This is a practical, do-it-yourself guide for leaders and facilitators wanting to help organisations to function and to develop in more healthy, human and effective ways as they strive to make their contributions to a more humane society. It has been developed by the Barefoot Collective.

Libya will exercise its right to buy Verenex Energy Inc., trumping a proposed C$499 million ($393 million) takeover of the Canadian explorer by China National Petroleum Corp. “We will exercise the right of preemption,” Shokri Ghanem, chairman of Libya’s state-run National Oil Corp., said today in an interview in Vienna. Libya wants to buy the Calgary-based explorer for “purely commercial reasons,” he said. Under the preemption clause, Libya has to match the offer from China’s biggest oil company.

Telecoms operator Neotel has become the anchor tenant on the Seacom cable, poised to deliver vast quantities of cheaper bandwidth to SA through a deal struck by its parent company, Tata Communications. Tata, which owns 56% of Neotel, has signed up as the undersea cable’s first big customer, and has struck another deal to actually manage the cable, its billing systems and customer relations on behalf of Seacom.

Lifan Group, one of the biggest privately-owned enterprises in China, will set up a vehicle assembly plant, the first of its type, in Ethiopia with an initial investment outlay of $10 million, Pan Juequan, chief representative of the company and project manager of the future establishment in Ethiopia told The Reporter. Lifan Group is also the sole supplier of engines, motors and spare-parts for the locally assembled Holland Car which produces Abay and Awash antomobile for the local market and export.

China has lost tens of billions of dollars of its foreign exchange reserves through a poorly timed diversification into global equities just before world markets collapsed last year. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the opaque manager of nearly $2,000bn (€1,547bn, £1,429bn) of reserves, started making huge bets on global stocks early in 2007 and continued this strategy at least until the collapse of the US mortgage finance providers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in July 2008, according to analysts and people familiar with Safe’s operations.

A group of Mozambique's nineteen development partners on Wednesday approved a $816 million aid package to support the government's 2009 state budget and other development projects for the next five years. The group, known as the Programme Aid Partners (PAP), who provide support to the national budget, are the largest grouping of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Indian vehicle manufacturer Mahindra and Mahindra has increased its stake in the joint venture with its South African partner to 90 percent from 51 percent, and invested a further 30 million rands ($3 million) in the country’s automotive business. Mahindra South Africa, which launched its new multipurpose vehicle Xylo here last week, also expressed confidence in the South African auto market, though other manufacturers reported record drops in sales in the wake of the global economic downturn.

Current global economic meltdown might be a blessing in disguise for Tanzania should long term strategies be employed to revamp its agricultural sector, Standard Chartered Bank` s Regional Head of Research, Africa Razia Khan has said.
Addressing a press conference in Dar es Salaam this week, Khan said the country stands to benefit immensely from adequate investment in agriculture, its traditional economic mainstay, owing to expected increase in demand for food and food products in countries currently grappling with the economic recession.

More opportunities for Chinese investment into Africa are to open up soon, with the announcement that China is to bolster its China-Africa Development Fund by an additional R19.8-billion ($2-billion). The state-run equity fund has already invested in 20 projects, totalling a massive R3.9-billion ($400-million), in Africa since it was established in June 2007. The latest development will give Chinese enterprises added impetus to sink their funds into the continent, particularly in light of the withdrawal of Western investors, many of whom find themselves under financial pressure because of the global recession.

Sino-African relations have aroused a lot of attention from around the world. Some are critical and some see more positive changes. Thus how to look at Sino-African relations depends on how one understands such relations. At a seminar in Stockholm last week, Dr. Henning Melber, Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskyöld Foundation in Uppsala in Sweden gave an overview on Sino-African relations and some changes in the current situation.

China has expressed “serious concern” to Sudan’s government about the expulsion of aid workers from Darfur, yet won’t back United Nations Security Council pressure to reverse the decision, China’s envoy said. “We have openly expressed our concern,” China’s ambassador to the UN, Zhang Yesui, said in an interview in New York. “We have advised the Sudanese government to be restrained. We told them we do not want the humanitarian situation to worsen.”

During six days at the end of January, citizens, movements and organizations from 142 countries gathered in the city of Belem for the IX World Social Forum. More than 2300 activities involved 113 thousands participants in panels, debates, seminars, cultural events, marches, demonstrations, and open spaces for direct interactions in this edition of the event in the heart of the Amazon region.

On the weekend of May 22-24, African organizers from across the U.S. and Canada will converge on Washington, D.C. for a conference recognizing African Liberation Day (ALD) with the theme, “One Africa, One Nation: Separated by Colonial Slavery, Reunited by Revolutionary Resistance!” The event, organized by the African People’s Socialist Party, will serve to formally establish the North American Region of the African Socialist International (ASI), a worldwide party uniting African workers to liberate Africa and its people wherever they have been dispersed.

Constitutive on the "International Day of Action against the Commercialization of Education" on Nov.5th 2008, the International Students Movement is calling for a Global Week of Action in April 2009 (20/04 – 29/04). We are a loose network of various progressive (student) groups from close to 30 countries on 5 continents. What unites us is the struggle against the increasing commercialization of education and for emancipating public education accessible to all members of society.

Black activists around the country will hold simultaneous press conferences on Saturday, March 21, 2009, also the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racism. The December 12th Movement International Secretariat will hold a Press Conference in New York City to protest President Barack Obama’s threat to boycott the United Nations World Conference against Racism - Durban Review being held in Geneva Switzerland next month.

In a reaction to the alarming data released in the 2009 State of the World's Forests report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Friends of the Earth International and the Global Forest Coalition, two leading networks of environmental and Indigenous Peoples' Organisations, called on world governments to take immediate action to halt deforestation and forest degradation.

Rights & Democracy (International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development) presents the John Humphrey Award each year to an organization or individual from any region of the world, including Canada, for outstanding achievement in the promotion of human rights and democratic development. The Award consists of a grant of $30,000, and a speaking tour of Canadian cities to help increase awareness of the recipient’s human rights work. It is named in honour of the late John Peters Humphrey, the Canadian human rights law professor who prepared the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The global financial and economic system is in crisis. Existing economic policies and institutions have overseen an economic system scarred by high levels of poverty and inequality, which is contributing to an environmental catastrophe. Blind faith in the virtues of markets, and inadequate public control, regulation and accountability of finance are at the heart of the financial crisis. Before the financial crisis, people across the world and in Britain were already suffering from the effects of rising food prices, inadequate essential services and the threat of climate chaos. There can be no return to business as usual. Fundamental change is needed.

cc As the international financial crisis points to the collapse of laissez faire economics and discredits market fundamentalism, Africa and the global South should break free from failed neoliberal policies and the institutions that have promoted them and define their own paths to development, writes Demba Moussa Dembele, director of the Forum for African Alternatives.

The crisis provides fundamental lessons, says Dembele, the first being that markets do not have self-correcting mechanisms, and that market failures are not less costly than state failures. Secondly, "the collapse of the neoliberal dogma is a major blow to the international financial institutions. What is even more devastating to them is the reversal of most of the policies they had advocated for decades in Africa and in other ‘poor’ countries under the now discredited SAPs (structural adjustment programmes). The IMF and the World Bank are supporting fiscal stimulus – expansionary fiscal policies – in the United States, Europe and Asia."

Thirdly, its clear that the state remains a central player in solving crises caused by markets, and is not the sole cause of economic and social problems in Africa that neoliberal policy has categorised it as. Dembele notes that many development agencies do not have Africa’s best interests at heart, citing failures to cancel debt and to dedicate 0.7 per cent of GDP to official development assistance budgets, along with restricting the access of African exports to Western markets. In contrast, US$4 trillion was made available in matter of weeks to tackle the international financial crisis, 45 times the total aid budget of the European Union and the USA for 2007.

Dembele calls for Africa and Africans to forget neoliberal capitalism and explore new paths to ‘an endogenous development for and by its people’, recommending that Africa should restore capital controls and reject unfavourable trade liberalisation policies, as well as reversing the privatisation of key sectors and natural resources. Likewise, the author calls for African governments to restore the role of the state in the development process, reclaim the debate on African development while learning from the experiences of other countries in the global South, and to build an alternative means for financing development including South–South co-operation and the integration of diaspora remittances into a coherent strategy.

Aid groups in eastern Chad are on alert for an eventual flooding of people into the area, after the government of Sudan sent out NGOs providing water, food and health care to millions of people in Darfur. The Sudanese government had expelled 13 aid groups from Darfur after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant of arrest for its president, Omar el-Bashir.