Frustrating the hopes of peoples and nations all around the globe will certainly not help make the world a more secure place for our children, concludes the Social Watch report 2004, summarizing the findings of citizen coalitions in 50 countries, poor and rich, about what they see as main obstacles to human security. The Social Watch report keeps track every year about progress and regression in the path towards eradicating poverty and achieving gender equity, a promise made by governments at the UN in 1995 and reaffirmed in the year 2000 in the largest gathering ever held of world leaders.

The trafficking of human beings is a problem in every African country, says the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef). The report, which covers 53 African nations, says children are the biggest victims in what is a very complex phenomenon. It describes how they are forced into slavery, recruited as child soldiers or sold into prostitution.

Recent IMF/World Bank reforms have real limits, deftly illustrated by the cause of debt cancellation. Ministers from wealthy nations have almost universally conceded that debt is a crisis, but assistance has been slow in coming. The creditor-based system of debt relief administered by the IMF/World Bank doles out aid at levels based more on poor countries' ability to cough up future payments than on what they actually need to reach humanitarian targets like the Millennium Development Goals. As economist Jeffrey Sachs writes, "It is perfectly possible, and indeed is currently the case, for a country or region to have a 'sustainable' debt" under IMF/World Bank definitions "while millions of its people are dying of hunger or disease."

Can South African schools be led away from apartheid's grim legacy? Are policy interventions ridding schools of injustice? Are schoolchildren learning values of democracy and equity? Or are classrooms still places where kids learn about the unjust divisions that exist between different groups of people?

Thabo Mbeki recently advocated unity with 'anti-globalisation' activists: 'They may act in ways you and I may not like and break windows in the street, but the message they communicate relates.' This raises two critical questions: is the South African government genuinely opposed to what Mbeki calls 'global apartheid'? And are the reforms advocated by Pretoria failing -- even on their own limited terms?

Mbeki's critics, from left and right alike, suggest that his AIDS policies, corrupt arms deal and support for Zimbabwe's repressive regime have damaged his credibility beyond repair. Others claim Mbeki's global ambition is his saving grace. But the content of Pretoria's broader reform strategy is rarely examined.

Between incomparable drawings by Zapiro, Patrick Bond considers the dynamics of international political economy and geopolitics.

He reviews a series of contemporary examples where Pretoria is frustrated by unfavourable power relations: US unilateralism and militarism, the UN's World Conference Against Racism and reparations for apartheid profits, soured trade deals, stingy debt relief and counterproductive international financial flows, unsuccessful reform of multilateral institutions, the New Partnership for Africa's Development, the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development and the World Water Forum.

Bond poses alternatives and also assesses the progressive social movements, which may well be Mbeki's most persistent, unforgiving judges, both locally and globally. (back cover)

Education For All Week 2004, 19-25 April, will focus on the world’s 100 million children who have no access to education. UNESCO and the Global Campaign for Education are organising the Big Lobby to give children the world over a chance to ask their governments to do more to enrol all children. The aim of the Big Lobby is to raise awareness of this fundamental human right, the denial of which makes children more vulnerable to poverty, hunger, violence, exploitation and disease.

Children’s right to education is being seriously undermined in dozens of countries by contradictory laws that allow them to work, be married or held criminally responsible at an age when they are legally bound to be in school, concludes a new report. “In the same country,” concludes Angela Melchiorre, children’s rights expert and the author of ‘At what age…are children employed, married and taken to court?’, “it is not rare to find that children are legally obliged to go to school until they are 14 or 15 years old but that a different law allows them to work at an earlier age or to be married at the age of 12 or to be criminally responsible from the age of seven.” The report, launched on the occasion of Education for All Week (April 19-25), found that there is no compulsory education in at least 25 States, of which ten are in sub-Saharan Africa.

This book is concerned with assisting providers of online education with useful tools to carry out teaching and learning transactions online. It presents the theory, administration, tools, and methods of designing and delivering learning online. It aims to bring to the teaching community a valuable product which should go a long way in popularizing the use of the learning technologies.

Angolan refugees coming back under a formal programme from the Republic of the Congo, and neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia and Namibia are aided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But many more - the so-called spontaneous returnees - have struggled home on their own since the end of Angola's civil war in 2002. In recent months their passage has been hampered by the rainy season, which has rendered many roads impassable and increased the ever-present threat of landmines. Just crossing the border back to Angola can be the biggest challenge facing returning refugees.

This year’s edition of the World Bank publication, African Development Indicators (ADI) 2004, launched last week, depicts a diverse picture of development in Africa, with several countries making remarkable progress and others lagging seriously behind. ADI 2004 presents data for more than 500 indicators of development for 53 countries. Thirteen Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries averaged more than five percent growth for the period 1995-2002, but many others saw their economies contract, usually as a result of severe civil conflict and adverse weather conditions. The region’s economic growth slowed in 2002 to 2.8 percent, slightly down from 2.9 percent in 2001.

Education is one of the key defences against the spread of HIV and the impact of AIDS. This is according to a fact sheet from UNAIDS, which says that while ensuring girls are in school is important to reducing overall vulnerability, it is insufficient without specific measures to provide information, skills and links with school-community services.

This document, a chapter of the International Youth Parliament's Youth Commission Report, considers the way that globalisation affects young people and their communities in the specific field of education. The processes of globalisation have both positive and negative effects on young people and their right to education, argues the document. Improvements in communication technology and educational delivery have the potential to improve the quality of education and make it increasingly accessible. However, the positive effects of globalisation are countered by the negative impacts of factors such as higher costs of provision, national budget misallocation, poor resource mobilisation, privatisation, international debt and economic instability.

Panos is a dynamic network of autonomous institutes developing and applying new thinking on the role of media and communication in development. The Panos AIDS programme has a history of producing cutting-edge analysis on key issues within the response to HIV/AIDS and is recognised as a pioneering organisation challenging existing strategies and approaches to fighting the epidemic. We are now looking for a director to provide vision and leadership to the programme. This is a new role. You will be responsible for establishing many of the structures within which you work and supporting the progressive scaling up of the programme's operations.

Wind energy is zero-emissions energy, a renewable resource that many environmentalists and alternative energy proponents feel is one of our last, best hopes for staving off devastating climate change. Globally, wind energy has grown 500 percent since 1997. In 2003, 8,133 megawatts of wind-generating capacity were installed worldwide. This brought the world’s total wind power generating capacity to 39,294 megawatts, enough to power 19 million European households.

Kenya has urged other African countries to adopt a spirit of compromise in negotiations aimed at ending the impasse on the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks. "Without sacrificing the principles and fundamental issues that we stand for, we cannot be successful negotiators unless we have some negotiating room," Kenya's Trade Minister Mukhisa Kituyi told reporters in Nairobi. He was speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of government officials and private sector representatives from 12 African countries to discuss how to revive deadlocked world trade liberalisation talks.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of 'global apartheid', an international system of minority rule whose attributes include differential access to basic human rights, wealth and power, from an African and South African perspective, and discusses possible alternative measures to fight against it.

On 1 April 2004, at around 7:30 p.m. (Kinshasa time), seven Military Intelligence (Détection militaire des activités anti-patrie, DEMIAP) soldiers and three National Intelligence Agency (Agence nationale des renseignements, ANR) officers raided the offices of Radio Kilimandjaro, a private station in Tshikapa, the second largest city in West Kasai province, central Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The soldiers stopped the broadcast as soon as they entered the station's studios and ordered all of the staff members who were present to undergo a two-minute voice test.

Africans do not see AIDS as a dire problem, unlike health experts, who predict the pandemic will unleash catastrophic consequences on the continent, according to a survey conducted in 15 African countries during 2002-2003 by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. According to the study, for which 23,000 adults were interviewed, many Africans, especially in East and southern Africa, had either lost relatives or friends to the disease or were affected by it in some other way, but many were undecided about whether their governments should divert resources from other priorities to fight AIDS.

The Seychellois government has announced that Seychelles has become the first small island nation in the world to develop an integrated national strategy for plant conservation under the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.

The ceasefire agreed between the Angolan government and UNITA in 2002 ended 27 years of civil war and provided the momentum for millions of internally displaced people (IDPs) to return home. More than four million people were displaced before the ceasefire. In early 2004, 450,000 of them were still waiting to go back to their homes, while around 400,000 were expected to settle permanently in their current place of residence. The majority of those IDPs who were able to return have faced a lack of basic services and food insecurity, as well as a widespread threat of land mines.