Debt management policy plays an important role in ensuring and maintaining long-term debt sustainability. This document assesses the current status of external debt management in heavily indebted poor countries.

The southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre will serve as the venue for the third World Social Forum from January 23-28, with organisers expecting attendance to top 100 000 in the gathering of social movements, non-governmental organisations, intellectuals and leftist groups from around the world - all striving under the banner of "A better world is possible". The WSF was inaugurated in January 2001 as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum, which brings together corporate executives, political leaders, economists and financiers in Davos, a Swiss city. Even more promising than the growth of the event, writes Michael Albert in a commentary ( http://www.enda.sn/Forum%20social/english/index.htm
* Statements from the African Social Forum
- FORUM CONDEMNS US AGGRESSION

- DESCRIBING AFRICA'S DEBT - ILLEGITIMATE, ODIOUS AND IMMORAL
http://www.portoalegre2003.org/publique/
* Choike - A Portal on Southern Civil Societies
http://www.choike.org/

Though the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) stresses the importance of increased investment in order to strengthen Africa's external trade, its proposals to achieve the intended objectives remain far from achieved as market access from Africa continues facing exceptions and postponements, said Dot Keet, a Research Associate of the Alternative Information and Development Center (AIDC), South Africa, at the recently held Africa Social Forum.

Thank-you very much for the newsletter. The valuable information given has struck up hot debates amongst my colleagues and I. Being a South African, and things going fairly well in our country, we tend to be naive and forget what is happening on the rest of the continent. Thanks again for allowing access to such vital information.

The debt crisis of developing countries has not yet been solved by current international debt management as designed by the Paris Club, International Financial Institutions (IFIs) including the IMF and World Bank, the London Club, and the G7. This paper presents the specific framework of an international insolvency procedure that relies on Fair and Transparent Arbitration Processes (FTAPs) to solve debt crises.

Africa's debt was illegitimate, odious and immoral, and had been paid many times over; it was Africa that was owed an immense historical debt for failed IMF/WB projects; debt was used as an instrument of domination and plunder of Africa's resources and the only solution to the debt crisis was its cancellation without external conditions. These were some of the conclusions of a workshop on debt help at the Africa Social Forum, which took place in Addis Ababa on January 6-7, 2003.

Urgently required to manage a large operation which provides community service and health programmes for over 130,000 Congolese refugees in three camps, and a community development programme in western Tanzania.

This article looks at the current state of Internet access in the African countries of Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. The different approaches for hooking onto the Internet backbone are discussed with a view to the availability and cost to Internet services for the community at large. This article further examines some causes of the current problems facing African countries and the high cost of Internet access to the ordinary person. Finally some initiatives to bridge the digital divide are presented and analysed in terms of how to maximize their returns.

Justice Minister Penuell Maduna has asked the Scorpions to probe the demise of the Saambou banking group last year on the basis of an independent report implicating executives in "suspicious" transactions, insider-trading and mismanagement, Business Day reported on Friday.

The International Monetary Fund could resume lending to Kenya from July - almost three years after it suspended support to the country over concerns about corruption. Abdoulaye Bio-Tchane, director of the fund's Africa Department, said last Friday that he was confident the new government of President Mwai Kibaki would take measures to combat official graft.

As millions go hungry, some African leaders have splashed out on jets and fleets of cars. Paul Harris reports from Eritrea and Malawi on a natural disaster compounded by war and corruption.

In today’s economically integrated world, trade matters more than ever before. This website has been created as a research, training, and outreach tool for people interested in trade policy and developing countries.

In mid-December, in the midst of the controversy over racist remarks by Senator Trent Lott, Bush administration officials intimated that a presidential trip to Africa in January would demonstrate the U.S. president's sensitivity to African American concerns. If President George W. Bush had followed through on his plan to visit five African countries, Africans would have posed hard questions. Is your policy "just another trip"? Or are you willing to commit real resources to responding to the deadly threat of AIDS, and to other urgent African priorities?

An answer of a sort came just before Christmas, when a White  House press release curtly announced that the trip was postponed.  Later Secretary of State Colin Powell also called off plans to fill in for President Bush at the U.S. -Africa consultation being  held in Mauritius this week. Heading the U.S. delegation instead  would be U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, who will tout  the benefits to Africa of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act  (which mandated this second consultation), and pitch other U.S.  policies for promoting free trade.

Both the reduced U.S. presence in Mauritius and the exclusive focus on trade accurately reflect the realities of U.S. Africa policy. Washington policymakers are offering band-aids for the continent's gaping wounds, while pushing policies that add to the damage and deprive Africans of resources to fight back. This is evident in the U.S. willingness to use Africa as a military staging ground for war in the Middle East, while ignoring Africans' concerns for their own human security.

It shows up as well in the stingy U.S. contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, amounting to only a tiny fraction of the $ 3.5 billion a year that would be the fair U.S. contribution, Meanwhile, the administration proposes handing over some $36 billion a year to rich investors by abolishing the tax on dividends. Last week U.N. Special Representative Stephen Lewis called rich countries' failure to respond to the AIDS pandemic "mass murder by complacency."

The administration brushes off findings that current "debt relief" programs leave desperately poor countries paying more to foreign creditors than they spend on the health needs of their people. And Bush refuses to act positively on global issues from women's reproductive rights to global warming, on which the penalty for failure falls most heavily on Africa.

Bush's balance sheet is also deeply in the red even in the realm for which the U.S. claims most credit: trade policy. It is true that AGOA has opened some additional opportunities for textile exports from African countries. But the benefits from this are estimated at only about $100 million to $140 million a year, and only go to a few countries. An International Monetary Fund study estimates that these benefits could have been five times greater if the U.S. had not imposed extremely restrictive rules of origin for the materials used in exported textiles. Meanwhile, African exports to the U.S. continue to be dominated by oil.

In December Washington stood alone to block a World Trade Organisation agreement to allow export of generic medicines from one developing country to another. African and other developing countries were outraged. The New York Times commented that Washington's position was "so obviously influenced by the drug companies that America is alienating nations whose support it needs on other trade issues."

As African countries face the combined impact of famine and AIDS, they also see their agriculture devastated by another killer: agricultural trade subsidies in the U.S. and Europe. Last year's U.S. farm bill, for example, added some $83 billion in new subsidies for rich U.S. farmers, whose exports already undercut developing country farmers who produce rice, maize, and other food crops. Such subsidies also undercut African exports. In a  report last fall, for example, Oxfam calculated that U.S. cotton  farmers received subsidies of $3.9 billion. Oxfam estimated the  damage to African cotton producers from these subsidies at about  $300 million a year.

Most official speeches in Mauritius will undoubtedly extol the potential mutual benefits of expanded U.S. -African trade. But that potential stands little chance of being realized with the current business-as-usual policy. When and if President Bush does visit Africa, he may seek to avoid answering the question of whether he values African lives. Two years into his administration, the policy record leaves little doubt that the answer is "no".

* William Minter is a senior research fellow at Africa Action, the oldest U.S.-based advocacy group on African affairs. This commentary was originally published in Le Mauricien (http://lemauricien.com), January 15, 2003.
* Send your comments for publication in the Letters and Comments section of Pambazuka News to

The fraud and corruption trial of former African National Congress chief whip Tony Yengeni and businessman Michael Woerfel was set to resume in the Pretoria Commercial Crimes Court on Thursday.

To counteract the difficulties facing their many dispersed and remote communities across the southern African region regarding land rights, human rights, capacity-building and development, the San decided to establish a regional organisation that could represent them at all levels, hence the establishment of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) in 1996.

A KwaZulu-Natal Aids charity has been excluded from the list of recipients of the R1.8-billion grant from the United Nations' Global Aids Fund - for the second time. In May last year, the Enhancing Care Initiative was prevented from receiving R712-million of the R1.8-billion grant after Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang lambasted the group for not making its application through the state's South African National Aids Council.

This practical guidebook is directed at smaller-scale local partners in Clean Development Mechanism projects -small businesses, non-governmental organisations and community based organisations - to empower them to put forward project ideas, particularly ideas with a development focus.

Former Zambian Finance Minister Katele Kalumba, who has been on the run from his country's authorities since last October, has been arrested by police in connection with investigations of the plunder of national resources. Kalumba was arrested Tuesday in the northern border town of Chiengi, near the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Justice Department spokesperson Paul Setsetse says South Africa will consider extraditing millionaire Cyril Kern of Cape Town, if there is evidence that he was involved in money laundering. Kern's gift of R15 million to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being used as political ammunition against him in the Israeli general election.

I like Pambazuka News because it keeps development issues in the limelight.

Mr. Nyarwaya Isaac
World Vision, Kigali, Rwanda