This Center for Global Development (CGD) report by senior fellow David Wheeler shows that while there is no indication that floods are more common in poor countries, when it does flood, poor country citizens are much more likely than the residents of rich countries to suffer severe consequences: homelessness, injury, death.

The 17th of April is the International Peasant's Struggle Day, established after the massacre of 19 landless peasants belonging to the Landless Movement (MST) in Brazil on the 17th of April 1996 during the second conference of La Via Campesina in Tlaxcala, Mexico. In commemoration of that day, La Via Campesina and its allies are organizing activities and actions all over the world.

On November 3, 20 unions from around the world met to create the Alliance for Justice at Group 4 Securicor. G4S is the biggest employer in the security industry and one of the biggest employers in the world with around 400,000 workers in more than 100 countries. The Alliance aims to win a global agreement to ensure workers' rights to join the union of their choice and receive decent treatment, including a living wage and social protection.

This journal will be the first part of a trilogy on New Technologies (part two – reproductive rights and HIV/AIDS; part three – intellectual property rights), to be published in September 2007.

Commemorating 200 years since the trade in African slaves was abolished by Britain, the Organization of American States (OAS) passed a resolution urging member states to continue implementing measures to eradicate the effects and consequences of the slave trade and slavery.

This report captures the themes of the final session of the Free and Open Source Software for OER discussion, in which the International Institute for Educational Planning's two communities on free open-source software (FOSS) and open educational resources (OER) came together to share their thoughts on the two related movements.

In Kenya, major banks – like most banks on the continent - prefer to deal with ‘big’ clients. ‘Small’ clients find obtaining access to banking services almost impossible. One bank in Kenya has set out to change this. Zipporah Musau and Kwamboka Oyaru report for PANOS.

Since the beginning of this month there has been all kinds of memorials, lectures, prayer meetings and other kinds of public activities commemorating two-hundred years of the abolition of the cross-Atlantic slave trade in Britain. They have provoked all kinds of reactions and generated a lot of interest, debate, reconstructions and deconstructions.

Unfortunately this is more in the diaspora than across Africa, outside of Ghana which has managed to weave the painful experience into a creative tourism package. In a year in which Ghana celebrates 50 years of independence and is guaranteed to be partying throughout the year, the anti-slavery commemorations have become another value added in a state-sponsored 'feel good' hysteria.

Ghana is not the only country from where slaves were captured and forcibly bounded and hounded on to ships, in chains, transported in the most inhuman conditions to the plantations in the Caribbean and North America, the other Americas and Europe. Nations of East, Central and Southern Africa and other parts of West Africa including present day Senegal and Nigeria were part of this shameful trade that went on for 400 years!

If the history touches all of us why are so many Africans and African leaders not interested in this barbaric experience whose impact continues to reveal itself in the continuing negative image of Africa and Africans in relation to the rest of the world? Slavery was followed by colonialism, which in many ways was a legal distinction without a practical difference in terms of the negative impact on the lives of our peoples. In a sense slavery formally ended in Europe but continued in the colonies.

Maybe one of the reasons Africans are not excited is that slavery reminds us, in too painful ways, of our subjugation, the indignities inflicted on us made more unbearable by the fact that the existence of many of our peoples today whether in Africa or in the diaspora bear too much parallel to slavery.

So for many regardless of the history and legal finesse slavery is not dead, it has mutated into other forms of exploitation and domination in which we still remain bottom of the pile on most indices of human progress. Like chiefs and emperors, kings and other slave dealers of old our Presidents and Prime Ministers preside over a system of power that continues to make our peoples 'hewers of wood and drawers of water', while the riches of this continent continue to be siphoned off by others; content to play junior partners for as long as their grotesque and gratuitous consumption lifestyles and that of their immediate family and hangers-on can be guaranteed.

They will sell anything having already battered their souls. So if they are sleep-walking through all the remembrances of slavery it is because the past is still weighing too heavily on the present and they may be afraid that such events may draw uncomfortable comparison to their collaboration in keeping their peoples in modern slavery in the name of thw free market, privatization, modernisation and globalization.

The slaves were captured in wars, slave raids, and forcibly sold but today we are willingly financing our own slavery. Just go in front of any Western embassy across this continent and see the hordes of our people (mostly young) willing to do anything to get the visa to go abroad. Anywhere will do as long as it is outside Africa, even if the former slaving countries of Europe and America remain favorite destinations! Look at the risks many take traveling, hitch hiking, facing all kinds of abuse, exploitation and indignities to smuggle themselves through the straights of Gibraltar into Spain from North African countries.

Even at the height of slavery millions of our peoples resisted, and many died, in what is euphemistically called the Middle Passage. Many as a result of being thrown overboard due to illness or because they were 'difficult to handle', and many also dived into the sea, preferring to be eaten by sharks, crocodiles and other sea predators than be taken into plantations.

On the plantations resistance was rampant in all forms through culture, the rise of the African churches, music, drums, etc; the most decisive being the successful slave revolt in Haiti. Haiti may be a by-word for all kinds of inhumanities today with the dubious title of 'poorest country in the western hemisphere' but it used to be the prized jewel of slavery economies as the leading sugar cane producer. It has a glorious role in the resistance against slavery which we should not forget. In the jungles of Brazil former slaves established the Zoumbi kingdom after overthrowing slavery.

It is important to remember these struggles because what we are getting through the Western media and the shameful 'cut and paste' uncritical coverage in our tech-dependent and intellectually lazy African media is that the Anti Slavery Society in the UK, the church and missionaries and good people in Europe and America helped to bring slavery to an end.

How come their conscience only woke up after four centuries? And that same conscience did not prevent them from supporting so called 'legitimate trade' (between unequal peoples which echo what we still face today) for another century, and colonialism after that!

Africans need to be aware of their own history to understand how and why we are where we are in order to be able to fashion out the best strategy to lift us up and fulfill the aspirations of our peoples to be rid of poverty, disease, want and shameful misery in the midst of plenty. That was the point that the Young Man, Toyin, from the African Campaigning Group, Ligali, was making when he 'allegedly' disrupted the service last Sunday at Westminister Abbey to which all the great and mighty of that slaving nation (who's Greatness has always been built on iniquities) were gathered.

The Queen, her arrogant but thankfully expiring PM Blair, and the ruling class of Britain, all of them including the church, heirs to slavery and beneficiaries of its illegal and immoral earnings up to now. The Anglican Archbishop, Rowan Williams, is a sincere and frank man who is a pain on the side of the powers-that-be. He was open in expressing remorse and confronting the painful past and the complicity of the British establishment.

But the British PM can only express regret and cannot find it in him to say 'sorry'. But his sorry is meaningless since he has been exposed to be a compulsive serial liar.

The bigger shame is that some African leaders (Museveni being the first to say there was no need for reparations and his current successor in Western adulation, John Kuffour, has loyally joined the queue) and poodle cousins among the few leading black tokens in Blair's government like Baroness Amos (she was in Elmina castle in Ghana recently and all she could say, with all her posh accent, was that the slaves, definitely including her ancestors traveled in 'difficult circumstances'!) think that it is not necessary.

Together with former top guard-dog of Bush, Colin Powell, Baroness Amos led the British and US delegations to the World Conference against Racism in which they tried but failed to scuttle any attempt to link Israeli occupation to racism and apartheid and also seek reparations for slavery. Thy do not need reparations because they have been more than amply rewarded by their House Nigger status. As good Christians, all of them, even if they are not Catholics, have they forgotten the relationship between: confession, resmorse, absolution and forgiveness?

Blair thinks (wrongly again) that he is being smart by stopping short of an apology because of the implication of guilt and subsequent legal obligation to compensate for his ancestors through reparations to the victims. But the issue will not go away even if they are ignoring it now.

When Africa becomes united and more assertive it will no longer be possible to ignore our demands. For me the challenge is to put our house in order first, then reparations will become a mainstream issue. Then issues of debt cancellation, aid and reform of the modern slavery economic system forced on humanity by IMF/World Bank/WTO will not be favors to us but part of the reparations.

The Reparations Movement should not despair. The answer is simple to any member of the Pan African Movement: "Do Not Agonise! Organise!!

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The recent state visit by Chinese president Hu Jintao has sparked renewed debates among Zambians about whether their country is receiving real benefits from its close economic relations with the Asian giant.

Bill Gates is pushing harder than ever for immigration reform that would allow the United States, the richest country on the planet, to skim off the cream of the few educated workers in developing nations.

The Alcan Prize for Sustainability is a US$1 million Prize that recognizes organizations demonstrating a comprehensive approach to addressing, achieving and further advancing economic, environmental and/or social sustainability. The closing date is 12 April 2007.

In an exciting development the Yogyakarta Principles on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity was due to be formally launched on 26th March. In addition, parallel events held during the Council were to enable discussion and analysis of the Principles and their application to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity around the world.

The United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has announced the launching of a global initiative to improve remittances services that allow foreign workers to send money back to their families in rural areas around the world.

Al-Jazeera reports that an Algerian court has sentenced several former banking executives to jail after finding them guilty of corruption following the collapse of the country's largest private bank.

According to Mohammed Ali Rashid, economics professor at the School of Arts and Social Sciences at the North South University in Bangladesh, even if trade openness boosts economic growth, such growth may not create jobs or alleviate poverty. Therefore the much-vaunted Aid for Trade concept should be redesigned so that "the major focus is shifted from simply creating more trade to the more important objectives of poverty reduction".

The new free trade agreements being signed up between rich and poor countries are proving far more damaging to the poor than anything envisaged within WTO talks, Oxfam said in a report issued on Tuesday 20 March.

Sexuality and Social Justice is an exhibition of 10 portraits with audio and text based interviews from the World Social Forum in January 2007. The exhibition pays tribute to activists who are doing brave work with sexuality and social justice in diverse ways.

The XO laptop is intended as an incredibly cheap and remarkably robust tool to aid children, particularly in developing countries, improve their education. Although the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is branded as "an education project, not a laptop project," the technical specifications of the XO laptop deserve some mention

Children with disabilities have the right to an inclusive education and United Nations Member States must increase efforts to ensure that all children, regardless of differences, learn together, the United Nations independent expert on the right to education has said.

The ICJ's international secretariat in Geneva is seeking to recruit a Legal Officer for its recently launched International Economic Relations Programme. Applications close on close on 6 April 2007. Applicants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are particularly encouraged.