Interfund, with assistance from the European Union, is launching a Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) Helpline to provide information and advice to NGOs and CBOs. The NPO Helpline will provide callers from NPOs with a range of information and details to assist their organisations to access support to better manage and support their activities.

Dates for the land claims court's restitution hearing between the Richtersveld community, state-owned diamond mining firm Alexkor and the government had been set for the three weeks between May 3 and May 21, the community's legal representative says. In October, the constitutional court ruled that the Richtersveld community had a valid claim to the surface and mineral rights of most of the diamond-rich west coast strip along the Orange River from Port Nolloth to Alexander Bay, from which it had been forcibly removed in the 1920s.

The weather has not been kind to South African maize farmer Tom van Rooyen, but his biggest worry is the political forecast. Standing by a stunted maize crop wilting in the African heat, van Rooyen says farmers are worried about impending land claims by communities evicted under white minority rule. Their concerns centre on a new act which will allow the government to expropriate land for restitution where negotiations on a "willing buyer, willing seller" basis fail.

The Landless People's Movement (LPM) - an independent national movement of poor and landless people struggling for land and agrarian reform - has welcomed the announcement that the government plans to return 232,000 hectares of land to the poor and landless through the land restitution programme before the elections expected in April. "The LPM welcomes all moves to speed up the delivery of land reform, and notes that the government's commitment to deliver in four months almost 50 percent of what it has delivered in the past 10 years provides strong proof that land reform in post-apartheid South Africa is possible. Such a dramatic increase in this short space of time also clearly supports the LPM's contention - made to Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza in our meeting with her on 10 January - that the past 10 years of the land reform programme have been an abject failure," said the organisation in a statement.

He works 10 hours a day and gets only R80 a fortnight. Joel Molungu Mashele, who sustained multiple head injuries when a building collapsed, killing three others, at the weekend, on Tuesday related his painful experience to Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana.

South Africa's Zulu-led opposition party has begun its election campaign amidst fears of street violence. About 20,000 supporters joined a rally in Durban to hear the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, speak on Sunday. Inkatha is trying to prevent the ANC - which controls the national government - from taking power in the province of KwaZulu Natal. Thousands died in fighting between the Inkatha and the ANC in the early 1990s.

More than 40 MPs have signed secret agreements to pay debts owed to a travel agency implicated in a parliamentary R15-million voucher scam. In terms of the deals, any MPs who fail to pay money owed to ITC Travel Services within a year will have summons issued against them and will face being blacklisted for bad debt.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) and the University of Fort Hare (UFH) have established the Unit for Rural Schooling & Development at UHF to implement the NMF’s Rural Schools Development Programme in the Eastern Cape. The aim of the Programme is to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in rural schools by strengthening links between schools and communities.

The US Government (USG) Mission in South Africa invites applications from prospective partners in response to President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The announcement, issued in an Annual Program Statement (APS), appears at the following website: http://www.fedgrants.gov/Applicants/AID/OM/SOU/674-04-008/listing.html
Interested applicants are encouraged to sign up for e-mail notification at this website to receive any updates.

IT Governance practitioners are scheduled to get together to discuss topical issues at the IT Governance Forum to be held at the VW Conference Centre in Midrand in Johannesburg on 28 and 29 January. An important area of discussion at the forum will deal with the local legislation pertaining to information technology.

The South African AIDS advocacy group Treatment Action Campaign, which has been nominated for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, on Wednesday announced plans for a new campaign in its battle for universal AIDS treatment that would target inequities between the country's public and private health care systems, Reuters reports. South Africa's health care system has retained its apartheid-era structure of "elite" private hospitals, which primarily care for wealthy whites, and public hospitals, which are overburdened in their attempts to care for the majority of blacks, Mark Heywood of TAC said. In its campaign, TAC plans to target private hospitals, which it says are "too expensive," and push for a "people's health service for a people's antiretroviral program," Heywood said.

Themba Lesizwe, the South African Network of Trauma Service Providers (SANTSEP), has invited proposals from Non Profit Organisations (NPO's) who are members of or in the process of being affiliated to the network and who work in the victim empowerment sector. Themba Lesizwe has identified the following specific geographical priority areas: rural areas in Mpumalanga, Free State, Gauteng and North-West.

The National Department of Health, through the Chief Directorate: HIV, Aids, Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STIs) and Tuberculosis (TB), has invited national non-profit organisations (NPOs) working in the field of HIV, Aids and TB to apply for funding. NPOs are considered to be national entities if they provide a service in three or more provinces.

South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have signed two key political and business agreements. In one of the deals, President Mbeki and his DRC counterpart Joseph Kabila signed a wide-ranging co-operation pact. It calls for the two countries to work together in many fields - including security, politics, economics, human rights education, and tourism. South Africa also agreed to inject S10bn into the DRC.

President Thabo Mbeki will this week sign into law amendments to the Restitution of Land Rights Bill that have reinvigorated the debate on the pace of land reform and the emotive issue of property rights. The amendments give the minister of agriculture the power to expropriate land without a court order for the purposes of land reform.

"We are the people who have borne the brunt of colonialism and neo-colonialism, of the invasion of our land by the wealthy countries of the world, of the theft of our natural resources, and of forced labour for the colonists." These are the opening words of the Landless People's Charter, the guiding document of the Landless People's Movement published shortly after the 23-24 July 2001 meeting of landless people that gave birth to the first national movement of poor and landless people since the Industrial and Commercial Union of the 1920s. These words also echo the statement of poor and landless people who attended the first post-apartheid gathering of the landless, the Community Land Conference in 1994, which aimed to provide guidance to the new government on ways to meet the needs of our country's poor and landless majority. Unfortunately, the voices of the poor and landless were not heard in 1994, and the private property clause was adopted to protect the colonial and apartheid grid of white property rights.

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The UN refugee agency is co-funding a home-based care project for terminally-ill refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa, where many of them have no access to health care. The caregivers are themselves refugees who want to help their counterparts die in peace and dignity.

Environmental lobby group, Biowatch, has said that the Department of Agriculture has flouted its own rules by simultaneously awarding Syngenta the go-ahead to carry out field trials of GM maize seed and commercially release the crop. "The simultaneous application … does not meet basic practice procedures for biosafety and undermines the primary purpose of field trials," said Haidee Swanby of Biowatch SA. The dual application also violated the environmental impact assessment provisions of the National Environmental Management Act and was at odds with the objectives of South Africa's Genetically Modified Organisms Act, she said.

Anglican archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane has added his voice to criticisms of the plan to drive a toll road through the Wild Coast. "While this might benefit through traffic and the trucking industry, we are convinced that it will be to the detriment of the impoverished people of Pondoland," he said in a statement. The Wild Coast was one of the most magnificent and unspoilt coastlines in the world.