The Resource Alliance is pleased to announce that the 5th International Resource Mobilisation Workshop will be hosted in Johannesburg from 26-28 March 2004. Some of the world's leading experts in the field of resource development and fundraising will be guest speakers.

A further outbreak of fighting in central Liberia sent more than 50,000 displaced civilians living in camps near the town of Totota fleeing towards Monrovia, 109 km to the south, on Wednesday.

The Ministry of Health of the Central African Republic is consulting its emergency operations partners after numerous cases of malnutrition and acute respiratory infections were detected near the town of Birao, some 1,100 km northeast of the capital, Bangui, a ministry official told IRIN on Monday. The ministry’s director of preventive medicine and disease control, Dr Abel Namssenmo, said that 73 children had died of malnutrition and respiratory infection between May and August in the village of Boromata, about 60 km west of Birao.

Average rates of malnutrition in southern Sudan have been steadily worsening since 2001 causing "a major humanitarian crisis", according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). Every survey undertaken in Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile since the beginning of the year showed at least 20 percent malnutrition rates. The measure - Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) - applies to children under five who are below 80 per cent weight for their height.

Mozambique's government launched an initiative Monday that will codify international norms protecting children's rights into its own domestic policy. The initiative, supported by UNICEF, will first analyze existing legislation and customs to see if current law sufficiently follows human rights treaties, such as the Convention of the Rights of the Child, to which Mozambique is a signatory.

Lung diseases cause a large proportion of childhood illnesses and hospital admissions in sub-Saharan Africa. A recent study in Zambia shows that most children in this category died from preventable or treatable infectious illnesses. The authors recommend that clarity and consensus are needed in guidelines for the management of childhood respiratory diseases in developing countries.

A regional women's network based in Nairobi, Kenya is seeking to employ a Communications Officer for a two-year full time contract. A probation period of three months shall apply.

Working with the representative in Nairobi and other Ford Foundation staff, the Program Officer will be responsible for the Foundation's Eastern Africa programming on education and sexuality in the region.

UNDP intends to recruit an expert for 2 months to support the development of a plan for the library at the University of Hargeisa, with a particular emphasis on the law section.

Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, has managed to enrol nearly half its children in primary school thanks to an increase in the number of trained teachers, the construction of special schools for late starters and the extension of a free school meals programme.

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) and the Media Foundation of West Africa (MFWA) have issued a joint statement in which they say they are "gravely concerned about the continued illegal and arbitrary closure" of Citizen FM radio station in Banjul, The Gambia. For more than two years, the government of President Yahya Jammeh has stopped Citizen FM from broadcasting on a false claim that the station's owner, Baboucar M. Gaye, has not paid his taxes and licence fees. MISA and MFWA believe this accusation to be a blatant fabrication. Citizen FM has not been charged in court, nor has it been ordered by any court to cease broadcasting based on the authorities' accusations.

Households with a higher level of education are less likely to be poor, a research project has confirmed. It has also confirmed the finding that returns to education rise with the level of education. The comparative project has shown that there are substantial differences across African economies and that large changes can occur within those economies.

When Ken Amoah established a child-welfare organisation eight years ago, he sought to rescue child labourers from a life toiling in the streets. The foster home, which is located in the New Achimota section of Accra, was set up to provide needy children with a place to live, an education - and a respite from work. Amoah has delivered on some of his goals, yet his prime donors - an arm of the Danish government called Danish International Development Assistance - are wondering whether he - and not neglected children - is the main beneficiary of his Accra-based organisation, Children In Need Ghana.

About 1.4 million children are to be immunised in Bauchi State during the next round of this year's National Programme on Immunisation (NPI).

Not a single cent of the R153 million allocated to RDP projects from the National Lottery Fund has been spent, reports the Sunday Independent. The issue of unspent RDP funds has been a subject of discussion between the Minister of Trade and Industry, Alec Erwin, and the Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, for a long time. No solution seems to be in sight. The closure of the Ministry of Reconstruction and Development (RDP) in 1996 left a vacuum in terms of an institutional mechanism to take forward the RDP programme and - in the current scenario - distribute RDP Lotto funds.

The latest issue of Global Connections, the Resource Alliance's electronic newsletter, features an article by Rob Wells, Director of Catalyst Works, a marketing agency specialising in the non-profit sector, in which Wells challenges grantmakers to include capacity-building for resource mobilisation in their funding criteria. Wells asks "why won't donors invest in this area of capacity building? Why won't they put a little money into strengthening the independence of NGOs through encouraging financial sustainability (as opposed to financial management)?"

The Sowetan reports that the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund (NMCF) is set to reach its target of raising R250 million, which is enough to guarantee the Fund's existence for eternity. NMFC's Chief Executive Officer, Sibongile Mkhabela, disclosed this during the Fund's 9th Annual General Meeting held recently.

Swaziland’s largest minority group by 2010 will be children under 15 who will have lost both their parents to Aids. “We are turning into a country of orphans. No one is really prepared for the scale of the social, economic and even political challenges this will bring,” said Charles Mngomezulu, a social welfare worker in the central Manzini region.

Trade in children, literally slave trading in infants to teenagers, has been a problem that African law enforcement officials thought was mostly confined to the western part of the continent. But a new study by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) has exposed the vulnerability of impoverished Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean on Africa's southeastern tip, to the practice.

Adults living with HIV/AIDS are receiving subsidised anti-retroviral drugs, while children in a similar situation are not benefiting from the medicine which the government launched last year, rights activists complain. ''Infected children have a right to life just as their adult counterparts who are currently benefiting from government anti-retroviral programme,'' says Oba Oladapo, chairperson of Positive Life Association, a non-governmental organisation.