettement of 170,000 acres of forest cover will be of an unprecedented magnitude since independence, a forest organisation has said.

The poor people of Butamira had for a moment thought that they could secure their future through exploiting the forest reserve but are now losing all hope. Government is determined to move them so Kakira Sugar Works could use the reserve to cultivate more sugarcane.

Kenyan MP Jimmy Angwenyi is reported as saying that FGM rites are important to the community as they mark a "new" stage in life.

Tanzanian police have raided the offices of the Lawyers' Environmental Action Team (LEAT) in Dar es Salaam and searched the homes of two LEAT attorneys, according to an international association of public interest attorneys based in Eugene.

The outcome of the bitter U.N. racism conference in South Africa remains a virtual secret two months after the conclusion of the meeting. The reason: Some African governments still are trying to link development assistance to slavery.

A Bill designed to deal with cheating lawyers is being drafted, the Attorney-General has said.

A weekly e-mail digest of the latest top stories from the global portal on international debt from the OneWorld network.

Our latest additions to Tanzania Online, the gateway to information on development issues in Tanzania. All documents are available free on tzonline.org. You can also receive these documents by email.

The latest jobs from OneWorld Jobs - the place on the internet for jobs in sustainable development, environment and human rights.

The Triangle Project is a progressive NGO based in Cape Town that services the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and
Transgendered (LGBT) community.

The International Human Rights Academy (IHRA) is to be held from 3 April to 20 April 2002 on Robben Island, Cape Town under the auspices of the Law Faculty of the University of Western Cape (UWC), the Faculty of Law of the University of Ghent (RUG), and the Law Faculty of Utrecht University.

The Africa Grantmakers Affinity Group (AGAG) is a network of grantmakers working in, or interested in working in Africa. The group has its roots in the Southern Africa Grantmakers Affinity Group (SAGAG), which was designed to encourage greater foundation interest in South Africa, promote better grantmaking in the country, and assist nonprofit organizations fighting apartheid.

The National Network of Grantmakers is an organization of 400 individual donors, foundation staff and board members, and grantmaking committee members involved in funding social and economic justice by supporting organizations working for change.