Water used to flow through the taps in Tabata, a sprawling suburb of whitewashed bungalows in Tanzania’s biggest city, Dar es Salaam. These days, the faucets and steel water pipes stand empty in backyards while families send their children to fetch water from a well. Girls heave buckets on to their heads while boys as young as nine wrestle jerrycans on to barrows and trundle them down the streets.
This warning may come a tad late for paddlers taking part in the two-day Fish River Canoe Marathon, which kicks off at the Grassridge dam on Friday, but elephants have been spotted in the Fish river. Well, that’s according to sheep farmer Tiaan Naude, who took a preparatory paddle down the river this week.
Enough funds to pay for the entire primary health and education needs of the world’s developing countries are being siphoned off through offshore companies and tax havens, according to a body formed to expose the offenders. A new group aims to expose how money that could finance global development is being hidden offshore.
Red tape, corruption and a lack of public support for government policies are hampering investment in the poorest countries, a report from the World Bank revealed on Tuesday. The bank also called on the international community to remove trade restrictions and subsidies. The benefits to developing countries would be four or five times the value of aid they receive, it says.
Famine in Africa could worsen unless action is taken to tackle the continent’s HIV/Aids epidemic, according to a senior United Nations official. “Unless urgent interventions are made, the epidemic could cause a steady fall in agricultural production, which would fuel serious famine in African countries,” said Peter Piot, executive director of the joint UN programme to fight HIV/Aids.
I miss the anti-globalisation movement. Not because I want to smash capitalism, and not because I think two dark towers on the swampy banks of the Potomac are responsible for poverty, disease and the voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me to buy new Nikes — but because the most creative street protests since 1968 made it respectable to talk about the international financial system over dinner.
The political and security situation in the Great Lakes region has deteriorated over the past decade despite robust intervention by the international community through protocols, peacekeeping missions, bilateral arrangements and development initiatives. Failure to make an impact has been partly blamed on the inability of state-centred mechanisms to address issues such as the stateless Banyamulenge.
There is growing evidence of political pressure on Zimbabwe’s media with government stepping up its harassment of journalists at two of the country’s remaining private publications, the Zimbabwe Independent and the Standard. Over the past week, journalists from the Mail & Guardian‘s sister publications have been questioned by the police about stories published as far back as February.
Arsene Wenger has told Wayne Rooney wil have to live ”like a monk” if he is to make the most of his phenomenal talent. The 18-year-old’s stunning debut for Manchester United in midweek came as no surprise to the Arsenal manager, who has previously described Rooney as the most exciting young English player he had seen.
So splendid was the agenda, and so eloquently was it read, and so warm were the sunbeams streaming down through the stained-glass representation of the ascension of Idi Amin, that the delegates at the first sitting of the Pan African Parliament decided to adjourn for half an hour to indulge their democratic ecstasies.