A little-known African localisation projected called KiLinux, which translated open source office suite OpenOffice.org into Swahili, scooped an award under the Education category at the annual Stockholm Challenge Awards that rewards ICT projects that accelerate the use of information technology for the benefit of citizens and communities.

"For the most part, sub-Saharan African nations haven’t focused their resources on filtering internet content. Ethiopia, however, appears to be pioneering a change for the worse," reports the blog My Heart's in Accra. "Several bloggers in Ethiopia have reported that all Blogspot blogs have been blocked within Ethiopia for the past few days. Many Ethiopian bloggers - both inside the country and in the diaspora - use Blogspot/Blogger to host their blogs - as a result, this block prevents Ethiopians from accessing several sites highly critical of the government."

On the eve of the 13th anniversary of Eritrea's independence, on 24 May 2006, Reporters Without Borders appealed to President Issaias Afeworki to release all of his government's prisoners of conscience, including 13 journalists being held incommunicado whose newspapers were shut down in a September 2001 crackdown. "Eritrea's independence day is once again going to be ruined by the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the political prisoners," the press freedom organisation said.

Jeet Mistry, from the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, writes about Freedom of Information Laws in Africa and their potential to support democracy. "Freedom of information has long been recognised as a foundational human right... However, around the world, only around 60 countries have enacted freedom of information (FOI) laws."

The SABC has canned a documentary on President Thabo Mbeki. City Press has learnt that the 24-minute documentary that charts Mbeki's rise to power and his survival in the cut-throat ANC political environment was withdrawn at the last minute due to political interference from the public broadcaster's management.

As most mobile phone users will testify, the quality of handsets is neither assured nor obvious. With reconditioned brands flooding the market, the quality is as comprised as it can get. This has been attributed to stiff competition as thousands of dealers fight it out for a share of the rapidly expanding industry. Dealers in reconditioned phones have also found their fair share in a market where the mobile phone has lost its status symbol, as poor farmers and students take up the technology.

A verdict has been postponed until next year in the 12-year genocide trial of Ethiopia's former Marxist ruler. Mengistu Haile Mariam is accused of killing tens of thousands of people after he ousted Emperor Haile Selassie. In a notorious campaign - known as the Red Terror - thousands of suspected opponents were rounded up, executed then tossed onto the streets. The ex-leader fled to Zimbabwe in 1991 and is being tried in absentia but 35 members of his junta are present.

NEPAD and the EASSy consortium have thus far worked extremely closely together, something acknowledged by both parties. But the consortium did not really expect to find themselves in a position where what they see as their project was in effect taken away. The parting of ways has come over proposals developed by NEPAD and the insistence that the cable should be built in such a way that it avoided the high-price inducing monopoly found on the West African SAT3 cable.

The apparent sidelining of Rwandans from the workings of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has led a government representative to question the UN-backed court's effectiveness. Kigali complains that unofficial changes to the court's mandate, for example the significant reduction of the number of genocide suspects, have actually undermined rather than developed Rwanda's legal system. In addition, officials criticize western countries harboring genocide fugitives for slowing down the process.

A media forum in Kigali urged African journalists to play a crucial role on the ongoing African peer review Mechanism (APRM). Representatives of African civil societies and country officials from the APRM asked journalists to play their role in advocating the APRM at large, to raise awareness on the activities of APRM in the continent. The Forum, the first of its kind, took place on the sidelines of the Sixth African Governance Forum (AGF), in which participants are reviewing the progress so far made as well as identifying setbacks in the implementation of the APRM.

Kenya has demanded an implementation date of the Sh15 billion Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (Eassy). The Permanent Secretary for Information and Communication said "if the date is not issued next week," Kenya would instead endorse a similar but parallel project, which would connect Mombasa to Djibouti at a cost of US$60 million.

The purpose of the Journal of Information, Information Technology, and Organizations (JIITO) is to encourage authors to develop and publish quality papers that address in a balanced manner all three entities signified in its title: information, information technology (IT), and the organizational context.

Reacting to a heavy-handed secret police raid on a TV station on 14 May, Reporters Without Borders has urged the Nigerian authorities to show more restraint towards the press and said it feared there could be more attacks on journalists critical of a proposed constitutional amendment to allow President Olusegun Obasanjo to run for a third term.

Reporters Without Borders welcomed as an "important signal" the decision to put Nyimpine Chissano, older son of ex Mozambican president, Joachim Chissano, under investigation in connection with the inquiry into the November 2000 murder of Carlos Cardoso, according to a statement, reports The step will allow the justice system to probe the possible implication of the former head of state's son in the murder of the country's best known investigative journalist, editor of the daily Metical, who was investigating a massive financial scandal at the time of his death.

Four years after it was established the Rural Communications Development Fund (RCDF) is yet to realise the dream of helping Ugandan villagers join the global village. Sustained by a one per cent levy off gross annual revenue of communications and service providers, the RCDF was established to ensure rural communications development through growth of infrastructure networks in the country. This was done after the government realised that there were likely to be imbalances in communication services between the rural and urban areas.

Tanzania is still suffering from the hangover of state control of the media, which was practised from 1965 until 1992. According to a report by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) entitled, So This is Democracy? The State of Media Freedom and Freedom of Expression in Southern Africa for 2005, under the multiparty system there has been a dramatic increase in the number of privately-owned newspapers competing with government media. However, the report says that the weak economic base of media owners has also led to alliances between the state, private media owners and business tycoons at the expense of press freedom.

Reporters Without Borders and its Somali partner organization, the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ), paid tribute to journalists trying to work in strife-torn Mogadishu, where an alliance of warlords is battling an Islamist militia, and offered advice on how to do their jobs effectively. "The effect of the fighting on the media's capacity to report confidently and independently is worrying," said press freedom organisations Reporters Without Borders and the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ).

South African ICT market analysts, BMI-TechKnowledge (BMT-T), believes that over 12 million South Africans will be connected to the Internet by 2009. BMI-T's latest research report, The South African Internet Services Market report for 2006, predicts that spending on dial-up will decrease up to 2009, as users migrate to broadband. Dial-up will maintain a high share of connections, but spending on broadband will account for a larger proportion of the market's total value.

The Meraka Institute's Open Source Centre (OSC) will launch a Soweto office on Friday 12 May, which aims to expose open source talent in the sprawling township just south of Johannesburg. The initial focus of the project will be on creating a wireless mesh network in Soweto to get the township on the Internet.

This award recognises print articles or a radio production on the theme 'ICT, Democratic Governance and Development in West and Central Africa.' Print and broadcast media journalists from the region may apply for consideration for one of the four prizes of F CFA 500,000 to 1,000,000.