Education Minister Naledi Pandor will this month lead a South African delegation to a Commonwealth meeting in Britain, where a set of protocols to guide the process of recruiting teachers is to be finalised. The meeting would focus on ways of stemming the flow of teachers from poorer to richer nations, said Pandor after her second Council of Education Minister's meeting in Pretoria.

The Rwandan government granted asylum on Friday to 283 people of Rwandan descent whom officials in Kigali have classified as refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The group - 172 children, 62 women and 49 men - were expelled from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo earlier in the week. Local military and civilian officials in the Congo had accused them of being Rwandans.

The days of the private media in Zimbabwe are numbered. Soon, readers will wake up to see only state-owned newspapers decorating the newsstands. On June 10, the government controlled Media and Information Commission (MIC) closed The Tribune, leaving at least 60 full-time staff out of work. The Tribune is the third newspaper to shut down in less than a year. Last September armed police shut down The Daily News, a popular newspaper that was a harsh critic of President Robert Mugabe’s government. Its sister publication, The Daily News on Sunday was shut down as well.

On 27 July 2004, Justice Edmond Cowan, speaker of the Sierra Leonean Parliament, banned the privately-owned "Standard Times" newspaper from covering parliamentary sessions for one month. The speaker's action came after the publication in early July of an article in the newspaper, under the caption, "MP Thrown Out of Parliament", which the legislative body considered disparaging.

Canadian-based charity Macdonald Youth Services (MYS) will publish and distribute to non-profits organizations worldwide, a free and unique, multi-media "how-to" resource about online volunteerism. Worldwide online users are projected to top one billion by the end of 2005. But globally, there are very few resources available now to explain how to tap into this huge, mostly untapped pool of potential online volunteers.

A recent report published by the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees and entitled, 'The Somali community in the UK: what we know and how we know it' has been widely welcomed by the representatives from a number of Somali associations. 'In addition to mapping exactly what has already been written on the Somali community, the report addresses what needs to be done to begin to undermine the seemingly perennial disadvantage Somalis face in the UK', the Independent Race and Refugee News Network reported.

The Nigerian Minister of State for Education, Hajia Binta Ibrahim Musa, has said that students of the National Certificate of Education (NCE) in Colleges of Education must be computer literate by 2005 as a pre-condition of their graduation. Speaking at a conference last week she also said that the country should 'seek to promote the use of ICT and distance education as a cost-effective and affordable way of expanding and improving the quality of education systems.'

Oxfam UK

Applicants are sought to manage Oxfam's strategic planning for, and immediate response to, humanitarian emergencies in eastern DRC and to manage emergency response staff in the field. The successful candidate must have at least three years of field experience of humanitarian work, some of it in a management position, as well as knowledge of issues relating to emergency programming, humanitarian law, community involvement and empowerment.

Save the Children, UK

Save the Children UK is looking for an experienced Operations Manager to introduce sustainable and efficient management systems for logistics, security, HR, HRD and administration within its Ivory Coast Programme. Successful applicants will have a proven ability to lead and coach a team and possess analytical and problem solving skills. They should also have a good command of the French language.

Save the Children, Norway

Save the Children, Norway, is seeking applicants for the post of Child Protection Adviser. You will be responsible for identifying and monitoring child protection issues in Northern Uganda as well as designing and advising on the implementation of child protection programmes in the region. The successful candidate will have experience of social welfare and of designing rehabilitation programmes for children associated with armed forces in developing countries.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has repatriated 283 people to Rwanda in a case involving second-generation Rwandan immigrants living in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo town of Kalehe, a UNHCR official told IRIN on Tuesday. The refugees claimed that Congolese military and local officials had rounded them up from their homes in Kalehe and detained them in a military camp in Bunyakiri, before forcefully expelling them into neighbouring Rwanda, said Mussa Fazil Harerimana, the governor of Cyagungu, a Rwandan town that shares the border with the Congolese town of Bukavu.

12-year-old Assigno lives in the village of Vo Asso Kedji. She has never seen her parents. Some have told her that they are dead; according to others, they are living in Côte D'Ivoire, over 700 kilometres away. Because of her family's poverty, and the fact that she has to help take care of her three sisters, Assigno could not afford the formal government schools.

Scanning through the mainstream press and digesting the fairly erratic and mostly insipid news on the continuing murders in Sudan, one is gripped by the horrible thought that maybe it is true that nobody cares. After all Bush and his cronies - who were so quick to ignore the United Nations in their dealings with Iraq - now seem only too content to evoke the selfsame authority in order to legitimise their policy of enforced abandonment in regard to Sudan. This selective disengagement seems to prove well enough that the people of Sudan are today’s “unworthy victims,” begins this article on www.zmag.org.

The Centre for Human Rights Studies in the Faculty of Law, University of the Free State, South Africa, invites applications for admission to study for a Masters Degree (LLM) in Human Rights specialising in Reproductive and Sexual Rights. The LLM in Human Rights specialising in Reproductive and Sexual Rights is the first of its kind on the African continent. It will be launched for the first time in 2005. It is an international programme that is aimed at equipping committed lawyers from the African continent with academic and practical skills for securing the realisation of reproductive and sexual rights at a domestic as well as an international level.

Approximately 65 women participated in two leadership training workshops conducted by Women's Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP) Moroccan partner, L’Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc (ADFM) in Taza and Ouarzazat. In the remote northeastern town of Taza, twenty-five women and five men participated in the training workshop, the majority of whom were representatives of organizations involved with economic development, social services, education, poverty eradication, women’s rights advocacy, and improving women’s health.

October 2004 will mark the fourth anniversary of the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security. To mark the occasion, the United Nations Secretary-General will publish a report on the progress and challenges in the implementation of the resolution since 2000. The report will not formally seek the input of civil society for the formulation of his report. However, the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security is seeking assistance in creating a civil society alternative report, entitled 'Four Years On: Advancing Women, Peace and Security'. For more information click on the link below.

The UK Department for International Development has extended the deadline for full Civil Society Challenge Fund applications until 31st October. The move comes as a result of DFID's decision to reassess the scope of the fund with a view to widening its remit to include innovative service delivery programmes.

Zimbabwean journalists have teamed up to publish a new daily online newspaper: "Zim Online - An independent news service from Zimbabwe", according to a media release. The service will be distributed via the internet (www.zimonline.co.za) and start operating from 7 July 2004. Zim Online aims to help fill the vast information vacuum left by the banning of independent newspapers and the expulsion of all foreign correspondents from Zimbabwe.

The Gleitsman Foundation was established in 1989 with the goal of inspiring greater grass-roots activism by recognizing the exceptional achievements of people who have initiated social change. They are seeking those individuals whose energy and courage have inspired others to join with them in confronting and challenging injustices.

Faced with a growing population of orphaned and vulnerable children, Swaziland's policymakers have turned to the children themselves to assess their needs at a conference outside the central commercial town of Manzini. "I am happy they are asking me about my life, because it is hard, and I think they should do more for orphans," said Sifiso Nhleko, a form three student from Siteki in the eastern Lubombo district near the Mozambique border. Nhleko, who has hereditary dwarfism, is a resourceful teenager who crafted his own crutch when he grew weary of hobbling about on an iron rod he discovered beneath a bridge - "a carpenter gave me wood and screws and he showed me how to make a crutch," he said.