Schools that serve poor students in developing countries often lack even the most basic infrastructure. Students sit at simple desks, which in many cases must be purchased by the students themselves. Classrooms lack textbooks so students must copy all material off of a chalkboard. Teachers are often poorly trained and unprepared to teach their overflowing classes.

A paper recently issued by the IMF examines the macro-economic impact of the aggregated remittance flows on the economies that receive them. The paper addresses two main issues: how to manage the remittance macroeconomic effects, and how to harness their development potential. The findings yield a number of important caveats and policy considerations, however, that have largely been overlooked. The main challenge for policymakers in countries that receive significant flows of remittances is to design policies that promote remittances and increase their benefits while mitigating adverse side effects.

Public-private partnership organisations (PPPOs) — which focus on African neglected diseases — have failed to change the imperialist research paradigm or involve African researchers on an equal basis, say T. J. Tucker and M. W. Makgoba in Science.

More than 10 million children around the world die before their fifth birthday every year, according to a new report by UNICEF, the United Nations Children Fund. The report, "The State of Africa's Children 2008," was launched on May 28 at the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development in Japan. It looks at the successes and failures of governments regarding the health and survival of the children of Africa and is complementary to a broader UNICEF report on the health of the world's children.

International aid groups are rushing to provide assistance to tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians displaced by fighting in the disputed oil-rich Abyei area before seasonal rains hamper aid flows, aid groups said. Civilians fled the central town of Abyei during over a week of clashes between northern and southern troops earlier in May, prompting fears of further conflict just at the onset of the rainy season.

Amnesty International has challenged world leaders to apologize for six decades of human rights failure and re-commit themselves to deliver concrete improvements. “The human rights flashpoints in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Gaza, Iraq and Myanmar demand immediate action,” said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, launching AI Report 2008: State of the World’s Human Rights.

The International Monetary Fund no longer has the financial clout to fulfil its traditional role of lending out money to save crisis-stricken countries, a new Bank of England report has warned. The Bank said in a working paper that the IMF's lending framework "may no longer be appropriate". It coincided with a critical report from the Fund's own Internal Evaluation Office (IEO).

Why is budget participation important? How can meaningful citizen participation in budgeting be fostered? This chapter of a World Bank book examines participation theory and case studies from Brazil, India, South Africa, Uganda and the United States. Citizen participation can make local service delivery more effective. Government attitudes and the role of civil society are both key in improving budget participation.

The Muslim Human Rights Forum (MHRF) is demanding action by the government of Kenya on behalf of a Kenyan national detained without trial in Saudi Arabia since September 2007. The Kenyan Abdullahi Adan Sheikh Ali, 23, a fourth year student at Madina University was detained at Jeddah Airport by immigration officials who told him they wanted to question him about his visa. Efforts by his family in Kenya to establish his whereabouts only bore fruits in December last year when he called to say that he was being held in a jail in Riyadh.

"From the late 1990's onwards, the research of children and childhoods has gradually become a topic of study in the social sciences. Children have increasingly come into the limelight as culture makers and not just as extensions to the study of adults. At the same time, African children have remained in the margins of such studies despite the fact that over forty percent of Africans are under the age of fifteen.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/376/48440china.jpgChina’s media and official reaction to the devastating Sichuan earthquake has been given generally positive coverage by Western media and governments, writes Stephen Marks. It may be a coincidence, but the earthquake and the allegedly more open reaction happen to follow soon after the coming into force of sweeping new Chinese government regulations on transparency - which could be a useful lever for activists seeking greater transparency in tracking the impact of China’s African footprint.

China’s media and official reaction to the devastating Sichuan earthquake has been given generally positive coverage by Western media and governments - both by contrast with the Burmese military junta’s handling of the recent floods, and also with Beijing’s reaction to previous natural disasters.

The Shanghai-based blog reviews and discusses the generally favourable global and Western reaction.

It may be a coincidence, but the earthquake and the allegedly more open reaction happen to follow soon after the coming into force of sweeping new Chinese government regulations on transparency - which could be a useful lever for activists seeking greater transparency in tracking the impact of China’s African footprint.

May 1 saw the entry into force of the Measures on Open Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation), issued by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. According to Ma Jun, Director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Chinese environmental NGO, ‘the measures require environment agencies to disclose 17 different kinds of environmental information, including regional environmental quality, amounts of discharge and the records of polluters in various regions’.

The categories of information which the new measures require to be made available to the public include:

- A list of enterprises violating discharge standards or exceeding discharge quota limits;

- Letters, visits and complaints filed about pollution caused by enterprises; and the result of their disposal;

-Administrative punishments, reviews, lawsuits and enforcement;

- A list of enterprises causing major and extremely large pollution accidents and incidents;

- Enterprises that refuse to comply with the effective administrative punishment decisions.

Enterprises listed for environmental violations must publish detailed discharge data within 30 days, on pain of a fine, and members of the public have a legal right to require environmental agencies to publish the list of polluting firms.

In addition, enterprises are encouraged to publish a much wider range of information regarding their environmental impact, and firms agreeing to do so will be rewarded with priority in the allocation of contracts for government-funded environmental projects.

All of which dovetails significantly with the conclusions reached last month in Nairobi at a strategy meeting of some 20 civil society activists and researchers from across Africa organised by Fahamu to discuss China’s growing African involvement.

A central theme to emerge from the meeting was the lack of direct links between Chinese and African civil society; While most African civil society groups are not explicitly concerned with China (and vice-versa) they are very much concerned with issues with a strong China dimension, and high on that list are issues connected with the environment.

Could African civil society groups pressure Chinese companies in Africa to raise their game, in ways which Chinese activists could use as leverage back home? This possibility might well be reversed if the new Chinese regulations prove to have teeth - African campaigners could press Chinese firms to be as open in Africa as they may yet be required to be in China.

The Chinese Government has a declared policy that where local laws are lacking or deficient, Chinese companies should abide by the relevant Chinese legislation. So participants at the Nairobi meeting agreed that better knowledge of China's own domestic laws, both on environmental regulation and on issues of employee rights and broader social responsibility, would help.

If the new regulations on disclosure prove to have teeth they could prove a useful basis for closer co-operation between environmental activists in China and in Africa. But how effective are the new rules likely to prove in practice?

As Ma Jun points out ‘It is well-known that there is weak enforcement of laws and regulations in China. As a law that reflects new thinking, the implementation of the measures is expected to be even more challenging’.

On the plus side, the regulations are launched by the energetic and radical Environment Minister Pan Yue whose State Environmental Protection Administration [SEPA] has since the last Party Congress, been officially retitled and promoted to the status of Ministry of Environmental Protection [MEP].

Pan Yue is on record as connecting China’s environmental crisis with the uncritical adoption of Western capitalist models of industrialisation, and the consequent widening of .

So it is not surprising that his Ministry was among the first to issue .

Which brings us back to the issue of government and media reaction to the earthquake crisis. Some of the positive Western comment has explicitly linked the greater openness about the scale of the disaster and even of inadequacies in the response, to the new directives on openness - Financial Times reported last week that:

‘In spite of wall-to-wall coverage of the earthquake in Sichuan province, the ruling Communist Party has been working hard to shape the news.

'A meeting of the party’s most powerful propaganda officials on Tuesday stressed the importance of “correct guidance of public opinion” and ordered a strengthening of political consciousness among journalists.

'All frontline coverage of the disaster should “uphold unity and encourage stability” while “giving precedence to positive propaganda”, ordered Li Changchun, a member of the party’s supreme Politburo standing committee, the People’s Daily reported.’

Just what these central edicts will mean in practice is still not clear. In the same issue of the Financial Times Mure Dickie analysed the implications in a piece headed China Media Project [CMP] at Hong Kong University reports that:

‘CMP has confirmed with sources inside China’s media that the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department (...) has issued “numerous” directives on coverage of the Sichuan earthquake, including a directive against “critical reporting” on the disaster. The general atmosphere for coverage, however, seems to remain relatively open. While media have been instructed to follow the lead of central party media – Xinhua News Agency, CCTV and company – regional commercial media can and are, for the moment, pursuing the story with intensity.’

CMP illustrates the point with a comparison of the coverage in the official Xinhuanet, site of the official Xinhua news agency, and Caijing, the leading independent business and current affairs magazine.

So where does that leave us? Central government agencies that issue commendable regulations, which will not be implemented by sluggish and self-interested officials unless, perhaps, they are forced to by energetic popular pressure. And politicians who encourage press openness - as long as it is ‘positive’ and avoids ‘irresponsible sensationalism’.

Sound familiar? Clearly Chinese and African civil society activists will have a lot of common experiences to share in future.

*Stephen Marks is research associate with Fahamu.

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

First of all your premise in that the poverty and economic stagnation in African countries is cause by corrupt and incompetent government is a narrow interpretation of the difficulties which beset the African continent. You virtually exclude the impact of neo-colonialism.

And your claims that the land distribution could have been accomplished by legislation in naive. They tried that in South Africa before Mandela left office and big landowner threatened to resist and ignore any such mandate, forcing the government to back down.

The 8th CIVICUS World Assembly will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, from 18th to 21st June 2008. The theme for the World Assembly is ‘Acting Together for a Just World: People, Participation and Power’. This focus is in response to the need to look at civil society's capacity to act in concert to realise shared goals while recognising there are allies in government, business, media and donor bodies who are working towards the same end and from whom strength can be drawn.

In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly, in its resolution 61/149, decided to convene in 2009 a review conference on the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. To this end, it requested the Human Rights Council to prepare this event, making use of the three existing and ongoing follow-up mechanisms, to formulate a concrete plan and to provide yearly updates and reports on this issue starting in 2007.

Despite progress, efforts to end the recruitment and use of child soldiers are too little and too late for many children, according to the 2008 Child Soldiers Global Report, launched by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. The report details how a near global consensus that children should not be used as soldiers, and strenuous international efforts – with the UN at the forefront – to halt the phenomenon, have failed to protect tens of thousands of children from war.

The Southern Africa Trust is seeking a consultancy to undertake an assessment of the impact of financial aid flows on the policy work of regional civil society in Southern Africa as part of its ongoing work to engage with donors on financial aid flows to Southern Africa but also as a way of strengthening its work around supporting increased aid flows to civil society for them to be able to effectively to influence policy to overcome poverty.

The VIII Colloquium seeks to bring together a diverse range of young activists and scholars, interested in acquiring new skills, exchanging experiences and constructing of collaborative human rights networks among nongovernmental organizations, universities and the United Nations.

In the wake of every new racist assault Black people worldwide, along with those who have joined our struggle in solidarity, spend countless hours responding to other people's hate and ignorance. Yet, this continual drain on our time and intellectual energy is one of the least recognized casualties of the racism propagated against us, writes Karina Ray.

Justice Ben Hlatshwayo of the High Court judge has deferred until Monday the bail ruling on the case involving the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions leaders. Their lawyer Alex Muchadehama said Secretary General Wellington Chibebe and President Lovemore Matombo are being accused of communicating falsehoods, when they allegedly told workers during May Day celebrations this year that two teachers had been murdered at Kondo School in Guruve. Both deny that they ever said this.

he One Laptop Per Child project is about to find out whether Microsoft, a rival the nonprofit group once derided, is the solution to its problems in spreading inexpensive portable computers to schoolchildren. Microsoft and the laptop organization announced today that the nonprofit's green-and-white "XO" computers now can run Windows in addition to their homegrown interface, which is built on the open Linux operating system.