A report from the Auditor General's office in Rwanda says that several government ministries and parastals were involved in irregular tendering procedures in 2002, causing the country to lose millions of dollars and frustrating the government's efforts to reduce high levels of poverty nationwide. "The findings indicate that some public officials continue to cause the government losses by dodging the National Tender Board in order to siphon government funds for their own interests," the report for 2002, which was released last week, said.

Central African Republic's labour union federation, the Union Syndicale des Travailleurs Centrafricains, has rejected a government decision to slash civil servants' salaries in an effort to reduce state spending, a union official told IRIN on Monday. "There are other ways to generate money for the public treasury without cutting civil servants’ salaries," Sonny Cole, the union's secretary-general, said.

The Coordination Office and Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Office of the Habitat International Coalition's Housing and Land Rights Network (HIC-HLRN) and the International Secretariat of the World Organisation against Torture (OMCT) would like to express their deep concern about the state of housing rights in Kenya. The Government's invitation of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing to conduct a mission on the situation of housing rights in the country, the support of its different ministries during the mission, its acceptance of the human-rights approach in its policies, and its creation of new laws and new bodies to promote and implement respect of human rights are promising. Yet, we want to ensure that your Government will take seriously into account all following issues, all of which the Special Rapporteur has mentioned in his preliminary observations on 21 February 2004.

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The head of Zimbabwe's central bank, handpicked by President Robert Mugabe to lead the government's anti-corruption drive, has received death threats from corrupt businessmen and politicians, a newspaper said on Sunday. Gideon Gono, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), was quoted by the private Standard weekly as saying he had received threats and needed personal security.

The Health Economics & HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) is based at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. HEARD conducts research on the socio-economic aspects of public health, especially the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The intent is to inspire health and development strategies that improve the welfare of people in and beyond Africa. HEARD's ethos is to share knowledge and transfer skills. This is accomplished by having a dedicated team of multi-skilled staff and a commitment to training African researchers.

Driven by concerns to demonstrate ‘value for money’, bilateral donors and major Northern development agencies are becoming more selective in the types of organisations and activities they will fund and the types of account keeping they demand from recipients. New requirements are forcing small non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in developing countries to change the way they work. They might be becoming more efficient, but are they also losing their ability to respond to the needs of the communities they serve? Research from McGill University and the University of Natal examines the influence of donors on South African NGOs.

The trading relationship between the European Union (EU) and South Africa is shaped by the Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement (TDCA) signed in 1999. Far from giving preferential treatment to an ex-colony, the TDCA actually imposes harsher liberalisation standards on South Africa’s agricultural exports than it does on Europe’s. Research from the University of Plymouth examines the protracted and acrimonious trade talks which led to the TDCA. Evidence drawn from interviews with key players in the negotiations suggests that European desires to please the World Trade Organisation (WTO) pre-determined the outcome. South Africa has had to adopt the neo-classical economic approaches which dominate the philosophy of development across the African continent.

Tycoon Kamlesh Pattni has denied videotaping prominent Kenyans as he bribed them. The denial, almost two weeks after the raids that police informants said yielded evidence of corruption, was issued by Pattni's lawyer Bernard Kalove. In the statement, Kalove accused "the press, both print and electronic, mainstream and gutter", of having gone on a "rumour generation and rumour mongering spree" intended to suggest that "our client was captured 'bribing', or 'greasing the palms of' or 'entertaining' certain prominent personalities".

The recent ANC Youth League conference was, in every respect, a gathering of the party's crown princes. And the aristocracy arrived in a style hitherto unimaginable. Unlike in past years when delegates came in buses and taxis, this year saw a flotilla of luxury sedans and hired cars for those who had flown in. An angry delegate from Alexandra township, north of Johannesburg, said the league was becoming an elite club of MPs and civil servants. "How will we be able to reverse the [township youth's] slide from political activism...when we live in town and drive flashy cars? The youth will not bother to vote when their leaders are seen to use them as stepping stones to their individual advancement."

Interims for Development has just revamped its website and launched a newsletter. The UK-based organisation works with African organisations and international companies operating in Africa to support their strategic human resources, technical needs and business development requirements. Its aim is to bridge the gap required to build African skills and capacity to take on the challenges of the 21st century.

Military expenditure by developing states is usually interpreted within the context of its potential alternative cost-benefits to the state and, often, its links with sustainable development, however, tenuous. In this sense, Ghana is not particularly different from other developing nations. This is in the sense that military expenditure is usually subjected to inter-agency ‘debate’ and cost-benefit analysis of how such expenditure could have been alternatively invested in ‘other’ development projects.

In 2003 the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced $10 billion in "debt relief" for the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to their calculations, this would reduce the country's foreign debt by approximately 80 percent. The offer came, however, with a full set of complicated conditions and deadlines. Even if all of the conditions are met, full relief would not be delivered until sometime in 2006. After that, Congo would still owe over $2 billion to foreign creditors. The largest creditors are the Bank and Fund themselves, plus the U.S., France, and Belgium. Yet the Congo, of all countries, has one of the strongest cases for full cancellation of debt and indeed for reparations from the lenders, writes William Minter, a Foreign Policy in Focus analyst and the editor of the AfricaFocus Bulletin, in this Foreign Policy in Focus commentary.

A Kenyan MP has lost his bid to get a court order compelling the government to release video tapes, which allegedly show former top officials being bribed. The High Court ruled that MP Koigi wa Wamwere has no legal capacity to sue the government since he has not stated his interests in the matter. The tapes were seized last week from the home of Kamlesh Pattni, the man at the heart of the Goldenberg affair.

The United Nations called on rich countries to compensate African nations for the damage done to them by agricultural subsidies accorded farmers in the developed world. "A mechanism is required at the international level to ensure that countries providing subsidies to their producers compensate African countries for income losses arising from such subsidies, on a pro rata basis," the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said in a report issued. It said such a mechanism was particularly needed "considering the loss of income to African cotton producers."

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Equatorial Guinea have launched a scheme to train enough teachers so that every child in the African country can finish primary school by 2010. Over the next four years the UNDP and Equatorial Guinea have promised to spend $5.2 million training 2,000 teachers, 45 school inspectors and 36 education advisers as part of a scheme dubbed “Education for All,” the agency said this week.

Children in South Africa have been speaking out about human rights violations, including child prostitution. A non-governmental organisation based in Cape Town called Molo Songololo organised the event to highlight the plight of thousands of victims of child abuse in South Africa and other parts of the world. According to a 2000 report by the NGO there were estimated to be around 38,000 child prostitutes in South Africa. Some of them are known to have been abducted at shopping malls.

Government has extended the probe into corrupt practices to all structures of the public service and warned civil servants with dubiously acquired properties to prepare for questioning. Vice-President Nevers Mumba said in Lusaka that the fight against corruption had been extended to the whole public service and all civil servants owning questionable properties would be called to account.

President Mwanawasa has maintained that austerity measures effected in this year's Budget are not meant to punish the public service workers. The President said the move was in fact an effort to ensure that Zambia reached the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) completion point.

African countries anxious to win more donor cash and foreign investment are rushing to apply to have their record on governance and human rights rated by a new panel, an evaluator said on Wednesday. The panel of seven African "peer reviewers" which will assess governments' records in the key areas has been set up under the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), an economic rescue plan for the world's poorest continent.