Teachers in Guinea began an indefinite strike on Monday to demand a 40 percent pay rise. With no classes to attend, many pupils in the capital Conakry staged anti-government demonstrations which were broken up by riot police. The pupils chanted anti-government slogans, but no arrests were reported. Bamba Camara, the Secretary General of the Guinean Teachers' Federation, said the nationwide strike had been called to demand a 40 percent pay increase and the full implementation of a 2000 protocol with the government, which set a formula for raising teacher pay.

The core research programmes of the institute are thematic in character and involve inter-disciplinary network building. They shall be based on co-operation between Nordic and African researchers to produce new knowledge and improved understanding of issues central to contemporary Africa. They aim at stimulating both academic and public debate on Africa. The core funding of the programme covers salaries for the programme co-ordinator and one administrator (half time), a set budget for travel, conference attendance, field work and other expenses necessary for the research including costs for seminars and publications. Additional activities will have to be funded from external resources.

Please forward names and contact information for youth community based organizations (CBOs) engaged in: 1) entrepreneurship, 2) critical thinking 3) youth empowerment and capacity building and 4) sustainability and economic self-sufficiency of people on the ground in South Africa and Tanzania.

After years of technical, financial and political hurdles, the United Nations "Official Document System" is finally open and free to general public. The ODS is the main repository of 800,000+ UN documents dating back to its earliest days, from General Assembly resolutions to UN agency memoranda, in all six of the UN official languages. This is a major coup to those who have worked for years to see this critical archive of UN documents made freely and publicly accessible.

EISA intends to appoint two researchers for a period of three years. EISA's vision is the promotion of credible elections and democratic governance in Africa. EISA has its headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa and three country offices in Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique. Qualified SADC nationals are encouraged to apply.

The Global Greengrants Fund supports grassroots groups working for environmental justice and sustainability around the world. The Greengrants model for grantmaking is founded on a set of advisory boards made up of environmental and social justice leaders. All grants are made on the recommendation of these advisory board volunteers. We are hiring a part time Coordinator to facilitate the work of two of our West Africa Advisory Board.

The Global Greengrants Fund supports grassroots groups working for environmental justice and sustainability around the world. The Greengrants model for grantmaking is founded on a set of advisory boards made up of environmental and social justice leaders. All grants are made on the recommendation of these advisory board volunteers. We are hiring a part time Coordinator to facilitate the work of two of these boards, one in East Africa and another in Southern Africa.

The South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) said it had not ruled out the possibility of action should its current pay dispute with government not be resolved timeously. Sadtu was one of four teachers' unions to declare a dispute over salaries. Sadtu spokesperson Thulas Nxesi said the outcome of the mediation process in the Education Labour Relations Council was expected "sometime this week".

Critics of free primary education should try their business elsewhere, Education minister Prof George Saitoti has said. "This is an era of free primary education; it is here to stay since our commitment is firm. No one should allude that Government will turn back on this policy," Prof Saitoti said.

The Social Capital Foundation conferences are open to all those who want to understand the world in which they live. The academic content of the conferences is excellent but the language used is clear and the conclusions are operational. Emphasis is put on lively presentations based on modern communication techniques, in order to allow congenial, interactive communication style. Speakers are scholars with a wide variety of profiles and practitioners with an established academic background.

The fourth CODESRIA/SEPHIS Extended Workshop on New Theories and Methods in Social History will be held from 5th to 25th September, 2005. The theme for the 2005 session is Gender, Ethnicity and Culture. The Workshop will be organised around the comparative experiences of Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean.

The Program Officer will be responsible for the program in Governance and Civil Society in the Middle East and North Africa region. Under the direction of the Representative in Cairo, the Program Officer will design, implement, monitor and evaluate a portfolio of initiatives and grants addressing a variety of governance and civil society issues.

The Center for Victims of Torture is seeking a Field Coordinator to coordinate logistics operations of a psycho-social mental health project in Sierra Leone for refugees and internally displaced persons who have suffered torture and war trauma. The position has a one-year, renewable agreement.

GrantCraft began at the Ford Foundation, with a kernel of case studies and examples that had long served as orientation materials for new program officers. From there, starting in October 2001, we've sought out hundreds of grant makers and grantees from other organizations to add examples and insights of their own, share successes and disappointments, and draw lessons from what they've done and observed.

At least 1.2 billion poor people are not able to read or write. This restricts their ability to carry out every day activities such as read signposts, understand medicine labels and machinery instructions, confirm commercial transactions and avoid being cheated. Increasing the pool of literate and numerate people is essential to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

A new report by Oxfam International has highlighted the watchdog role NGOs can play in monitoring budget spending in resource-poor countries like Malawi. In Malawi, the Civil Society Coalition for Quality Basic Education (CSCQBE), a grouping of NGOs, began monitoring how the education ministry was spending its budget allocation three years ago.

The National Council for Higher Education has come up with a damning report on the status of higher education in the country. While noting positive developments in the sector like the number of universities increasing from one in 1987 to 28 today, it warned that 11 of them were operating illegally. The draft report being released at a stakeholders' workshop in Kampala paints a gloomy picture of the sector saying it is characterised by poor record keeping, under-funding, outmoded curriculum and unacceptably high lecturer to student ratio.

Decentralization is at the top of the reform agenda in many countries. Governments and agencies consider it an indispensable step in efforts to provide quality education for all. However, little is known about its actual impact on local schools. The recent newsletter of the UNESCO Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) looks at the situation in West Africa and Asia.

On 9th December President Olusegun Obasanjo launched a new Girls' Education Project at an official opening ceremony during the meeting of the National Council for Education. The £26million project, entirely financed by DFID Nigeria, will be implemented by UNICEF and Nigeria partners over the next three years. The project's goal is to achieve significant progress in Nigeria towards MDG 3: to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005 and to all levels of education no later than 2015.

South Africa's system of social grants has reduced poverty and is playing a developmental role in uplifting poor households, according to a new study. The research was commissioned by the Department for Social Development and focused on the social and economic impact of the government's main social transfers, such as the State Old Age Pensions (SOAP), Disability Grants (DG) and Child Support Grants (CSG), among others.