Fundraising Trainers Ass. has introduced a fundraising newsletter aimed at sharing fundraising information in Zimbabwe. Contact [email][email protected] to receive a copy.

Responsibilities include:
- Participate in the development, programming, testing, debugging, implementation and support of Content Management System (CMS) and other information systems releases, modules and functionalities.
- Independently liaise with users in African UN Information Centre’s (UNIC) to define and specify requirements.
- Prepare technical and user documentation for CMS, as well as training materials and conduct technical presentations.

The Ugandan government has not yet paid over Shs700m in compensation to victims of torture and human rights violations, according to the Uganda Human Rights Commission. The Commission chairperson said "the government has an obligation to fulfill its liabilities," adding that "the government would not be promoting and protecting the human rights of Ugandans if it refused to pay these victims."

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has agreed to support private and public sector players build capacity for ICT outsourcing in Kenya. IFC and the ICT Park (ICTPark.Com) - a consortium of local, regional, and global organisations working together to make Kenya ICT capital of Africa, have announced plans to start offering courses from April 10 to 25 in Nairobi.

A new bulletin that focuses on the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) and civil society has been released by Partnership Africa Canada (PAC). The first issue contains articles on the following:
- a description of the APRM, its structure and composition;
- news of a civil society workshop on the APRM held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia;
- the civil society workshop declaration;
- news about the Ghana APRM report presented to the APRM Forum at the African Union summit in Khartoum;
- media coverage of the APRM;
- reference materials on the APRM and governance.
Visit to find out more.

Niger has withdrawn permission for a BBC team which found evidence of hunger in the country to continue to report on the humanitarian situation there. Officials said international and local media would not be allowed to do stories about the food situation as they did not want that subject touched.

Reporters Without Borders has voiced alarm at the impunity with which the Gambian government has been able to illegally detain Madi Ceesay, the managing director of the biweekly newspaper The Independent, and Musa Saydikhan, its editor, for the past week. The press freedom organisation wrote to the British, French and US ambassadors in Banjul calling on them to "urgently intercede with authorities to obtain the release of these two journalists," adding that their detention was illegal under Gambian law as charges must be brought against a detainee within 72 hours.

Jean-Louis Ngalamulume, the editor of the newspaper "L'Eclaireur", was freed on the evening of 31 March 2006 after paying US$40 in bail. He had been detained since 31 January. After meeting with Reporters Without Borders and its local partner organisation, Journalist in Danger (JED), President Joseph Kabila sent the justice ministry a request for the release of Ngalamulume and "La Tolérance" editor Jean-Pierre Pambu Lutete, who is expected to be freed on bail in the next few days.

Calls for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to end its six-year moratorium on the planting of infertile genetically modified (GM) crops have been rejected. On Friday (24 March), a CBD working group rejected a proposal to allow field trials of the crops, which produce sterile seeds, on a "case-by-case" basis.

Rwanda's president Paul Kagame has created a science ministry and placed it under his direct supervision in an effort to accelerate the integration of science and technology into all sectors of the economy. Kagame announced the move on 18 March along with a broad cabinet reshuffle.

Makerere University Kampala, is to scale down its bandwidth from the current 21 Mbps (Megabits per second) to 6 Mbps due to lack of funds. Bandwidth controls the amount of data that can be passed along a communications channel in a given period of time. A higher bandwidth means a lot of data can be transferred within a short period of time. But the university has failed to sustain the current bandwidth due to lack of funds. The university's public relations officer says the bandwidth scale down will make the Internet services much slower thus affecting data communication.

Not only Zimbabwe is executing massive eviction campaigns against informal settlers in Southern Africa. The Angolan government has maintained the same policy "for many years," the UN's Special Rapporteur on adequate housing revealed. Citing specific examples, Mr Kothari said that hundreds of families were affected at the end of last year when the Luanda provincial government undertook "forced evictions and demolitions of homes" to implement the governmental housing policy, in the municipality of Kilamba Kiaxi in the Angolan capital.

Last week the European Commission announced that it will force mobile companies to lower their excessively high international roaming charges and scrap all roaming charges for receiving calls abroad. A fortnight ago the annual meeting of the Arab ICT Regulators Network heard a presentation of a study of Middle East roaming charges that covered parts of North Africa. It also concluded that in the field of roaming that there was an absence of real competition and this was a strong disincentive to operators to negotiate lower prices. Sub-Saharan Africa’s solution? An expensive African Telecommunications Study to develop a single SIM card that can be used across the continent. Russell Southwood looks at the findings of the Egyptian study in the latest edition of Balancing Act News Update.

The International Bureau of Education, one of UNESCO’s specialized centres, has just launched a new redesigned and updated version of its “Country Dossiers” database. This tool makes it easier for users to access a wide range of educational data and resources that focus on curriculum in over 160 countries.

This brief paper looks at the challenges of the traditional education management information system (EMIS) in meeting the need of providing information on the academic and financial performance of schools relative to other schools: expenses, resource use, education outcomes. This information is of particular importance to parents and community members, and/or local governments as a result of their increased governance and management authority of schools due to decentralised education systems.

Tanzanian media owner and prominent businessman Reginald Mengi and several of the journalists working in his media outlets have been slapped with a 100 billion shilling (approx. US$8.6 million) libel suit allegedly for defaming the executive chairperson of the Quality Group Limited, Yusuf Manji. The historic libel suit comes a few days after the 24th issue of the new English daily newspaper "This Day", owned by Mengi, exposed a property deal involving the Quality Group Company limited.

The Public Protector, the Gender Commission and the South African Human Rights Commission have expressed concern over the conduct of Jacob Zuma supporters and media coverage of his rape trial, according to a report on the Mail & Guardian's website. The three bodies - all set up under Chapter Nine of the Constitution and referring to themselves as the C9s - said they met on Friday to discuss events around the trial.

Three years of transitional government in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has led to anything but stability and economic prosperity. The corrupt, ruling political class is, more than anything else, engaged in enriching itself. Based on investigations of the situation in the Congolese province of Katanga, the report Fatal Transactions demonstrates how members of the government, with the help of international donors such as the World Bank, have profited from the natural wealth of the Congo in recent years, at the expense of the Congolese people.

Health Minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang admitted that South Africa is doing “very, very badly” at curing tuberculosis at the launch of a TB crisis plan on World TB Day (24 March). Only about half the country’s TB patients are cured, while almost 7% of patients who are not cured go on to develop multi-drug resistant TB, which is hard and expensive to cure.

The new Solo computer is being developed in partnership with a group of software designers based in Great Britain. It is designed to get around the many challenges of operating in Africa. It is very tiny, just like a single card from the motherboard of a regular PC and comes with all the same ports and connectors as a PC.