Sustainable development means the elimination of poverty in ways that do not damage the environment for future generations. If world leaders can't take steps to ensure trade benefits poor people and the environment, who can?Write to world leaders with your demands on sustainable development.

Some school children in Zimbabwe cannot afford to buy a pencil. Often up to ten children share one pencil between them and in some cases children just cannot write or participate in lessons because of  the lack of stationery. Got some pencils or pens that you can spare? Then please share them with these children.

Recent revelations to the effect that Kenya will lose approximately 25,000 teachers to HIV/Aids within the next 10 years spells doom for the country's education sector. This is a sector that is currently suffering from a shortage of staff as a result of sporadic teacher recruitment.

Please take action to denounce the trial of South African activists protesting government policy. Demand the African National Congress, South Africa's ruling party, implement free water and electricity services to their impoverished people, as was internationally advertised two years ago! Send an email or fax a letter to Mayor Masondo, denouncing his treatment and arrest of activists who protested the failure to address the lack of affordable water and electricity in April. Their trial begins on August 15.

Support the women of the Niger Delta by writing to ChevronTexaco urging them to fulfil its part of the agreement that ended the siege on its oil terminal in Nigeria.

Sustainable development means the elimination of poverty in ways that do not damage the environment for future generations. If world leaders can't take steps to ensure trade benefits poor people and the environment, who can?Write to world leaders with your demands on sustainable development.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) opened in Durban at the International Convention Centre (ICC) on 5 June 2002. I managed, on the strength of an SABC interview, to enter the portals of the ICC. As the day unfolded I moved between a passionate band of protestors outside and the soirée happening inside. It gave a wonderful insight into the unfolding transition in the country. Inside Jay Naidoo, the former Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) general secretary and Minister in charge of the RDP, wandered around. He wore a beautiful green suit and a pair of brogues with an extra layer of leather on the heel. Working the other side of the expansive foyer was former chief of NEDLAC and Arms Acquisitions czar now Executive Director of the J&J Group Jayendra Naidoo. As they moved closer, I watched from the balcony with bated breath. Without taking their eyes off future contacts and contracts they passed each other in choreographed moves reminiscent of the O'Jays. Outside the protestors were being pushed behind barricades some 300 metres from the ICC. At the previous year's WEF conference they were right outside the ICC but this time the police would have none of it. Undeterred, the protestors were busy rigging up a speaker system and giving out pamphlets condemning Thabo Mbeki's New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) as a home-grown form of structural adjustment.

INSIDE THE TRANSITION

The integration and deracialisation of the economy with accompanying liberalization and marketisation has wrought significant economic changes. The African middle class and professional class have grown considerably while a small economic elite is furiously consolidating. […]

Central to the transition also is the impact on the composition of the South African working class wrought by the macroeconomic strategy of the ANC. A recent Reserve Bank report has shown that wages for skilled workers have steadily grown as well as productivity. The report also discerned a growing gulf between the unionised and better skilled on the one hand, and marginalized South Africans on the other.[…]

Alongside this one has spiralling unemployment. In 2001 University of Cape Town economist Haroon Bhorat wrote that "the job creation performance of the formal economy has been abysmal". This conclusion has been supported by later studies that have pointed to escalating job loss and unemployment. […]

According to the 1996 Census the poorest 40 percent of our population got less than 3 percent of the national income, while the richest 10 percent enjoyed over 50 percent. The poorest 40 percent of African households' economic situation has progressively worsened over the last decade. […]

Ironically inequality has been exacerbated by the lack of state support (like a social wage) with South Africans aged between seven and 59 (women) or 64 (men) totally cut-off from any form of social security. This translates into over 13,8 million people in the poorest 40 percent of South Africa's households not qualifying for any social security transfers. This means that the poor have had to largely come to rely on themselves for survival. […]

This then is the economic location of the Poors - the unemployed and lower working class. […]

THE NEO-LIBERAL SQUEEZE AT THE ‘LOCAL’

The Poors have been spewed out by the transition. It is the Poors who have opposed the water and electricity cut-offs and evictions and who have begun making connections between their situation and that of people first in Soweto and Tafelsig but then also in Bolivia, South Korea, America's prisons, Zimbabwe and Chiapas. But the Poors have no grand ideology. They are actors on a local stage, squaring off against home-grown villains like Operation Masakhane. The latter is touted as "part of a drive to normalise governance and the provision of basic services at the local level. It aims to persuade people across South Africa that they must contribute to this process through participation and by paying for housing and services". But where would the money come from to pay for services?

In the most comprehensive study of affordability David McDonald found a serious crisis. "If for example, 18 percent of the seven million people who are reported to have been given access to water since 1994 are unable to pay their water bills 'no matter how hard (they) try', then 1.26 million of these new recipients are unable to afford this water and an additional 1.2 million have to choose between paying for water and buying other essentials like food. Similar percentages apply to the 3.5 million South Africans who have been given access to electricity". […]

RISE OF COMMUNITY MOVEMENTS

As the ANC's assault on the poor resulted in more and more evictions, disconnections and retrenchments a variety of new community movements began to arise. Hesitantly at first, movements began to arise to challenge the water and electricity cut-offs, the evictions and lack of land redistribution. The rise of these movements based in particular communities and evincing particular, mainly defensive demands, was not merely a natural result of poverty or marginality but a direct response to state policy.

The state's inability or unwillingness to be a provider of public services and the guarantor of the conditions of collective consumption has been a spark for a plethora of community movements. While the movements mobilize around diverse demands like land titles, water and electricity supplies, access to housing and health facilities, the general nature of the neo-liberal emergency concentrates and aims these demands towards the state.
[…]

The Poors, or what others have variously called the "multitude", "the unwaged", "slaves-in-waiting", the "metropolitan militant", "the mob" and "the wretched of the earth" have come to constitute the most relevant social force post-1994 from the point of view of challenging the prevailing political economy. The community movements of the Poors have challenged the very boundaries of what for a short while after the demise of the apartheid state was seen exclusively as "politics". […] The poor are not just involved in recognition, or the discovery of the right policies, or the creation of the right administrative framework, or even the goodwill of power-holders. They are challenging the very distribution of power in society and are doing so in ways that do not stick to the gradualist, corporatist, and nation-building script.

UN-CIVIL SOCIETY

The new social movements were strong enough to put 20 000 on the streets at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban. They have fought off the state's hired guns to prevent evictions and disconnections. They have reconnected water and electricity. Although they are still fragmented and largely without money for transport and printing and legal fees they have made one thing very clear: the Poors will not take the neo-liberal assault on their lives lying down. They will fight and the fight has begun. This is a struggle that already has heroes, legends and martyrs. Already the ANC flag is being burnt and spat at outside the Martin West Building that houses the debt collectors of the eThekwini Council in Durban.

Their actions have achieved a number of successes. The Council in Durban announced the writing off of arrears to the tune of R17 million in June 2002 soon after 5000 residents marched onto their offices. In Cape Town and Johannesburg the reconnection of water and electricity by community movements has reached 'epidemic' proportions, reappropriating basic needs and creating no-go zones of decommodification. […]

If community movements are to grow and spread and build a culture of revolutionary confrontation, they have serious challenges to confront in the immediate. The Poors face an ANC which, sensing the growing combativeness of the Poors, have started to differentiate the ANC from government and the ANC as a liberation movement, not to challenge the former but to try and head off challenges emanating from outside corporatist structures. […]Alongside this there has been increased repression. The Regulation of Public Gatherings Act of 1993 gives police and civic authorities far reaching powers in preventing and even banning mass demonstrations. The recent arrest of National Land Committee and Landless People's Movement members in Ermelo is a particularly graphic example of the repressive use of this Act.

Beyond the immediate challenges, the Poors have serious questions, which strike at the heart of a longer-term project. How do they link up with the militant unions like SAMWU? How do they broaden their movement into rural areas that are either marked by a absence of basic services or when they do arrive are commodified in a manner putting it out of reach of the intended consumers? […] What is to be their relation to the formal institutional sphere of 'politics'? In particular should they contest elections at least at a local level? How are connections to be made with similar struggles in Zimbabwe, in Mexico, in Argentina, in Indonesia and with those movements directly taking on the IMF and the World Bank on the streets of Seattle and Genoa? How do the Poors turn their actions that have remained defensive (fighting bloody battles to stay in the apartheid ghettoes) into demands that take the offensive against the neo-liberal state? One of the dangers is that the very success of campaigns like Operation Khanyisa is that it leads to demobilization because once people have their lights switched on, they do not see the need for the collective. It also serves the purpose of reducing anger because people now have lights and water. This has certainly been the case in Mpumalanga, Chatsworth and Wentworth. This is the danger of remaining localized, particularistic and single issue. The state faced with collective resistance and exposes at a public level, simply retreats from the more militant areas and moves to areas less organized. […]

WE ARE THE POORS
Ashwin Desai

We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most unexpected of community movements, beginning in one township of Durban, linking up with community and labour struggles in other parts of the country, and coming together in massive anti-government protests at the time of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001. It describes from the inside how the downtrodden regain their dignity and create hope for a better future in the face of a neo-liberal onslaught, and shows the human faces of the struggle against the corporate model of globalization in a Third World country.

The Global Campaign for Refugee Health is a campaign to increase public awareness and funding for programs to prevent and treat infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria that afflict refugees and other displaced people worldwide.

The Global Campaign for Refugee Health is a campaign to increase public awareness and funding for programs to prevent and treat infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria that afflict refugees and other displaced people worldwide.

Anti-Slavery International has launched an on-line campaign: Stop Human Traffic. By visiting the web site site, you can access information about human trafficking and take action to help us bring an end to this modern day slave trade.

Pygmies were among 682,640 children under the age of five years vaccinated against polio during the first round of the first cross-border, synchronised polio vaccination campaign for 2002 to be held in the Republic of the Congo between 25 and 29 July.

Not less than 284,000 child labourers work in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms in West Africa, findings released by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United States Department of Labour (DOL) have shown.

The international campaign to improve access to treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS has seen some recent successes. But the battle is not yet won. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) has joined Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA) in a new campaign phase to lobby the British government to secure more assistance in the battle against AIDS through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which was set up in 2001. Join the campaign and write to Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development.

Exploitative child labour is still rampant in cocoa-producing communities of West Africa, fresh findings from a joint study by the region's governments, the United States and other stakeholders of the international cocoa industry, show.

Cheikh Kone, a journalist from the Ivory Coast, is one victim among many languishing in Australia's detention camps. His detention without charge or trial, with no accusation even that he has committed any crime at all, is now entering its twenty-first month. Armed robbers and those guilty of violent crimes often fare better. Please write letters to the Australian authorities politely asking that Cheikh Kone be released from detention and that he be given adequate legal representation.

US NGOs, citizen and public interest groups are asking for your signature to a statement addressing critical priorities and concerns about the positions and actions of the U.S. government at the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa this month. Originally produced and delivered at a press conference last month in Bali, Indonesia at the final preparatory meeting for the Summit, the statement responds to the question asked throughout the two weeks of the meeting: "What are we going to do about the United States?"

Burkina Faso and Niger are to conduct a joint campaign to vaccinate at least 500,000 children aged 12 months to five years, officials of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou, told IRIN.

After a one-month postponement due to a series of political elections, the Republic of Congo (ROC) launched on Thursday this year's nationwide campaign to vaccinate 682,640 children aged five years and under against polio, with assurances of access to all districts of the troubled Pool region, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

A group of young people who have been active in the WSIS process and with organizations involved in youth, ICTs, sustainable development, and human rights have formed a Youth Arm of the Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) campaign. We invite those interested in working with CRIS youth to join our mailing list.

Freedominfo.org is a newly released site that provides data on freedom of information laws from areas all across the globe. Designed to link the efforts of freedom of information advocates around the world and give voice to movements that have previously struggled for greater openness, this site contains a global survey that summarizes these laws in 45 countries.[From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2002 http://scout.cs.wisc.edu]