This year’s edition of the World Bank publication, African Development Indicators (ADI) 2004, launched last week, depicts a diverse picture of development in Africa, with several countries making remarkable progress and others lagging seriously behind. ADI 2004 presents data for more than 500 indicators of development for 53 countries. Thirteen Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries averaged more than five percent growth for the period 1995-2002, but many others saw their economies contract, usually as a result of severe civil conflict and adverse weather conditions. The region’s economic growth slowed in 2002 to 2.8 percent, slightly down from 2.9 percent in 2001.

Education is one of the key defences against the spread of HIV and the impact of AIDS. This is according to a fact sheet from UNAIDS, which says that while ensuring girls are in school is important to reducing overall vulnerability, it is insufficient without specific measures to provide information, skills and links with school-community services.

This document, a chapter of the International Youth Parliament's Youth Commission Report, considers the way that globalisation affects young people and their communities in the specific field of education. The processes of globalisation have both positive and negative effects on young people and their right to education, argues the document. Improvements in communication technology and educational delivery have the potential to improve the quality of education and make it increasingly accessible. However, the positive effects of globalisation are countered by the negative impacts of factors such as higher costs of provision, national budget misallocation, poor resource mobilisation, privatisation, international debt and economic instability.

Panos is a dynamic network of autonomous institutes developing and applying new thinking on the role of media and communication in development. The Panos AIDS programme has a history of producing cutting-edge analysis on key issues within the response to HIV/AIDS and is recognised as a pioneering organisation challenging existing strategies and approaches to fighting the epidemic. We are now looking for a director to provide vision and leadership to the programme. This is a new role. You will be responsible for establishing many of the structures within which you work and supporting the progressive scaling up of the programme's operations.

Wind energy is zero-emissions energy, a renewable resource that many environmentalists and alternative energy proponents feel is one of our last, best hopes for staving off devastating climate change. Globally, wind energy has grown 500 percent since 1997. In 2003, 8,133 megawatts of wind-generating capacity were installed worldwide. This brought the world’s total wind power generating capacity to 39,294 megawatts, enough to power 19 million European households.

Kenya has urged other African countries to adopt a spirit of compromise in negotiations aimed at ending the impasse on the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks. "Without sacrificing the principles and fundamental issues that we stand for, we cannot be successful negotiators unless we have some negotiating room," Kenya's Trade Minister Mukhisa Kituyi told reporters in Nairobi. He was speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of government officials and private sector representatives from 12 African countries to discuss how to revive deadlocked world trade liberalisation talks.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of 'global apartheid', an international system of minority rule whose attributes include differential access to basic human rights, wealth and power, from an African and South African perspective, and discusses possible alternative measures to fight against it.

On 1 April 2004, at around 7:30 p.m. (Kinshasa time), seven Military Intelligence (Détection militaire des activités anti-patrie, DEMIAP) soldiers and three National Intelligence Agency (Agence nationale des renseignements, ANR) officers raided the offices of Radio Kilimandjaro, a private station in Tshikapa, the second largest city in West Kasai province, central Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The soldiers stopped the broadcast as soon as they entered the station's studios and ordered all of the staff members who were present to undergo a two-minute voice test.

Africans do not see AIDS as a dire problem, unlike health experts, who predict the pandemic will unleash catastrophic consequences on the continent, according to a survey conducted in 15 African countries during 2002-2003 by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. According to the study, for which 23,000 adults were interviewed, many Africans, especially in East and southern Africa, had either lost relatives or friends to the disease or were affected by it in some other way, but many were undecided about whether their governments should divert resources from other priorities to fight AIDS.

The Seychellois government has announced that Seychelles has become the first small island nation in the world to develop an integrated national strategy for plant conservation under the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.

The ceasefire agreed between the Angolan government and UNITA in 2002 ended 27 years of civil war and provided the momentum for millions of internally displaced people (IDPs) to return home. More than four million people were displaced before the ceasefire. In early 2004, 450,000 of them were still waiting to go back to their homes, while around 400,000 were expected to settle permanently in their current place of residence. The majority of those IDPs who were able to return have faced a lack of basic services and food insecurity, as well as a widespread threat of land mines.

Rich country governments have failed to provide financing they promised under the "Education for All Fast Track Initiative" (FTI) to help fund universal primary education in poor countries, according to a World Bank report. The scheme—intended to help countries meet the Millennium Development Goal of providing primary education for all children by 2015—is suffering from a lack of financing, according to a report by World Bank staff. The report was prepared for the development committee of finance and development ministries, which advises the boards of the World Bank and IMF.

The international humanitarian medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has said that the battle against tuberculosis (TB) is being lost because of reliance on archaic diagnostic tests and drugs. "The HIV/AIDS pandemic has magnified this problem as TB often coincides with, and is made harder to treat by, HIV/AIDS. MSF calls for an urgent increase in worldwide investment in TB research and development," the organisation said.

As many as a third of the world's people do not meet their physical and intellectual potential because of vitamin and mineral deficiencies, according to a report released in New York by UNICEF and The Micronutrient Initiative. The report is accompanied by individual Damage Assessment Reports that present the most comprehensive picture to date of the toll being taken by vitamin and mineral deficiency in 80 developing countries.

Outlining what she called the "scandal of malnutrition" in the world, U.N. Undersecretary General for Management Catherine Bertini said this week that while the global gross domestic product has increased 100 percent over the last 20 years, "the number of underweight preschoolers has only decreased by 20 percent." "As the world grows richer, we do not keep up in the areas of improvement of nutrition," said Bertini, who was director of the World Food Program before she took her current post.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has began its discussion on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and all forms of discrimination, hearing the Special Rapporteur on racism and the Chairpersons of the Working Groups on people of African descent and the implementation of the Durban Declaration present their reports. Doudou Diene, Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, said the alert status today was at red with regard to racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia. There was a resurgence and vitality of traditional forms of discrimination, and the appearance of new forms of discrimination affecting the non-national, the refugee and the immigrant.

A series of African countries speaking before the Commission on Human Rights have decried what they said was a lack of effort on the part of developed nations to carry through on international commitments to combat racism, and called for more action to end discriminatory policies in immigration, education, and employment. A Representative of the Republic of the Congo, speaking on behalf of the African Group, said the Group was very concerned by the increased practice of discrimination in Europe.

The International Day for the Elimination of Racism was observed on March 21 at the Palais des Nations in Geneva with a panel discussion entitled "Intercultural Dialogue: a means to combat racism”. The Special Rapporteur for Racial Discrimination, Doudou Diene, said that all forms of discrimination had both political and economic constructs and often at the core of the problem of racial discrimination was a cultural misunderstanding.

Preparations for Education for All Week 2004 (19 - 25 April) are well underway. UNESCO is working with the Global Campaign for Education for this event. The focus this year is a lobby by children on behalf of the 104 million children who have no access to education. The Big Lobby is intended to sensitize governments, teachers, parents and children to those who are denied the right to education.

A Zambian bank has granted loans of more than 30 million dollars to white Zimbabwean farmers re-settling in Zambia. Zambian state media quotes the Standard Chartered Bank, Stanchart, as saying the money was disbursed between January and December last year.