An estimated 25 million people are living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa and although there appears to be a stabilization in HIV prevalence rates this is actually due to a rise in AIDS deaths and a continued increase in new infections. This is according to a UNAIDS report that warns that the number of people living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has risen in every region of the world during 2003 and last year five million people became newly infected with HIV - more people than any previous year.

This paper focuses on teacher motivation and incentives in low-income developing countries (LICs) in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In particular, it assesses the extent to which the material and psychological needs of teachers are being met. This includes overall levels of occupational status, job satisfaction, pay and benefits, recruitment and deployment, attrition, and absenteeism.

On the eve of World Breastfeeding Week UNICEF said that by expanding the number of women who exclusively breastfeed during their child’s first six months, at least 1.3 million infant lives could be saved this year. UNICEF also called for greater global commitment to protect, and promote breastfeeding. Every year more than 10 million children die from mainly preventable causes, including diarrhoea, pneumonia, measles and malaria. If every baby were exclusively breastfed from birth to six months, an estimated 3,500 children’s lives could be saved each day, UNICEF said.

Pascal Lamy, the European commissioner for trade, recently wrote that "half the world's economists" were opposed to the epidemic of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs). The fact of the matter is that nearly all scholars of international economics today are fiercely sceptical, even hostile to such agreements. By contrast, politicians everywhere have succumbed to a mania that originated in Europe. Unfortunately, the economists are right. The politicians' lemming-like rush into bilateral agreements poses a deadly threat to the multilateral trading system, argues this article.

Although poverty reduction is the central objective of the Millennium Development Goals, there is little agreement over the definition of poverty. Different methods of defining poverty identify different people as 'poor' and have different implications for policy. New research argues that poverty reduction strategies need to be clearer and more transparent in defining poverty, and more multidimensional in measurement and targeting.

Total aid flows to education have declined at the beginning of the present decade. The current level of US$1.5 billion of support to basic education is still far short of the roughly US$7 billion per year required to meet the universal primary education (UPE) and gender goals. How should governments and the international community translate their commitments into real resources?

Nigeria is Africa's largest and most complex country, with a population of 120 million people from over 250 tribes. The vast, swampy terrain of the Niger Delta region supports almost 20 million people, many of them in isolated communities only accessible by boat. The Niger Delta serves as the economic nerve center of the Nigeria Federation with its vast oil deposits. Presently, crude oil accounts for about 85% of the nation's revenue. Oil from the Niger Delta accounts for 20% of oil supply to the US, and has become increasingly important from a strategic perspective as conflicts continue in the Middle East.

However, this “blessing” has become a curse for the people of the Niger Delta. They have suffered environmental devastation, economic poverty, and constant conflict. To make matters even worse, political considerations and greed on the part of a corrupt government have kept many of the earnings from these vast reserves from returning to the Niger Delta to help restore the region.

Since the discovery of oil and the production in commercial quantities in 1958, the people of the Niger Delta have known no peace. Today, violent inter tribal and inter communal conflicts, arms proliferation, ethnic militias and illegal bunkering (theft of crude oil directly from pipelines) have become synonymous with the region.

Economic activities related to oil and gas has placed the government's security emphasis on the need to produce oil and gas most effectively and efficiently. This type of security consideration ignores the impact on other environmental and human resources such as waters, forests, fish and the climate of the area. The youth of the region, a vibrant and energetic generation who should be supporting the productivity and the future of this area, are instead being continuously cut down by bullets from security operatives under the guise of the war on terrorism. Communities are razed and extra-judicial killings are the order of the day.

From the days of the hanging of playwright and prominent environmental rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa and nine other Ogoni individuals by the then military regime of General Sani Abacha, to the Odi holocaust and the burning and destruction of Awor and Fenegbene by the present Obasanjo administration, the story has been the same.

When oil production activities are intensified or activated in a very dedicated manner, riverbank erosion results, gas flares occur frequently, forests are cut down, rivers and streams are dredged, turned into canals or blocked and then polluted. Farms and sacred lands are not spared either; they may be acquired for oil and gas development or polluted, as production gets under way. Anything that is seen to obstruct or have the semblance of serving as obstruction to the free flow of oil is uprooted and destroyed, whether it is a human being, a community or a stream.

Compounding the plight of the people of the Niger Delta is the issue of environmental pollution. Oil production and dredging have caused acid rain, fouled the air and the water, and caused widespread and dramatic erosion. Whole communities have watched their lands erode away. Fishing and farming, the traditional occupations of these people, is no longer viable. This situation has caused poverty, hunger and desperation among these peoples, who are struggling to eke out a living.

The issue of ownership rights is key. Federal laws automatically transfer title to any land where oil is found to the federal government without adequate compensation to the landowners. This gives the federal government the right to enter into an unholy alliance with multi national oil companies in the name of joint venture operations at the exclusion of the people. The result is that the federal government and the multinational oil corporations share the resulting revenue on a ratio of 60:40 percent with nothing left for the landowners. In addition, oil spills and other ongoing problems caused by the oil production are not attended to, so the area is left in much worse shape than before the oil reserves were found.

Underlying this complex and fraudulent economic arrangement is the issue of ethnicity and tribalism. There are 250 ethnic nationalities in Nigeria, with the Yorubas, Igbos and the Hausa/Fulani of the west, southeast and the north comprising the majority tribes. The minorities of the Ijaws, Itsekiris and other nationalities inhabit the oil rich Niger Delta region, which is swampy deltaic terrain, and is completely cut off from development, modern industries and social infrastructure. Educational opportunities are limited, and the closest health care facility is about three hours by speedboat.

Because the government tends to be populated by people who originated from the majority tribes which do not happen to be located in the delta, they have created a formula for sharing the revenues from oil production that favors other regions, further increasing the poverty in the delta and creating anger and conflict between the delta tribes themselves. Trust amongst the tribes has been eroded, while hatred and suspicion have grown, as they are made to believe that they are enemies to one and another by the divide and rule and divide and exploit attitude of an insincere national government and its dubious multi national collaborators.

The combination of these factors creates a potential powder keg. Because Nigeria is the largest nation in Africa and considered the leader in political and economic issues, any eruption could have a deeply destabilizing effect on both the continent and the global community. By providing the world a more complete understanding of the real story behind the impact of the oil discovery and production during the last 45 years in Nigeria, perhaps we can find the resources to address these issues before a major eruption occurs.

* Joel Bisina is a peace activist and founder/Regional Director of the Niger Delta Professionals for Development (NIDPRODEV) a non-profit organization working on the communal and inter tribal conflicts in the oil rich Niger Delta Region of Nigeria.

* Please send comments to

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in its fourth round of grants has rejected Zimbabwe's application for $218 million in funding for its HIV/AIDS program, Zimbabwe's Standard reports. The denial of funding puts plans to scale up the country's antiretroviral drug program in "disarray," according to the Standard.

The scale of HIV infection is such that all actors - government, business, civil society, the medical community - need to be drawn into one massive coordinated effort of life-preserving. In this context, are the big pharmaceutical companies part of the solution or part of the problem, asks Walden Bello from Focus on the Global South in a speech delivered at the debate on patents, drug development, and HIV/AIDS at the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok. Big Pharma are less concerned about saving lives and much more concerned about protecting its patents, he says and suggests a new research and development framework, based on a people-oriented approach to patents, maybe coordinated by the UN, in which there is room for participation by many other actors, including governments, government institutes, and civil society organisations.

The International Whaling Commission's annual meeting closed last Thursday with a small but significant victory for countries that want to maintain a ban on commercial whaling well into the future. During the closing moments of the four-day meeting, the IWC put the brakes on what had seemed unstoppable momentum to set a deadline of June 2005 for agreeing new whaling rules which could spell the end to the 18-year-old ban.

Leaving education entirely in the hands of market forces entails ignoring that it is a right recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The debate then focuses on accepting education as a common good and the importance that it has and must have for the development of any society. In this sense - and to judge from how things are evolving - the McDonaldization of education may result in research being driven not by what serves the public interest, but rather by what is profitable for large corporations. Read this feature on education by clicking on the URL provided.

The World Bank finances energy projects, often run by multinational energy corporations, including Shell and BP, in developing countries. More than 80% of the energy extracted is exported and used in the developed world. World Bank money has left a legacy of environmental and social devastation, from cyanide spills in Peru to land expropriation and water pollution at oil pipelines in Chad. The bank has blindly chanted an "economic growth" mantra to those who have questioned the appropriateness of this investment, presenting a dogmatic argument that these projects will somehow inevitably help the poor. Hannah Ellis, an international financial institutions campaigner for Friends of the Earth, argues in The Guardian UK that in its 60th year it is time for the bank to deliver or retire.

When: 28 September 2004

Where: Crowne Plaza, Johannesburg

The Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa (CAFSA), will be hosting its first Corporate-Community Involvement (CCI) conference entitled, 'Companies in Communities - Sharing Innovation,' in Johannesburg.

This paper examines the extent to which the distribution of development assistance is directed towards the poorest countries. The ways in which different donors distribute their development assistance is shown to differ markedly. The two largest bilateral donors, the United States and Japan, and the largest multilateral donor, the European Commission, spend large amounts of their aid budgets in small, relatively well-off countries. In contrast, despite some bias towards small developing countries, the Netherlands, the UK and the World Bank direct most of their aid to the poorest countries. France, Germany and the UN System’s aid programmes occupy an intermediate position. The paper concludes with a discussion of the questions the analysis poses for aid policy and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

Amnesty International's Secretary General, Irene Khan, has called the AIDS pandemic a human rights crisis. Speaking during the closing plenary of the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand, she said that the 'failure to protect the rights and dignity of people is fuelling the pandemic and making it worse.' She attacked those governments who were 'still looking for a quick fix to HIV', and who were 'still failing to recognise that human rights violations increase people's vulnerability to infection, and that people living with HIV/AIDS often face grave human rights abuses.'

Thousands of the 350,000 Liberians who fled abroad as refugees to neighbouring Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire and other West African countries as far away as Ghana and Nigeria, have begun the long trek home. They have been unwilling to wait for the UN refugee agency UNHCR to begin its official mass repatriation programme in October once the rains end and Liberia's dirt roads become more possible. UNHCR estimates that about 50,000 refugees have already spontaneously made the journey home since Liberia's three warring factions signed a peace deal in August 2003.

The 15th international AIDS conference has come and gone, but what will we have hoped to achieve when the world meets again in Toronto in two years time? Unlike the international AIDS conference in Vancouver 1996 when Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) broke new scientific ground and Durban 2000 when equal access to medicines made centre-stage, Bangkok 2004 presented no revolutionary science, no dramatic breakthroughs. But it did get back to basics and the need for an holistic approach. There is no single strategy to address HIV/AIDS. It requires prevention and treatment, activist pressure and government commitment, advanced scientific research and community involvement, and above all, a human rights-based approach designed to support vulnerable individuals and groups.
* Related Link:
What did the HIV conference achieve?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3900597.stm

The European Development Fund Committee has deferred the approval of their promised Budget Support Programme, together with the expected disbursement of the first Sh4.7 billion already reflected in Kenya's Budget for 2004/2005. Their decision is a result of the agency's concerns about the prevailing governance situation in Kenya, specifically the Anglo Leasing affair.

The world's oceans have absorbed nearly half of the carbon dioxide that humans have released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and manufacturing cement, according to research published in Science this week. As carbon dioxide contributes to global warming, this may sound like good news, but the flipside is that the gas is acidifying the seas and posing a threat to marine life.

Lighting plays a fundamental role in our lives, says this feature on the website of the World Watch Institute. "We use lights to illuminate most of our daily activities and to create a safe, comfortable environment." But each kilowatt-hour of electricity releases over two pounds (nearly 1 kilo) of carbon dioxide (CO2). "The buildup of CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere is contributing to global climate change, which is predicted to result in more frequent and severe storms and droughts, the rapid spread of infectious diseases, rising sea levels, and other adverse effects that could harm humans and other life on Earth."