African countries have to balance their spending on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for education better. Skills development among teachers, which accounts for only 10% of most countries’ ICT budgets, has to be strengthened. Spending on costly hardware, which covers 90% of most countries budgets, should rather be reduced. This is one of the key recommendations of a communiqué released by participants in the Third African Ministerial Round Table on ICT for Education, Training and Development.

International AIDS Conferences—like the one planned for next week in Vienna—can be strange affairs. On the one hand, there is a reason to celebrate: Scaled up treatment campaigns have prolonged millions of lives; HIV testing and education are reaching many more. Yet, on the other hand, there is the reality that more than 33 million people are living with HIV worldwide. Despite efforts to expand treatment, nearly three million more become infected each year. In Zambia alone, over one million people are living with HIV.

For the past three months civil society organisations, academics and even some government officials have been warning that a new round of xenophobic attacks are coming soon after the World Cup has ended. Over the last two weeks, many of these same people have seen their world cup fever give way to a feverish effort to prevent (or at least prepare for) the forthcoming melee. No one has been readying themselves more fervently than migrants, many of whom have started packing and making their way to sites of safety either in South Africa or beyond its borders.

A reminder to the ANC that it needed to deepen democracy in society arrived at the ANC’s Polokwane conference, where one major gripe against President Mbeki was that he had failed to create “policy coherence” amongst the ANC and its alliance partners, let alone the broader society. Mbeki was criticised for insulating public policy through technocratic methods, and failing to build consensus in society beyond the so-called chattering classes. Whilst Mbeki’s vision for a post-colonial society that worked rested on making unpopular decisions, it was at least palpable.