The First Lady of Rwanda, Mrs Jeanette Kagame, will visit the UK Houses of Parliament on Tuesday, April 20th to mark ten years since the Rwandan genocide. She will be joined by Noreen Kaleeba, pioneer of HIV work in Uganda, founder of TASO and UNAIDS Community Mobilisation Programme Manager. Mrs Kagame will be the guest at an event organised by Survivors Fund (SURF), a UK based charity working to support survivors of the Rwandan genocide, and hosted by Brian Cotter MP, Survivors Fund Patron. As the founder of PACFA (Protection and Care of Families Against HIV/AIDS), a Rwandan programme which advocates for specific policies, strategies and actions to fight HIV/AIDS among women, children and families, Mrs Kagame will launch a campaign to access HIV/AIDS treatment for women who contracted HIV/AIDS as a result of being raped during the genocide.

"The Landless People’s Movement (LPM) – a national movement of poor and landless people struggling for land reform – will launch a national rolling mass action strategy this week as part of it’s “No Land! No Vote!” campaign in response to the 14 April election. The campaign, which aims to raise the voice of millions of poor and landless people who say that “10 years of failed land reform is enough” through an organised boycott of “ballot-box democracy” in a context of broken promises, will include local, provincial and national actions culminating in a national march on election day. These actions will include a series of marches, demonstrations, assemblies, pickets, land occupations and occupations of government buildings."

Health Action International (HAI) Africa is a growing informal network of consumers, NGOs, health care providers, academics and individuals in more than 20 countries promoting increased access to essential medicines, the essential medicines concept and the rational use of both modern and traditional medicines. HAI is looking for experienced individuals to occupy the above positions in its office in Nairobi, Kenya.

Labour Minister Hubert Oulaye has denied that a ministerial decision requiring companies to give priority to Ivorians when hiring staff was “exclusionary”, amid growing tension over the measure. Last month, a senior UN official told the Ivorian government that the country was not "xenophobic" but had entered " a dynamic of xenophobia."

Celebrities can cause considerable change in society. Little wonder you have the likes of celebrated soccer star Kalusha Bwalya getting involved in the measles campaign, late Princess Diana in the land mine crusade and Bono in debt relief for developing countries, and the list is endless. Having realised the grand impact that celebrities give in effecting social change, the ministry of Labour and Social Security which has been working in close collaboration with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the fight against child labour in Zambia, have identified local celebrities to help in fighting the scourge. They have picked on two local artistes, St Michael (Michael Zulu) and his wife Sista D (Daputsa Nkhata-Zulu) to be their child labour ambassadors in Zambia.

Campaigning for South Africa's general elections, to be held next month, has moved into top gear - with politicians scrambling for an endorsement from the country's 20.7 million registered voters. "The parties are now in full-swing campaign mood,” says Khabele Matlosa of the Johannesburg-based Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA). Two of the country's nine provinces are the site of especially heated electioneering. "The major parties seem to have set their eyes on KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape,” notes Matlosa, adding "In the rest of the places, I think it will just be ceremonies, nothing much.”

There is less than two weeks from the March 20 launching of the Health NOW! campaign under the slogan ‘No war, No WTO; Fight for people’s health!’ The campaign will highlight the urgency of ensuring health for all while exposing neoliberal globalization and wars of aggression as today’s two major threats to global people’s health.

Civil society and opposition parties on Tuesday launched a united campaign to improve democracy in Angola, two years after the end of its decades-long civil war. The 'Campaign for a Democratic Angola', to be launched in a total of four provinces this month, will see around 30 organisations combine their efforts to push for change and ultimately improve the lives of the Angolan people.

In line with the Global day of action against the War in Iraq and the occupation of Palestine, the Anti-War Coalition (Gauteng) will be hosting a rally and a festival on the 20th March 2004.

A three-day nationwide campaign to provide some 9.5 million children aged six to 59 months in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with Vitamin A supplements was launched on Friday in Kinkole, 30 km east of the capital, Kinshasa, by Arthur Z'Ahidi Ngoma, one of the country's four vice-presidents. According to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), who in collaboration with Congolese authorities are carrying out the initiative, recent studies have found that 60 percent of Congolese children aged five and under suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, which is an underlying cause of 40 percent of childhood deaths in the country.

The edition includes:
* Bruce Podobnik & Th omas Ehrlich Reifer: The Globalization Protest Movement in Comparative Perspective;
* Peter Waterman: Adventures of Emancipatory Labour Strategy as the New Global Movement Challenges International Unionism;
* Jeffrey M. Ayres: Framing Collective Action Against Neoliberalism: The Case of the “Anti-Globalization” Movement.

Accusations of political bias are piling up against Malawi's state broadcaster in the run-up to general elections scheduled for May 18. In the latest salvo to be fired, a group of religious leaders has asked the courts to ensure equal air time for all political parties.

A motor bike-donated by the German Embassy; at least 50 people to attend to on a 'good day'; the nearest village being 13km away for house-calls and no anti-retroviral drugs to give some of his patients who desperately need them, is what one medical officer in the remote area of Shiwa'ng'andu (lake of Crocodiles) in the Northern part of Zambia has to contend with on an almost everyday basis. “What can I do really, as I have to almost literally split myself to attend to various health matters in the villages, do sensitization programs, attend to patients at the Shiwa Hospital and of course try and spend time with my family,” says one jovial Joshua Musabaka whom this writer had the pleasure to meet during an HIV/AIDS sensitisation workshop held in Chief Mukwikiles' area recently.

If you are in Bulawayo or London, join the Women of Zimbabwe Arise in a solidarity protest march on International Women's Day on March 08. Click on the link below for full details.

* The BBC film "Kill Thy Neighbour" will be shown at Chatham House on March 31st.
* BBC World Television will be running a Rwanda season during April with the films "Journey Into Darkness" (1994); "Valentinas Story" (1996); "When Good Men Do Nothing" (2000) and "Kill Thy Neighbour" (2003).
* VisionTV will be broadcasting the documentary "Rwanda: In Search of Hope" on April 8 at 10pm ET.
* PBS Frontline is producing a major documentary on "Rwanda, 10 years later”, scheduled to have its premier at the Holocaust Museum in DC on April 1, 2004, then to be shown on PBS stations in the US and may also be shown on BBC Panorama.
* NPR (National Public Radio-USA) is presenting a one-hour news magazine on courageous Hutu who saved Tutsi lives during the genocide, risking their own in the process. To be aired around April 7th.
* Anne Aghion's sequel to her acclaimed 2002 documentary, "Gacaca, Living Together Again In Rwanda?" will be released in late March or early April.

Ibutsa Rwanda is a weekend of commemoration, reflection and celebration remembering those who died and recognizing the experiences of those who survived the genocide of Rwanda in 1994. Ibutsa Rwanda provides a cultural forum for the communities of Toronto to reflect on the meaning of the genocide, while also celebrating the music, dance, song, poetry, literature, films and art that characterize a vibrant and powerful Rwandan culture thriving today in Canada and in Africa. Ibutsa Rwanda honours survival and life and the responsibility of "those who know and must tell”.

Two main features interrupt the dusty horizon of Hargeisa, the windblown desert capital of the self-declared, but as yet unrecognized, Republic of Somaliland. The first has always been there, a set of identical twin mountains, but now there is another - competing satellite towers mounted high on the spiny brown ridges overlooking the town, that also pierce the low-slung skyline and stand testament to the city’s more recent history.

Every year, the World Economic Forum produces a "Global Competitiveness Report". They ask the World Bank and corporate executives around the world about economic conditions in different countries. But they don't ask labour interests about how workers and unions fare around the world. Harvard University's Labour and Worklife Program thought it would be a good idea to try to conduct a survey called the Global Labour Survey. When the results are announced in May 2004, they are expected to receive worldwide attention.

Around the world, many police and law-enforcement officials misuse their right to use force, with fatal consequences. Most police forces are armed, but are inadequately trained on how to assess when and where to fire a gun, but with political will, this can be corrected and save many lives, a new report by Amnesty International concludes. Guns and Policing: Standards to prevent misuse focuses on what governments should be doing to control the use of guns by their police forces. The report has been written by Amnesty International for the Control Arms Campaign and is the first in a series of short thematic reports to be produced for Amnesty International, Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) during the campaign. The Control Arms Campaign is a global campaign aimed at making people safe from armed violence.

'Advancing the Campaign Against Child Labour: The Resource Allocations of National Governments and International Financial Institutions', a report released by the US Labour Department comparing military and basic education expenditures by governments in 73 developing countries for each year from 1990-2001, finds that most of these countries dedicated a larger share of their central government expenditures to education than to the military. In contrast, the report indicates that the multilateral development banks the World Bank, African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank invested a relatively small portion of their resources in these countries to basic education and child labour.