Publishers of academic books on Africa are looking for an administrator for a small friendly office to start in September 2005. Enthusiasm, energy and an eye for detail essential. Experience with a publisher, NGO or bookshop would be useful. Computer literacy, including Excel and database skills required. The job entails financial, sales and stock-keeping duties as well as the daily running of a busy office. Hours are negotiable up to a 35-hour week. Salary c.£17,000-£19,000 pro rata according to experience and present salary, and hours to be negotiated. For full job description please email Lynn Taylor [email][email protected] or tel: 01865 244111

Many refugees in South Africa find themselves unable to begin or continue with their education. A 2003 study, the ‘National Refugee Baseline Survey’, found that almost 40 percent of persons surveyed had children who were not attending school, mostly because their parents were unable to afford the fees. Those surveyed also reported that refugee children were turned away from primary schools because the facilities were said to be full, or unwilling to accept children with asylum seeker and refugee permits.

It is exactly now 29 years after the massacre of thousands of children who marched against the compulsory teaching of Africans and many injustices perpetrated against children in schools in Soweto, South Africa during the Apartheid Era. 16 June 1976 marked a new era for the African child, an era of deep thoughts, feelings, emotions and vision. An era that made the world over sympathise with the African child more – a child born and bred in a continent not only plagued by poverty but by disease and both natural and man made disasters. What comes into my mind about the African Child today is a deep sense of deprivation – a child born in a rich continent with abundant human and material resources, a child whose legs are in a deep pool of water but whose presence does not mean much as the same child dies from thirst.