Rights of an elected parliamentarian must be respected as it impacts on the entire country, according to the Committee on Human Rights of the Interparliamentary Union (IPU). "... if the rights of an elected parliamentarian are not respected, this does not bode well for the ordinary citizens of those countries," says President of the IPU Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians, Sharon Carstairs, Thursday.

The project 'Co-operative research on East African territorial integration within globalisation' (CREATING) has received funding from the EU 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development under its Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH) programme of measures to support international cooperation.
The Royal Museum for Central Africa is one of the 9 major partners in Europe and eastern Africa involved in this project.

South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994 created new possibilities for economic policy. Economic liberalization brought sustained, if unspectacular, growth that reversed the long decline in per capita incomes, but left its scars in much job shedding associated with business becoming internationally competitive. Using poverty estimates from a combination of sources, this WIDER study demonstrates that poverty nevertheless declined quite substantially after the turn of the century.

After decades of civil war, the Democratic Republic of Congo is about to sign an agreement with China who will provide $9 billion worth of investment in rebuilding infrastructure in exchange for the country’s natural resources, the largest deal of its kind in Africa.

The 2nd Symposium on Academic Globalization: AG 2008, part of the Academic Globalization Project, is being organized in the context of WMSCI 2008, and its collocated conferences. The purpose of AG 2008 is to bring together scholars, educators and practitioners with the objective of exploring, reflecting and sharing ideas with regards to the impact that the Globalization Phenomena is having or might have on universities (research, teaching and continuing education), and vice versa: the impact that academia is generating, or could generate on the phenomenon of globalization.

Present to 350 other experts from the international youth enterprise, employment and livelihood community. The Call for Proposals is now open. Proposal submission deadline is April 18, 2008. Click here for more information. Practitioners, funders, members of the private sector, academics and youth leaders from over 25 countries and all sectors will share learning, innovations, and ideas for strengthening and expanding opportunities for young people around the world.

Celine Tan argues that "the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness may have the effect of circumscribing national sovereignty and country autonomy over development policies contrary to its stated principles of country ownership and mutual accountability."

Two recent studies have highlighted the propensity of new modalities of aid and aid harmonisation processes under the Paris Declaration framework to increase rather than reduce donor interventions in aid recipient countries and exacerbating the imbalances of power between donor and recipient countries.

The Paris Declaration was adopted in 2005 as a roadmap to increase the quality of aid, and development assistance is increasingly influenced by whether the recipient developing countries comply with the Declaration's principles.

In a report prepared for the UN Human Rights Council?s High-Level Task Force on the Implementation of the Right to Development released earlier this year, Roberto Bissio, executive director of the Third World Institute and Social Watch based in Montevideo, Uruguay, argued that the relatively minor gains in efficiency and reduction of some transaction costs in the aid process are often overridden by the asymmetrical conditions under which negotiations are taking place between donors and recipients within the Paris Declaration framework.

Meanwhile, the findings of a study by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) released two weeks ago showed that donors have continued to undermine policy ownership in low-income developing countries by imposing their own priorities and policies on developing country governments through new aid instruments while marginalising the voice and participation by citizens and civil society groups in the process.

Taken together, these studies highlight the danger that the new architecture for negotiating and delivering concessional financing to developing countries under the rubric of the Paris Declaration may have the converse effect of reducing rather than improving the efficacy of development assistance.

They demonstrate that increased coordination of aid policies by developed countries can in practice work towards undermining rather than supporting global partnerships for development, including those under the Millennium Declaration, and create new forms of conditionalities on developing countries.

The Paris Declaration is a non-binding declaration that was endorsed by a group of developed and developing countries in 2005, following on from a series of high-level inter-governmental forums on aid effectiveness and harmonisation.

It has a total of 115 signatories to date and claims to lay down ?a roadmap to improve the quality of aid and its impact on development with 56 partnership commitments organised around the five key principles: ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results, and mutual accountability.

Compliance with the principles of the Paris Declaration is measured using 12 different indicators and development financing is now increasingly channelled through countries? compliance with these indicators.

According to Bissio's extensive study of the Paris Declaration framework, the Declaration fails to provide the institutional mechanisms to address the asymmetries in power between donors and creditors on one hand and individual aid recipient countries on the other. He argues that institutional ownership of the Paris Declaration process remains vested with the OECDs Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and the World Bank where donors and creditors have exclusive or majority control, with little or no developing country voice or vote.

Bissio's report further points out that for recipient countries, the Paris Declaration creates a new level of supranational economic governance above the World Bank and the regional development banks, with the OECD?s DAC comprising of the same western governments who control the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and who contribute to the Bank?s concessional lending facility, the International Development Association (IDA).

At the country level this new international governance increases the asymmetry between the aid recipient country and its donors and creditors, which gather together as a single group in the new aid modalities ... While this is intended to save costs and make procedures easier for the recipient country (and thus make aid more efficient), the inherent risks of such an increased imbalance in negotiating power at the country level are not compensated in any way by the international mechanisms set in motion by the [Paris Declaration].

Although developing and developed countries are represented in equal numbers in the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness which has the responsibility for managing the operationalisation of the Paris Declaration principles, the presence of institutions controlled by OECD members tilts the balance in favour of the latter, said the report.

Further, in such an ad hoc new body, developing countries lack the tradition and expertise of their own negotiating groups that they have put together over the years in other international negotiating fora (such as the G77 in the UN or G20 and G33 and other regional groupings in the WTO).

Under the Paris Declaration framework, donors and recipients are not peers, as recipient countries are penalised if they do not implement conditions for assessing financing under the framework but they do not have a corresponding mechanism for penalising the donors and/or creditors, the report argues.

Bissio's study found that the complex set of assessment criteria and definition of indicators by which the Paris Declaration is reviewed, the associated new conditionality packages for disbursement of aid under new mechanisms such as direct budget support and sector-wide approaches (SWAPs) and criteria for evaluating recipient countries' governance systems as part of the new aid system are all ultimately decided upon by the DAC, in close working relation with the World Bank?.

These findings are complemented by results of the Eurodad study which showed that the Paris Declaration?s measure of country ownership is the presence of a good quality and operational national development strategy as determined by the World Bank.

The Eurodad report also argues that in spite of the Paris Declaration's rhetoric on mutual accountability, donors are rarely held accountable for the quality of their aid to developing countries.

Instead, it found that the focus of the Paris Declaration has been ?entirely on the recipient government?s responsibilities and fails to recognise the steps that donors must take to create space for recipient governments to fulfil these responsibilities.

At the same time, recipient governments rarely take the lead in determining aid policies and ?are only negotiating around the edges if at all when it comes to improving the quality of the resources on offer. Case studies from seven low-income countries showed that power imbalances and weak capacity continue to limit developing country governments? ability to negotiate with donors and creditors on the conditions of their financing. The high aid dependency of some recipient countries shifts the balance of power to the donors,? says Eurodad.

Both reports also highlight the undermining of national policy space which accompanies the new modalities of aid championed by the Paris Declaration, including those centred on the World Bank and IMF-led Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and PRSP-linked financing instruments, such as budget support whereby financing is channelled direct into a country?s budget in support of a general policy framework.

The Eurodad report shows that the complex array of structures which have grown up around the PRSP process where donors and recipient governments gather to discuss policies and programmes under the guise of policy coordination have increased donor interventions in country?s development strategies and economic policies.

As donors increase the amount of aid they give either through direct budget support or to sector (e. g. agriculture, health, education) ministries, they also want to have a say on government policy in that sector, says the report.

Not only do the donors' constant presence and increased discussions with governments on the minutiae of government policy place additional pressure on overburdened administrations in developing countries, they also enable donors to get increasingly involved in the details of national policymaking.?

The Eurodad report argues that the conditionalities accompanying new aid instruments such as budget support has therefore shrunk the political space that such an instrument was supposed to have provided.

It says: Budget support has come hand in hand with more intrusion by donors in government policy making through ever more detailed matrices of policy conditions and performance indicators ... usually laid out in the Performance Assessment Framework (PAF) - the conditionality matrix attached to budget support.

Conditionalities may also be attached through the Paris Declaration indicators themselves. For example, according to the Paris Declaration, donors are required to increase the use of country systems, including national procedures for public financial management and public procurement. However, recipient countries must in turn commit towards improving such systems in order for them to be considered reliable by donors.

Indicators for reviewing compliance with the Paris Declaration principles in these areas include adherence of developing countries to broadly accepted good practices or implementation of a reform programme to achieve such practices. These good practices in turn are based upon the OECDs indicators which include the opening up of national procurement systems to qualified foreign firms, according to Bissio's report.

This amounts to a controversial conditionality of liberalising public procurement system and undermining developing countries' right to use national procurement systems as a development tool, and one which goes against the developing countries demands against the Singapore issues in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), says Bissio.

In adopting some of the reports recommendations at its fourth session in January this year, the High-Level Task Force on the Right to Development called for greater efforts to promote untied aid aligned with national priorities, particularly in the fields of procurement and financial management in order to meet the ownership requirements under the Paris Declaration and to make use of opportunities to build on the congruence between the principles of aid effectiveness and the right to development?

*Celina Tan is a Senior Researcher at the Third World Network.

**The two reports referred here have come at a crucial time for the Paris Declaration in the run-up to the third High Level Conference on Aid Effectiveness to be held in Accra, Ghana in September 2008 which will review the operationalisation of the Paris Declaration framework. They can be downloaded at: and [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

More mothers and children in developing countries are receiving treatment than ever before, according to a new report by the United Nations. But stigma, limited information and fragile health systems still pose hurdles to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Coverage of mother-to-child transmission prevention (PMTCT) services continues to expand, especially in southern and eastern Africa, according to a report by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) entitled, “Children and AIDS: Second stock taking report.”

South Africa's Archbishop has condemned the persecution of lesbians, gay, transgender, bisexual and intersex (LGBTI). Desmond Tutu addressed hundreds of gays and lesbians at an annual awards gala dubbed "A Celebration of Courage" in San Francisco in the United States.

When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Directors meet for their Spring and Annual Meetings tens of thousands of demonstrators regularly protest in front of the conference centers. The activists want to raise global awareness of the neoliberal trade and financial policies of the Bretton Woods Institutions. These policies were established in 1989 in the so-called “Washington Consensus” between the World Bank, IMF and the US Government.

While recognising that market access is important to ensure the development of international trade, India is engaging with African countries and offering trade privileges to the continent, which is home to over 900 million people.

President Bingu wa Mutharika returned from his weeklong state visit to Mainland China and brought home a K40 billion aid package for Malawi. Mutharika briefed the press on his visit at the New State House in Lilongwe. Reading the President’s communique, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Henri Mumba said the K40 billion includes a K12.2 billion grant, which would, among other projects, be used for construction of the Karonga/Chitipa road and the new Parliament building in Lilongwe.

The new Country Assistance Strategy for the Democratic Republic of Congo, which the Bank has kept secret, suggests a continued emphasis on the natural resource sectors as sources of growth going forward and predicts at least $1.4 billion in new lending over the next three years.

How can aid effectiveness in Sierra Leone be improved? This European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) report reveals piecemeal progress in improving aid effectiveness. It focuses on issues of accountability and ownership to analyse who sets the policy agenda and identify obstacles to the development of an accountable, democratic and country-driven aid system.

Humanity United and Ashoka's Changemakers launched a global online competition to identify innovative approaches to exposing, confronting and ending modern-day slavery. Today over 27 million children and adults are in slavery or bonded labor around the world—more than any other period in human history. As one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world, slavery remains largely hidden from the public eye and thrives on the rising global demand for inexpensive, unskilled labor and commercial sex. Deadline: June 18, 2008.

Advert free and available for use by anyone with access to the net Loband simplifies websites into text-only pages (with clickable links so you can view important images) making them around five to ten times faster. By filtering out everything except the core text, sites that were previously difficult to view on poor connections become usable.

Regarding the article on China and Africa - - compared with Europe and the US, both China and India are small players in Africa. But just as recent reports from the Economic Commmission for Africa said, cooperation with Asian countries, such as China and India, boosts Africa's economies.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/359/47200india.jpgIn the March 27th, 2008 Pambazuka issue, Firoze Manji argued that in comparison to Europe and the US, and that while keeping an eye out on China, Africans should not be distracted from paying attention to the West's continued exploitation of the continent.

In this essay, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta adds yet another layer by looking at India's growing role in Africa

The world's two most populous countries, China and India, are now seriously competing with each other to engage resource-rich Africa, thereby imparting a new dimension to South-South relations.

From Apr. 7-9 New Delhi will host heads of government of 12 African nation-states and a similar number of regional economic groupings. Many see this as a modest answer by India to the grand Africa summit that Beijing hosted in 2006.

Among heads of government expected are Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Joseph Kabila Kabange of Congo, Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, John Kufuor of Ghana, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda, Maitre Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Tertius Zongo of Burkina Faso and Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete of Tanzania.

The New Delhi meeting will be attended by leading functionaries of the African Union, various regional economic communities and the New Partnership for Africa's Development. Notable absentees will be Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

While this is the first time India is organising such a large summit of African leaders, this country has had long links with the continent. "Indian traders once sold glass beads to an eager African market (and) now its expertise centres on science and technology," observes a media release of the Johannesburg-based South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA).

The release added: "China's inroads into Africa are well known; India's approach has been much quieter. The India-Africa Forum meets for the first time?offering a fresh insight into this modern-day scramble for Africa."

A government of India official told IPS, who may not be named according to briefing rules, that unlike "China's greed for Africa's oil, copper and other minerals", India is more interested in longer-term economic partnerships that are mutually beneficial and do not replicate colonial systems of exploitation of African wealth.

This official pointed out that India had for long supported South Africa's anti-apartheid movement because of the personal involvement of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the 'father' of the Indian nation, who had cut his political teeth in that country. More recently, India was the first country to send United Nations-sponsored troops to Congo.

The Indian government has, in addition, supported technical exchange and training programmes in most African countries. For more than four decades now, 1,000 individuals from sub-Saharan countries have been provided technical training in India each year. Besides, there are an estimated 15,000 students of African origin currently studying in Indian universities and educational institutions, many of them on government scholarships.

Pointing out that the "waters of the Indian Ocean united us" and that India and Africa had a "common civilisational heritage and shared experience of colonialism", India's Minister for External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee recently said "our commitment to solutions based on common but differentiated responsibility and respective capability remains steadfast".

Ethiopia's Minister of State for Trade and Industry Tadesse Haile, on a visit to India, last year, said this country should be a ''shareholder and not just a stakeholder in Africa's development process''.

India has participated in projects relating to rural electrification in Mozambique and Ethiopia, railways in Senegal and Mali, cement in Congo and computer training in Lesotho. Indian companies are involved in building Ghana's National Assembly and military barracks in Sierra Leone.

Private corporate groups in India have had long-standing ties with African countries. For instance, the Tata group has a presence in 14 countries in areas such as hotels, telecommunications, hydro power and transportation. The word 'Tata' is synonymous with 'bus' in a country like Uganda, writes Seema Sirohi, Indian journalist for the 'Outlook' magazine who was recently in Johannesburg.

Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer Cipla has led the way in supplying inexpensive generic anti-AIDS drugs to African countries in the teeth of opposition from Western multinational corporations. Other Indian business groups have made major investments in Africa in the areas of information technology, hospitality, electrical equipment, and hospitals.

Senior journalist Neerja Chowdhury told IPS: "India had ignored its natural allies in Africa for a long time and in fact, many in this country had a rather patronising attitude towards Africa that was seen as a backward continent. Thankfully, that attitude is changing somewhat and the Indian government is re-focussing on Africa." Nevertheless, she said relations between India and Africa are "still nowhere what they should be".

While annual two-way trade between India and Africa has gone up fivefold from five billion US dollars to 25 billion dollars over the last five years, this volume is half that of Africa's export-import trade with China. Indian officials, speaking off-the-record, say China's economic strategy is more aggressive than that of India's and basically aimed at capturing Africa's mineral resources like oil, copper and manganese.

In a paper, Navdeep Suri, India's consul-general in Johannesburg has written: "We cannot match China dollar-for-dollar nor do we have the command economy where state-owned companies can be ordered to pursue the government's directive regardless of their own bottomline."

India's Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma, while stating that the New Delhi summit would "help the pace and spirit of historic and time-tested ties between India and Africa gather momentum", has argued that it "would not be correct" to see India-Africa relations as "competition with any other country".

Sirohi, who spoke to influential South African minister Essop Pahad, quoted him saying that while he wanted to engage with both India and China, the two countries would have to compete. "Let the best man win," he remarked.

Arun Kumar, professor of economics at New Delhi's prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, told IPS in an interview that there is "considerable potential between India and Africa in the areas of agriculture, energy and sustainable exploitation of minerals". He added that the fact that persons of Indian origin had settled in large numbers in East African countries besides Libya, Sudan and Darfur, could help strengthen economic ties.

In Durban, South Africa's foreign affairs spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa told the Press Trust of India news agency that the New Delhi summit could not only consolidate and drive the position of developing countries in the World Trade Organisation but also lead to the "writing off (of) the debt owed to India by the poorest countries of the world, a large number of which are African countries."

What may indirectly help India, Sirohi wrote in her article in the 'Outlook', is that the Chinese presence in Congo and Zambia has sparked off local resentment. Trade unions have protested against China's policy of 'dumping' cheap goods. Congo reportedly recently expelled 600 Chinese nationals and shut down three firms.

*Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is a journalist with over 20 years experience in print, radio and television, the last two years of which have been with Television Eighteen. Paranjoy anchors the India Talks discussion and interview show on ABNI. This article first appeared in Inter Press Service.

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

This new CGD working paper analyzes an often neglected facet of development-higher education. While higher education was in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s, it subsequently fell out of favor. The various development paradigms, from basic needs to rural development, structural adjustment and policy reform, had little place for higher education; and the recent emphasis on institutions also pays little heed to this subject.

This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of Angola and China's partnership. The study is based upon fieldwork carried out in Angola in 2007 and 2008 and includes numerous interviews with Angolan officials. It describes a pragmatic bilateral partnership, deconstructing the Chinese loans to Angola and documenting the number of Chinese workers in Angola and the impact of their projects.