Representatives of several powerful international media associations were told by top government officials on Thursday that Zimbabwe's independent media must expect violence for "provoking" supporters of President Robert Mugabe's regime, SAPA-DPA reported. The five-member delegation of the Co-ordinating Committee of Press Freedom Organisations were quoted as saying that senior officials in Mugabe's information ministry warned it was "understandable" that journalists who were seen as supporting an anti-ruling party agenda would be threatened with violence.

The Tanzanian authorities, backed by UN agencies and Britain's Department for International Development (DFID), are planning to use information technology to improve planning and decision-making in their efforts to reduce poverty. The Tanzania Socio-Economic Database (TSED) is intended to make it easier for government agencies to discern trends and spot disparities among regions, according to the UNDP, which is backing the endeavour.

In pockets of the developing world, those deepest in poverty are starting to discover that they can use technology to pull themselves up. In tiny rural villages and overcrowded urban areas, people are using the Web to find day jobs, sell everything from crafts to cows, communicate, learn skills, and improve their lives.

Offered through the USDA Graduate School and taught by BARBARA FILLIP, PH.D. This spring, the course is entirely online for the first time. We have 31 participants and 8 guests from around the world, including one in Senegal, two in Nigeria and one in South Africa.

Click on the: "Click here to register for FREE Database of the Month" link near the top of the South African Studies fact sheet. Composed of 14 different databases providing access to over 769,000 records, this unique combination of databases gives access to published South African documents, books, journal articles, theses and current research, covering all topics.

Le Bulletin du 10/05/01, no 08

Greenstar is proud to announce the appointment of an outstanding Greenstar Ambassador -- Osei Darkwa is a Ghanaian who is helping Greenstar establish its first solar community center in Africa.

"Technology is the backbone of management and organizational effectiveness. It equips people with data and information that can then be synthesized into learning and knowledge; and, this knowledge is what gives organizations more powerful voices in, and greater impact on, community change -- the ultimate goal of nonprofit capacity-building." Roni Posner, Executive Director, Alliance for Nonprofit Management. These words sum up the general consensus among participants interviewed at the Alliance for Nonprofit Management's national conference held several weeks ago in Cleveland.

semaine du 11.05.01 au 20.05.01

A new report from McConnell International goes some way towards rectifying this problem. The report, entitled "Ready? Net. Go! Partnerships Leading the Global Economy", discusses the "e-readiness" of 53 countries. E-readiness is defined as "the capacity of nations to participate in the global economy" and McConnell measures e-readiness by examining each country's progress in five key sectors.

The state media swamped its audiences with stories about the late Minister of Youth, Development, Gender and Employment Creation Border Gezi. All the media reported the disruptions to the May Day workers’ celebrations, but the state-owned media took the opportunity to discredit the ZCTU and blame the violence on “opposition political hooligans” .

Egypt: Telecom Egypt to pay fees, not buy mobile licence; Uganda: Media Organisation to Get Website Swaziland: Government Asked to Review Decision to Ban Newspaper And Magazine.

MediaChannel.org - news, reports, resources and opinion. Featuring content from over 660 media-issues groups worldwide.

Every December thousands of children around the globe celebrate a special day: the International Children's Day of Broadcasting (ICDB). The key to the yearly event is participation by children and adolescents, and we invite television and radio networks around the world to continue their extraordinary work by taking up a new challenge for 2001.

COSATU and the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) have made a joint submission on the Intended Telecommunication Policy Directions, gazetted on 23 March 2001. The submission’s approach to telecommunications policy rests on: Accessibility and affordability of telecommunications services to working people and the poor; The direct interests of our members in the telecommunications sector; The importance of this sector for South Africa’s economic development.

E-mail access to Internet resources and databases is a topic dear to Kabissa, since it enables African organisations who have difficulty accessing the Web to do so with ease - via email. Our colleagues in Trieste have come a long way to solving the problem. We urge you to take advantage of the service that they have made possible.

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The information revolution has not only brought scientists closer together on a global scale; in the minds of some critics, it has created a 'digital divide'--a gnawing gap between scientists in the North, who enjoy full e-connectivity, and their colleagues in the South, who do not.

ICTP's "www4mail" project, which Centre staffer Clement Onime and I launched in 1998, has sought to close this troublesome divide by providing researchers in developing countries with access to databases, online journals, and scientific preprint repositories via e-mail.

Simply put, www4mail gives browsers in the South the means to navigate the internet off-line and free-of-charge through low-cost technologies that are available in their home countries. As a result, www4mail offers an instructive example of a technological solution to disparities in 'information access' between the North and South. It also aims to help fulfil ICTP's mandate for transferring knowledge to developing countries.

An important lesson learned from www4mail is that high-bandwidth access to the internet is not essential for bridging the digital divide. Indeed the service--and the software that drives it--offers web information to internet users in countries where full connectivity is not widespread. As an added bonus, www4mail's support for non-Western character sets enables internet users from these countries to interact with web-based information in their own languages. Since its launch more than two years ago, the software has evolved rapidly thanks largely to extensive user feedback that has led to enhancements and new features. www4mail was designed to overcome many of the obstacles--such as JavaScript, cookies and frames--that have sometimes impeded the use of other free software. At the same time, it has tried to replicate, as closely as possible, the experience of browsing the web via full internet connection, including searches of online databases.

Most importantly, the software is easy to use and extremely reliable. So much so that the www4mail project was named a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge Award 2000, a 'cyberspace competition' that included more than 600 projects from 84 countries (see News from ICTP, Summer 2000, p. 14).

An evolving goal of the project is to disseminate the service more widely and to use it as a catalyst to build capacity in developing countries for setting up and hosting local www4mail services. Until now, five main public www4mail servers--one each in Germany, Italy and the United States and and two in Canada--have been established to deliver web pages via e-mail to users around the world. Each server can supply more than 5,000 pages of information daily. We hope to have additional servers in place in the near future. www4mail's value is reflected largely in its rising number of users. But like the dynamic environment in which it operates, the project's prospects for success in the future (and the not-so-distant future at that) lie in its ability to meet the demands of an ever-more sophisticated and complex operating environment. That, in turn, means finding ways to provide easy access to more dynamic content, multimedia elements, and specialised software. To keep pace, the www4mail project must continually draw on state-of-the-art knowledge and technologies. For this reason, observations and insights from www4mail users are always welcome. It's the only way we can ensure that we stay abreast of advances in the field in ways that allow us to serve the needs of scientists working in remote areas. By taking one small step at a time, projects like www4mail will help determine whether, over time, the digital divide narrows into a sliver of separation ultimately bridged by creative applications of today's technology.

[This article first appeared in . Many thanks to Enrique Canessa for permission to reproduce it.]

Questions concerning www4mail may be addressed to http://www4mail.org

To learn more about using the Kabissa www4mail server, contact Tobias Eigen. Alternatively, simply e-mail [email][email protected] with the word "help" in the message body. Full instructions will automatically be returned to you via e-mail.

An online discussion about the Kabissa www4mail server for the African non-profit sector is ongoing! To join, write to [email][email protected] with only the command "subscribe".

The Instant OnlineFundraiser: a one stop E commerce solution for raising money online and selling your campaign's merchandise.

New media change the form in which old media operate. Although the not-for-profit sector in Africa does not have commercial motives, its work
can often suggest ways in which new media will develop. The absence of the need for purely financial payback allows it to experiment and to meet the needs of audiences not yet part of the market. This week there has been a cluster of new announcements that focus on bringing together digital content, the internet and radio.

Vous trouverez dans le forum général sur www.africultures.com les réactions à des articles problématiques publiés dans de grands médias: Yacouba Konaté en réponse au Figaro, Manthia Diawara à propos d'un article du Monde, Olivier Barlet à propos d'un article des Cahiers du Cinéma. On peut également y lire une contribution de l'écrivain Patrice Nganang. Ce forum est ouvert à toutes vos réactions et contributions. D'autres forums seront bientôt ouverts qui vous permettront d'intervenir dans les futurs dossiers
de la revue.

In the course of the past 6 weeks there has been considerable interest in the publication Making Waves - Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change, written by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron and produced by The Rockefeller Foundation In this issue the focus is on some of the stories and experiences that are told in Making Waves. Next week in The Drum Beat, there will be an emphasis on the strategic lessons and principles drawn from these experiences.