Chairperson of the first South African AIDS Conference 2003, Prof Jerry Coovadia, says, "There is a complaint, probably justifiable, that there are too many meetings and conferences on HIV/Aids. While this may seem to be so, we in South Africa are exposed to a catastrophe of massive proportions. This conference aims at nothing less than providing a comprehensive, holistic and precisely relevant programme for all stakeholders, including community representatives, business and the media. There is no equivalent meeting serving such a purpose. This conference leads directly from the hugely successful and landmark AIDS 2000; and one has the organisers promise of a worthy successor to the 2000 conference."

The Open Knowledge Network is an initiative of the G8 Digital Opportunity Taskforce (DOTForce) linking together existing grassroots information and knowledge-sharing initiatives to promote both the creation and the exchange of local content as widely as possible across the South, supported by a range of different information and communication technologies. The programme is coordinated by OneWorld International and its network of southern offices. See for more information. The Project Manager, located in Africa, will be responsible for planning, coordinating and delivering OKN activities in the region, based on building solid relationships with a range of stakeholders (especially at grassroots level) in a pan-African context.

"SATELLIFE Health Information Project" from the United States was one of the two winning projects at the 2002 Stockholm Challenge Award in the "Health" category. SATELLIFE uses multiple technologies - from satellites to modems - to connect health professionals to critical information in under-resourced areas. In rural Africa, manual health surveys are expensive, inadequate, inaccurate and slow. The project uses PDAs to collect timely public health data, return it to policy-makers and explore appropriate affordable technology for the environment. In a Ghanaian trial programme, 30 volunteers trained on the PDAs and completed over 2,400 surveys within five days. The data were analysed and the report delivered in six days instead of the usual four to six months.