Women & Politics in Uganda, which won a 2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award, explains why the women's movement in Uganda has made its presence felt so forcefully and quickly in this country since 1986. Unlike women's movements in other African countries, the Ugandan women's movement has distinguished itself by establishing greater autonomy from the state, suggesting that societal autonomy is critical to its efficacy, although other key factors are also discussed.

A new batch of articles is now available on the Africultures English website. Olivier Barlet's Editorial "The endogenous gaze"; "Karmen Geï" by Joseph Gaye Ramaka (Senegal), film review by A Mensah; "You have to be inside something to change it": Interview with Simon Njami, "Nigeria: the photographic giant", by Erika Nimis; "Koudou, the foiled-tographer", by Ananias Leki, Ivoirian photographer; "Lomé's street photographers have got the blues" by Guy Hersant; "Press photographers in Benin" by Monique Phoba; "The photographic studio: a social testing-ground" by Jean-François Werner; and "I have to be a jack-of-all-trades": interview with Beninese photographer, Erick Ahounou, by Olivier Barlet.

The national organised crime head of the detective service, Assistant Commissioner Albert Eksteen, was arrested at the department's headquarters in Pretoria on Tuesday for fraud involving about R40 000.

Lack of access to information and technology affects Africa in general and women in particular. However, through the efforts and co-ordination of many government and NGO agencies, that essential access to information is slowly progressing throughout southern Africa.

A good education system is increasingly important not only for the success of a modern knowledge-based economy but also for the creation of a socially just society. The explosion of knowledge about the nature of learning, combined with the growing power of technology, create the potential to transform the most fundamental unit of education: the interaction of teacher and learner.

VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) has already been making waves in Africa. Mothers in Ethiopia use it to talk to their children in the USA. ISP owners in Ghana are arrested for using it. Togo has companies that do outsourcing work with it. The Guinean state telco has watched its revenues collapse because of it. Even South Africa's Telkom (see first item in News Round-Up and Snippets) is testing it. The genie is out of the bottle and and governments and state telcos are struggling to keep up. Mawuli Tse of iBasis describes how VOIP can be used in positive ways to change life in the continent.

The world is awash with guns - at least 550 million of them. An endless cheap supply of small arms has spawned an epidemic of killing. In a three-part series, Guardian writers hunt down the dealers, talk to the victims and ask what can be done to stop the trade.

Small World Theatre (SWT) collaborated with Tanzanian performers to find out what prevents people, particularly women in poor communities, from participating in elections.

A media ethics body run by journalists providing advice and support to members of the public who experience difficulties with the print and broadcast media, supplying media training for NGOs, and undertaking research on aspects of media law and ethics.

Access to Justice is pleased to announce the publication of its biannual Cases on Human Rights (CHR). Cases on Human Rights brings together, in a single volume, groundbreaking, distinctive and empowering human rights cases from across the Commonwealth, and this current edition encompasses cases from Nigeria and South Africa. Cases on Human Rights will expand vistas of legal scholarship and professional expertise in the protection and defence of human rights and will appeal to a broad spectrum of human rights practitioners.

Global economic arrangements enable a wealthy white minority to rule a world that's largely populated by people of color, says Africa Action executive director Salih Booker. In the first of what will be a continuing series of occasional interviews with Africa advocacy groups and NGOs in the United States, allAfrica's Charles Cobb Jr. spoke with Booker about a new organization - Africa Action - formed through the merger of three of the oldest Africa advocacy groups in the United States.

The issue of reparations has to be on the agenda of the Third United Nations World Conference on Racism in Durban later this year, Jubilee South Africa and other anti-debt movements insisted at the weekend.

First we would like to thank all of you who responded to our survey questionnaire. We received a 5% return (308 replies). The distribution of our respondents did not reflect our subscriber base, with a disproportionately lower number of responses returned from African countries. The results are nevertheless interesting.

· 55% of respondents work in Africa
· 39% work in NGOs, 13% in Universities, 10% in international agencies, and the remainder in sectors such as consultancies, media, private sector, CBOs, government, and funding agencies
· We asked which three categories of the newsletter were you liked most:
o Rights and democracy 37%
o Development 33%
o Conflict, emergencies and crises 25%
o Education and social welfare 25%
o Editorial 27%
o Health 21%
o Women and gender 20%
o Internet and technology 19%

We suspect that these findings indicate that in many areas we may need to improve the quality of materials that we include. We hope we can do so with your help. Please continue to send us information for inclusion in the newsletter.

As you know, we will be closing down during August, and during that time we hope to be able to make some changes to the structure of the newsletter to make it easier for you to use the materials we publish.

Using discarded computers in rich countries for the benefit of disadvantaged populations in poorer countries is the idea behind World Computer Exchange. The first doubt that arises is how people are supposed to maintain the machines. I have heard too many stories of 'donated computers' being given to non-profit organisations, schools, etc... and then being left to rust in a storeroom because they are not useable or the recipients do not have the skills to use them. However, the WCE provides installation, connection and maintenance plans along with each donation it makes. In addition, recipient schools are partnered with tech-savvy schools in developed countries. There are, of course, tech-savvy schools in developing countries as well - it could be interesting to engage tham as partners with the recipient schools.

This report from the the Commonwealth of Learning details current issues faced in telecentres. It is available as a book but can also be downloaded in .pdf format and read using Acrobat Reader. It offers information and advice on the organisation and running of telecentres. It has been designed for policy-makers, centre managers and all of those in education, training, health and community development who are keen to serve urban, peri-urban, rural and other disadvantaged communities.

This interview is an interesting look at a multi-national's vision of the future internet and the role of open-source software. "IBM is spending millions of dollars and taking some of most important software code and adding it to Linux. That means that Linux is getting better and better, faster and faster, than any other operating system out there," claims Mike Nelson of IBM. Read about high bandwith, fast internet access and smarter computers that will be able to handle PETAbytes of information - and hope it will be deployed in Africa as readily and easily as in developed coutries.

The Southern Africa Institute of Fundraising (SAIF) presents the following Workshops: 23,24,25 July - Training the Trainer in Resource Mobilisation; 6 August - Donor Marketing - Cause Related Marketing Negotiation; 6,7,8 August -Resource Mobilisation Workshop in Cape Town; 7 August - Dealing with the Media Workshop; 15,16,17 August - Resource Mobilisation Workshop; Training takes place at the SAIF National Office in Johannesburg, South Africa - please book early. For more information contact the National Office on +27 11 884 0351 or e-mail [email protected]

The Southern Africa Institute of Fundraising SAIF) presents the following Workshops:

23,24,25 July
Training the Trainer in Resource Mobilisation

6 August
Donor Marketing - Cause Related Marketing
Negotiation
6,7,8 August
Resource Mobilisation Workshop in Cape Town

7 August
Dealing with the Media Workshop

15,16,17 August
Resource Mobilisation Workshop

In July the World Bank will launch a multi- million dollar internet-based development knowledge initiative at . Trumpeted as a place to find diverse perspectives on development, the Bank argues that its Development Gateway will be a convenient tool for civil society groups, officials, journalists and independent researchers. We disagree. On closer scrutiny, the Development Gateway initiative looks less like an attempt to encourage debate than a means to stifle, moderate and control dissenting opinion. We wish to warn colleagues of the perils of associating with or supporting this project.

There are three fundamental objections to the Gateway project. First the gateway privileges certain voices over others. The Gateway does not prioritise poorer people as site contributors, editors or viewers. The Bank's heavy English-language bias exacerbates the dominance of official 'development knowledge'. You will not find topics on "political economy" or "inequality" or "discrimination", just concepts like "governance" and "human development". Moreover the Gateway's 130-issue taxonomy ghettoises cross-cutting issues such as gender and climate change.

Second, the claim that the site is independent is untenable. This is a clear attempt by the Bank to consolidate itself and its allies as the main authorities on "development knowledge". This is reflected in both the content and process of the Gateway. For instance, in order to provide local content, the Gateway has its own country portals. These will be run by government officials, private business and civil society groups appointed without any clear criteria of representativeness. The content of these gateways will be policed. Within these country gateways, site contributors are told to avoid "country/locale specific events", and not to use metaphors, puns or irony in order "to aid machine translation".

The Bank is appointing individual or institutional "topic guides" to filter and organise material in each of the site's subject areas. The Gateway is supposed to represent all perspectives and all types of analysis. The only reason to exclude items is if they fail to meet the site's "quality" criteria, yet it remains extremely unclear as to how this quality threshold is determined. And given the volume and diversity of information posted on the internet daily, it is unlikely that the guides' coverage will be comprehensive. With the best will in the world, then, topic guides' selections will be biased in favour of the intellectual tastes of themselves and their contacts.

The third, and most pernicious, effect of the development gateway is to undermine alternatives. Instead of encouraging existing initiatives, the Bank has chosen to centralise internet coverage of development issues in a bid to sift and control the flow of ideas. This is likely to distract from and damage the development of diverse, independent internet sites on these issues.

This is why, in our individual capacities, we pledge to avoid all contact, whether official or otherwise, with the World Bank's Development Gateway. We encourage our colleagues to undertake a similar pledge, and to support alternative sources of knowledge.

Signed (as individuals, organisation names provided for reference only)

Initial signatories:

Yash Tandon, International South Group Network, Zimbabwe
Patrick Bond, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Phil McMichael, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Chris Brooke, Magdalen College, Oxford University
Rutendo Kambarami, Communications Officer, Mwelekeo waNGO, Zimbabwe

To sign, send a message to [email protected] with your name and organization in the subject line.

I would be very interested to learn what any of you think of the recent book by Hernando de Soto: The Mystery of Capital. Does it shed some light on why, in spite of transfers of "the $56 billion that OECD countries counted as Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 1999", and much larger sums over the last 50 years, "it is equally obvious that ... poverty and inequality continuing to increase".

If the 20th century model of development is not working, clearly we need to find a 21st century approach that delivers more positive results.

de Soto writes about capitalism flourishing in a bell jar. What is the bell jar made of? If it is made of transparent laws, financial institutions, regulatory regimes & culture in some dynamic mix, then "expanding the jar" is what de Soto is talking about. The point is that all peoples have to have a seat at the table and a voice in the conversation as full partners. This is clearly not the case today. It was obvious to me in rural Jamaica that the control of the flows of information and money were widely seen as the keys to political power. It is reasonably obvious that this view of power is also currently dominant in Washington, D.C. as well. Attempts to free these flows from centralized controls of the elites is generally seen as subversive and most unwelcome.

US political theory at its best assumes that we, the people, are all full partners in our self government. In too many cases, however, citizens and consumers are NOT seen as partners. Too often we the people are viewed merely as passive targets to be manipulated and controlled by monologues and advertising from the elites in the center, be they left wing communists or right wing capitalists.

One thing I am guessing is that neither de Soto nor the KABISSA-FAHAMU NEWSLETTER discuss, or fully value, the power of the Internet to give many more citizens a seat at the table and a voice in the conversation as full partners. What's more, the Internet grants these new partners powers which are greatly amplified by the possibilities of self organizing collective actions at the local level of the edge. The Internet is, after all, fundamentally about exchange and conversation at the edge, independent of the center.

It just may be that the online gaming experience will catalyze self organizing political action groups. That is, gaming may have the unexpected and unintended consequences of allowing very large numbers of people to experience the power of collaborative actions and communications which they control as partners.

Thoughts?

– jock gill

The purpose of Kellogg Foundation programming in southern Africa is to assist in the social and economic transformation of the region, and to nurture the area's emerging democracies. Within these countries, W.K. Kellogg Foundation programming will strive to strengthen the capacity of Africans, their families, organisations, and institutions as they work to develop and sustain healthy communities.

Development, State and Society is a nuanced overview of economic thought, political formations and social issues applied to Africa.

The focus of this premier course is human rights as seen from the African perspective. This Master's Degreee is a regional cooperation initiative under the auspices of the Association of African Universities (AAU) presented in partnership by:

- The Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria
- The Faculty of Law, University of Ghana
- The Faculty of Law, Makerere University (Uganda)
- The Faculty of Law, University of the Western Cape (South Africa).

En visite en France du 20 au 23 juin, le président sénégalais Abdoulaye Wade, 75 ans, a plaidé la cause de son plan «Oméga». Le vieil avocat dessine pour L'Express les contours du programme d'investissements massifs qu'il soumettra en juillet à ses pairs, lors du sommet de l'Organisation de l'unité africaine de Lusaka (Zambie). De la Casamance au sort d'Hissène Habré, le tombeur d'Abdou Diouf esquisse aussi sa vision du continent.

Africa Network Meeting
Lusaka, Zambia,July 7-8, 2001

The Africa Democracy Forum (AFD)will hold a p0arallel meeting at the 37th Summit of the Organization of African Unity.

Migrants contre le sida, c'est l'émission de radio qui s'adresse directement aux séropositifs d'origine arabe et africaine. Chaque mardi de 17 à 18 heures sur la radio Fréquence Paris Plurielle (FPP) 106,3 MHz FM (région parisienne). L'émission de la semaine est re-diffusée sur FPP le mercredi matin de 11 heures à midi. Enfin, vous pouvez aussi écouter l'émission sur Internet (à la demande) avec votre lecteur MP3. Pour recevoir le sommaire complet de chaque émission avant sa diffusion, abonnez-vous (C'est gratuit).

Southern Africa AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS) is looking for an Information Officer to join its team, based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Qualifications: a relevant degree with five years experience in journalism or communications. Contact: SAfAIDS, PO Box A509, Avondale, Harare, Zimbabwe. Deadline: 13 July, 2001.

It's Friday night and it's the start of a long weekend for most Mozambicans... Rosalina, a receptionist for a South African company in the capital Maputo, was diagnosed HIV-positive early last year. "At first I could not believe it. I also did not want to believe it and for a little while I just forgot about it. But it's not something that you can forget. There is always something in your mind," Rosalina says above the music, but not without checking first that no one is listening.

UNHCR is planning to hold a refugee forum on 14-16 September 2001 in Rouen, France. 'The Refugee Perspective' will feed into the Global Consultations process that UNHCR launched this year in the hope of re-invigorating the 1951 refugee convention. The registration deadline is July 1. For information, please contact the Conference Secretariat.

Islamic governments, with the connivance of the conservative Bush administration, succeeded in watering down the final declaration of commitment to strategies and targets to beat the global Aids pandemic at the UN yesterday by excluding any reference to gay men.

The Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants aims at promoting respect for fundamental human and social rights in all issues related to undocumented migrants within Europe. Their new website will provide extensive information on the specific theme of undocumented migrants within Europe.

Isis-Women's International Cross Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE) is hosting the Kampala Know How Conference 2002 from 23 - 27 July 2002 in Kampala, Uganda. Isis-WICCE is now hiring a Conference Manager for the period June 2001 - October 2002 to lead the process of organising the conference. Skills and qualifications: experience working in Africa, managing groups and budgets, interest in women and human rights. Contact details: Isis-WICCE Attn. The Director Tel: +256-41-543-953.

A group of prominent Zimbabweans calling itself Citizens' AIDS Survival Trust (CAST) is lobbying government to evoke section 13 (2) G of the Constitution of Zimbabwe to contain the AIDS pandemic. Section 13 (2) G calls for the suspension of civil liberties in the event of an outbreak of infectious and contagious diseases. CAST has called on the government to declare a state of emergency as the best option to contain the AIDS epidemic.

The intersection between asylum and migration is to be discussed for the first time in a forum in Geneva during UNHCR's Global Consultations on the refugee protection regime. From the outset, given the present political discourse in predominantly Western countries, it is clear that this intersection evokes different concepts for different stakeholders. It is therefore to be regretted that two major stakeholders, UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), frame the discussion within a "control" perspective and use language such as "concerns about uncontrolled irregular migration."

A new international cybercrime treaty may soon be adopted despite heavy criticism from privacy groups and industry leaders. In response, several GILC member organizations, including Privacy International, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, have submitted a letter "to voice ... continuing concerns regarding the development and form" of the treaty.

As Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade prepares to meet with President Bush Thursday, Human Rights Watch urged him to comply with a United Nations request to hold the exiled Chadian dictator Hissène Habré so that Habré could be extradited to face torture charges.

In a landmark judgement for the online age, the highest court in America has ruled 7-2 that freelance writers did not give consent for media companies to publish their work on Web sites when they signed contracts for print publication.

Access to the information highway is by small roads connected to homes and communities. Download a book on how it works in Africa.

Human Rights Watch warmly welcomed today's decision by the Security Council to recommend to the General Assembly the reappointment of Kofi A. Annan for a second term as the United Nations Secretary-General. Earlier today, the Council unanimously chose the Ghanaian to serve for another five years as the world organization's seventh head.

Tobacco is the only product which kills when used as intended. Despite scientific certainty on the health effects of tobacco it continues to be promoted and controls remain weak in most countries. This is due primarily to the economic and political influence of the transnationals tobacco industry. The negotiation of the world's first public health treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, is creating an important precedent and bringing tobacco control into the centre stage.

The UN General Assembly's historic Special
Session on HIV/AIDS ended on Wednesday with what Secretary-General Kofi Annan described as a "clear strategy" for tackling the epidemic.

Killer AIDS has orphaned over one million children in Kenya. Millions more, affected by the epidemic in other ways, are being forced, due to lack of adequate state support to drop out of school and seek often-dangerous work on the streets in order to care for ill parents.

Till the other day, Lacinan Seogo was one of Save the Children's sponsored children in Burkina Faso at the age of 8. He has come a long way since then and today teaches children in Babdo, the village where he grew up.

Unmet need for contraception in developing countries is often attributed to a lack of family planning services. Yet the problem of unmet need persists in urban areas with reasonable access to services. Is poor communication between couples responsible for continuing unmet contraceptive need?

Are people in low-income areas aware of the risks of drinking dirty water? What can be done to improve the quality of drinking water for poorer people? Researchers from Population Services International and the Zambian Society for Family Health report on the results of a survey in low-income neighbourhoods in Lusaka, Zambia.

It is fortuitous that a seemingly innocent request for data by the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Professor Jerry Gana, may yet unravel the deep-rooted scam in the yearly federal budget.

President Daniel arap Moi and his ruling party have been buying votes by pumping money into traditional fund-raisers that have long been used to raise financing for public development, an advocacy group said Monday.

COSATU is extremely worried by the statements by Minister of Health casting doubt on whether the South African government will provide anti retrovirals even if they become more affordable. The prevarication by the Minister of Health amounts to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, particularly after the victory scored against the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. COSATU believes that there is sufficient reason for the government to begin a programme of providing anti retrovirals as part of a comprehensive treatment strategy.