“C'mon people! Everywhere Zimbabweans are saying that they are too scared to do this or that because of this brutal regime. Stopping buying the Herald is a small sacrifice in the face of the trampling of freedom of expression in Zimbabwe. If newspapers register with the regime's media commission, the commission can then interfere in the content of the said registered paper. This is not acceptable.” This is an extract from an article on the Zvakwana website. To read the full article visit the website, where you can also subscribe to their website.

This web site collection of online fundraising resources is the work of Adam Corson-Finnerty and Laura Blanchard, authors of Fundraising and Friend-Raising on the Web. It includes excerpts from the book, a series of essays on the changing online fund-raising scene ("musings"), and teaching materials from classes and presentations.

The latest issue of New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising takes an atypical look at volunteers and fundraising. One of the chapters focuses on how professionals and volunteers can work together by implementing reciprocal learning in teams. The concept encourages fundraisers not only to teach volunteers about the financial development world but also to be open to learning what volunteers can teach fundraisers about the communities they serve, the business strategies that can be applied in nonprofits and tactics they may have learned elsewhere.

The African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships (ACHAP) project leader, Dr. Donald de Korte, has said that Botswana will have about 200,000 orphans in 2010 if the current situation is not reversed.

A group formed in London has joined the battle to overturn the silencing of Zimbabwe’s only independent daily newspaper, The Daily News, using two weapons: trying to shame the supreme court judges who shut down the paper two weeks ago, and encouraging protests, particularly in the 19 other African members of the 54-nation Commonwealth. "Whether it will work we don’t know. But we are looking at how you put pressure on a government that is not open to peer pressure," said Lindsay Ross, executive director of the Commonwealth Press Union, and an organiser of the Friends of The Daily News.

This paper is about how to harness IT to foster youth employment or livelihood opportunities in developing countries. The central question asked by the author in this paper is: What kind of policies will further the IT revolution in the interest of creating livelihoods for the young people of the developing world.

A national human rights NGO in the Republic of Congo has called for the incorporation of human rights instruction in school curricula. At the conclusion on Saturday of a seminar held to discuss the matter, Christian Mounzeo, interim president of the Congolese Human Rights Observatory (Observatoire congolais des droits de l'homme), said that it was the responsibility of government authorities to take action as soon as possible, recalling that in 1995 the UN had declared a decade of human rights education.

Prepcom-III was supposed to be the final preparatory conference for the UN's World Summit of The Information Society (WSIS) which takes place December 10-12 in Geneva. All the loose ends should have been tied up when Prepcom-III, also held in Geneva, closed after two weeks of negotiation. Now organisers have hastily reconvened another meeting for November aimed at breaking the deadlock over the drafting of two key documents.

Zimbabwean police on September 26 charged Francis Mdlongwa, former group Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), with practising as a journalist without official accreditation. He becomes the 10th journalist who worked for The Daily News and the Daily News on Sunday, the ANZ's two news titles shut down by the government on September 12, to be charged under Zimbabwe's tough media law, the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), in the past week.

The Higher Council for Communications ordered 10 of the country's privately-owned radio stations to suspend their programming as of 25 September 2003.

For questioning the judgment of a policeman who ordered a driver detained for failure to carry a road-worthiness certificate, Rotimi Oyekanmi, a reporter with The Guardian Newspaper, spent six hours in a police cell in Ogbomoso, Oyo State, South-west Nigeria, according to a story in Media in Nigeria, a weekly publication on developments within and affecting the media, communication and freedom of expression sector in Nigeria.

The International Press Institute (IPI), a global network of editors, leading journalists and media executives, has expressed its concern at the disappearance of Abdoulie Sey, the editor-in-chief of the bi-weekly Independent newspaper.

Police in Zimbabwe this week released a list of 45 Daily News staffers whom they instructed to report to Harare Central Police Station. The list included past and present Daily News employees and journalists.
Related Link:
* Police charge nine Daily News journalists
http://allafrica.com/stories/200309291024.html

A high-profile Microsoft deal to provide thousands of free computers to Namibian schools by 2004 is an attempt to marginalise Schoolnet Namibia, claims Director Joris Komen.

A private rural radio station in North Kivu Province of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been banned from broadcasting since 16 September by a local government administrator, Congolese media rights NGO Journaliste en danger (JED) reported on Wednesday. JED said that Radio Communautaire Ushirika (Racou) in Kiwanja, Rutshuru territory of North Kivu, had failed to obtain authorisation from the provincial governor, Eugene Serufuli, before beginning broadcasts.

More than 150 delegates from 23 African countries meeting recently in Maputo, Mozambique, agreed to bring "e-strategies" for mobilizing information and communications technology (ICT) for development into the mainstream of government planning. The gathering was held in preparation for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva this December.

Namibia has set the stage for developing Information Communication Technology (ICT) systems in schools throughout the developing world when it became the first country to sign a 'Partnership in Learning' agreement with Microsoft.

The South African government has entered into a partnership with Microsoft Computers to develop software in IsiZulu and Afrikaans.

A new discussion list on `Education Rights and Realities' has just been launched. This forum focuses on the right to free, good quality education as it has been defined by successive international conventions and commitments, most recently the six Education for All (EFA) goals agreed by 155 governments at the World Education Forum in April 2000.

The Ungana-Afrika initiative, which is providing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) consulting for civil society organisations, has finished its pilot phase. The goal of this pilot phase was to introduce the internationally proven eRiding model to the NGOs in Southern Africa. "We have found a huge niche for these kind of services among southern African NGOs. The demand has been bigger than we were able to satisfy, " says Toni Eliasz, Ungana-Afrika's project manager.