The South African government should recognize that political repression and economic deprivation have forced Zimbabweans to flee their country and immediately stop deporting them, Human Rights Watch has said in a new report. Human Rights Watch called on the government to grant Zimbabweans in South Africa temporary status and work rights.

Just days before the Presidential run-off election, Lovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, President and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) will be in court to face charges of 'spreading falsehoods prejudicial to the state' - or rather, telling the truth about violence in Zimbabwe. As part of their bail conditions they have been banned from addressing political or public gatherings for almost the whole election campaign. These charges and bail conditions are clear breaches of free speech and freedom to associate.

We are urging people everywhere to protest at attempts to silence these men, and at the state-sponsored violence and intimidation which has intensified since the first round of elections in March.

If Lovemore and Wellington aren't able to address a public gathering themselves, you can help them to with this campaign action, but you'll need to hurry. We are making a giant photo mosaic of Lovemore and Wellington, using pictures of hundreds of their supporters from around the world - and we want to use your photo as one tiny part of it. We'll get this printed on a large banner as a focus for the London demonstration on 23 June, and will make the image available to other international demonstrations and to the media.

This is a last minute campaign, so we need to get your photos in immediately. There are two ways to do this:

Take a photo of yourself with your digital camera and email it to [email][email protected] Take a photo of yourself with your cameraphone and send it by MMS to 07546 229055 (0044 7546 229055 from outside the UK).

We'll do the work to make the photo mosaics and you'll be able to see the result here at the end of the week. If you're able, please take photos of your friends and colleagues as well, and send all of those to us in the same way - the more the merrier.

For more information, click here

The Gender & Diversity program invites applications for the first round of fellowships under the AWARD Program. The fellowship will support African agricultural women scientists from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia with PhD degrees, including those in post-doctoral positions, and women scientists with MA/MSc/MPhil/BA/BSc degrees.

June 18 marks Nelson Mandela’s 90th Birthday. We are asking you, our readers, to send us your thoughts in a couple of lines on why this anniversary is important for you. We will publish a selection of the best comments received. Please send a sentence or two to: [email][email protected].

In Mali the most important exams come last: the baccalaureate at the end of June. But this year, with secondary-school teachers in their seventh straight month of strikes, the exam risks going unmarked, meaning students may face a blank school year. That is making many of them angry.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has been successfully running school feeding programmes around the world for years. But in Ghana the lead partners are the Ghanaian government and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), not the international community or non-governmental organisations.

Pambazuka contributor, Shailja Patel, has just been named the 2009 Guest Writer at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden.

The programme has previously hosted two guest writers, Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana, and Gabeba Baderoon from South Africa.

The raison d'être behind the guest writer grant is the conviction that knowledge of Africa is not gained only from social science analysis and facts, and that literature can significantly add another language and meaning, and illustrate the diversity. The purpose of the grant is three-fold:

Firstly, to provide an opportunity to sit and write, away from daily chores, teaching or other (the Nordic Africa Institute is also not a teaching institution);

Secondly, to make possible readings to audiences in Sweden, and one or two other Nordic countries by visits to those countries

Thirdly, to add by their presence to the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the Nordic Africa Institute with its researchers and other staff, guests, guest researchers and scholarship students.

Bringing basic skills training programmes to workers in the informal sector can help to bring down poverty and unemployment levels, while improving economic growth. This emerged at the World Bank’s Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) held in Cape Town, South Africa. The theme is ‘‘People, Politics, and Globalisation’’.

President Yahya Jammeh’s reported threats to expel or kill lesbian and gay people not only encourage hatred, but also contribute to a climate in which basic rights can be assaulted with impunity, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the president. Human Rights Watch called on Jammeh to completely disavow all such statements, and to work toward repealing the country’s colonial-era sodomy law, which allows arbitrary and discriminatory arrests and invasion of privacy.

Women’sNet, a feminist organisation, is looking for a youthful and energetic woman to join our hard working team. The incumbent will manage the Girls’Net project, and will therefore need to have a combination of project management skills, content development skills and interpersonal skills suitable to working with girls. The position is based at Women’sNet’s office in Newtown, Johannesburg.

The research assistant will work on a qualitative research project on child domestic labor in Egypt. This research is part of a collaborative project between CMRS/AUC and the NGO, Terre des Hommes. The Assistant will work closely with and under the direction of the principle investigator of the study (Dr Ray Jureidini). The appointment period is 6 months with possible renewal for a year.

Take action today to stop child labor on the Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia by calling Bridgestone Americas CEO Mark Emkes at 615-937-1000 and tell him to switch from a quota pay system to a living daily wage for workers on his rubber plantation in Liberia. For 82 years, Firestone has operated a rubber plantation in Liberia where there is widespread child labor, abuse of workers’ rights and environmental destruction.

Among the numerous challenges facing social research in Africa is the lack of visibility for research output. Traditionally, research findings are presented in conferences through conference papers which are subsequently published as articles in scholarly journals, and eventually as books. In the light of this situation and its challenges, CODESRIA has deemed it useful to encourage African social scientists actively involved in research, publishers who disseminate the results of such research, and the information professionals who collect, indicate and promote the research, to debate and discuss the different issues raised around electronic journals, in order to better promote their knowledge and development.

CODESRIA is pleased to announce that it is organising a high level research meeting on African Economic and Political Integration and Alternatives to the EU-ACP economic and partnership Agreements (EPAs). The initiative is being undertaken as a contribution from the African social research community to the raging debate on Africa’s integration and development in general, and the EPAs in particular. The meeting will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 9-11 June 2008.

The South African authorities have begun moving nearly 10,000 immigrants, forced out by xenophobic violence, into camps on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Dozens of buses provided by the UN's refugee agency began transporting immigrants into relief camps after they had spent up to three weeks in community centres, churches and shelters.

At 17, Julia Metito* (*not her real name) should be in her final year in secondary school in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, but three years ago she had to leave school to give birth and then nurse a child. Today, she finds herself in Class Seven with 13-year-olds. 13,000 girls leave school every year in Kenya due to pregnancy, according to research released at the beginning of May by the Centre for the Study of Adolescence, a non-governmental organisation that works on reproductive health, gender and social policy for teenagers.

Six hundred teachers have left classrooms in Kenyan schools for better paying jobs elsewhere in just the past six months, according to the Head Teachers Association and the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT). That is about three teachers leaving the service every day.

In history, people reach a stage when they say “no” to oppression and exploitation. During the colonial period in Kenya, the Mau Mau liberation movement developed appropriate strategies and tactics of saying “no” to colonialism”. Besides armed struggle, it developed songs, dance and other cultural activities that clearly embodied the message of people’s struggle. Once again under neo-colonialist and globalised phase of imperialism, the same tradition of resistance is emerging in Kenya. Tunakataa! We say no! is a collection of resistance poetry and artwork written by Kauli Raiya (“People’s opinion”) a group of Kenyans who remain anonymous. Kauli Raiya, whose other “Kiswahili underground workers’ organ” was Upande mwingine (“the other side”) were also active in documenting resistance activities of “workers, peasants, progressive intelligentsia and all the patriotic Kenyans fighting for the interests of the oppressed and exploited majority” and its documentation was used by Mwakenya-December Twelve Movement in its publication “Kenya: Register of resistance, 1986” (Nairobi: 1987 – the quotations are from this underground publication).

Omotade “Tade” Akin Aina, a sociologist whose well-known work has highlighted the challenges in Africa of urban poverty, governance and development, will join Carnegie Corporation of New York as Program Director, Higher Education in Africa, it was announced today by Vartan Gregorian, president of the foundation. Tade is an experienced foundation executive, whose decade-long tenure in the Ford Foundation’s Nairobi office, has been marked by innovation and visionary leadership.

Applications invited from parliamentary staff (researchers, librarians, clerks) who regularly handle science related issues. Members of African parliaments are increasingly required to address the science, technology and innovation aspects of important policy issues, such as climate change, infectious diseases, ICT infrastructure, agriculture and food security, etc.