The millions of dollars pumped into the training of teachers and the construction of schools could be rendered null and void by HIV-AIDS. Education authorities have released a report which predicts that around 3 360 people, or 20 per cent of Namibia's total teaching staff of 18 000 countrywide, could be lost due to AIDS-related illnesses in the next seven years.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our views and our concerns regarding the important efforts currently underway on the Somali National Reconciliation Conference in Eldoret (Kenya). We refer to conference procedural matters, individual rights versus clan rights, the disastrous state of human rights in the country, constitutional rights, judicial review, war crimes tribunal, the land question, and the need for affirmative action.

Ghana has prioritised health, education, sanitation, infrastructure, local government administration and agriculture under its poverty reduction strategy for 2003, the Finance Minister Yaw Osafo-Maafo told Parliament on Thursday. Reading the 2003 budget speech, the minister said that funds to support the poverty reduction strategy would be provided under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC).

Working in collaboration with the ADM Advisor under the supervision of three heads of mission and in collaboration with five other senior staff members, S/he will be responsible for overall administrative and financial tasks of the program, under advisement of the ADM Advisor.

Save the Children requires a Technical Advisor who will assist in the development of action plans, collaborate with MINALOC staff and provide advice on the development of child rights legislation and reinforce partnerships between the government, INGO's and NGO's.

The project evaluator will be required to assess and study the relevance of an education project in Somalia in assisting in the provision of primary education to children in the target schools.

Responsibilities include planning and implementing all health project activities in cooperation with the district health office in different health zones for an ECHO project supervision of the implementation (medical monitoring and evaluation) of project activities (including medical administration, procurement of drugs and management of stocks, budget control) in cooperation with project coordinator and administrator respectively.

The present paper aims to review open and distance learning in the context of present challenges and opportunities, describe relevant concepts and contributions, outline some significant current global and regional trends, suggest policy and strategy considerations and identify UNESCO's initiatives in this area, including its role in capacity building and international co-operation. The globalization of distance education provides many opportunities for developing countries for the realization of their education system-wide goals. Two main factors have led to an explosion of interest in distance learning: the growing need for continual skills upgrading and retraining; and the technological advances that have made it possible to teach more and more subjects at a distance.

For the first two years of his life burns victim Mavuto was unable to walk. An accident with scalding water had left the skin on one of his legs so scarred he was unable to stand. And the future looked bleak for the little Malawian boy, whose name means problem.

While funds from the National Lottery is being distributed to charities, sports and to a lesser extent arts projects, not a single rand destined for RDP projects has been disbursed, reports the Sunday Independent. Since the inception of the national lottery three years ago, R10,9 billion has been made in ticket sales but not a cent of the R153 million set aside for "RDP" projects has been spent.

While KwaZulu-Natal education officials have been spending hundreds of thousands of rands on sprucing up their offices, the Japanese government has donated R50-million in a year-long project to build schools in the rural areas of the province.

UNICEF has agreed to provide Guinea-Bissau with assistance worth US $23 million under a new five-year support and cooperation programme that will continue until 2007. The programme will cover child protection, nutritional health, primary education and functional literacy, and a social communication policy, the programme's coordinator, Karim Alkadiri, told IRIN.

CANADA has donated $96 million towards a project to help the poor get legal assistance under the test case litigation scheme run by the Legal Resources Foundation.Handing the money to the LRF this week, Canadian High Commissioner Mr John Schram said his government, through the Canadian International Development Agency (Cida), was ready to assist projects that improved the lives of the poor.

Human rights activists in the Republic of Congo (ROC) have called for better application of existing laws to protect the rights of children. The call was made on 19 February, at the end of a four-day seminar for the training of human rights educators.

South Africa's Finance Minister Trevor Manuel on Wednesday unveiled a range of poverty relief measures in the country's budget for the next financial year which include extending the child support grant, raising pensions and providing for a food relief fund.

State involvement in the economy and the role, function and size of the public sector has been under severe attack. As a result, essential services such as health, education and social welfare have been under attack through privatisation, deregulation and ideas that campaigned against the public good and propagated exclusivity, says the South African Democratic Teachers Union.

Despite having pretended as if the issue of last year's widespread strike organised by the Progressive Teachers Union (PTUZ) had been resolved, the government has now begun to penalise all the 625 teachers who participated in the strike by threatening them with transfers to remote and politically volatile areas, The Standard reports.

Hundreds of teachers refusing to be re-deployed to other schools in formerly disadvantaged areas of the country face being kicked out of the civil service as Government moves to bridge the teacher-pupil ratio.

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) says the detention of Ismael Mbonigaba, editor of the newspaper "Umuseso", who has been imprisoned for the past month for allegedly "inciting people to be divisive and practice discrimination" was simply an excuse for the government to crack down on independent media and the opposition.

Following a new front of fighting in Western Cote d'Ivoire in December Oxfam is now looking for urgent additional support to assess and respond to the needs of thousands of refugees and returnees crossing in to Liberia.