TO ENGAGE MORE children in media and be able to create mini production
units even in poor communities, Plan International partnered with Anak
TV over the summer to train up to 200 youths aged 9 to 17 in photography
and radio and video production.

Plan International advocates for schools free of corporal punishment,
bullying, discrimination, peer pressure and other forms of aggression
through its units throughout Asia, as presented in the United Nations
Study on Violence Against Children.

full article
<http://newsinfo. inquirer. net/inquirerhead lines/nation/ view/20080601- 140032/Kids- learn-media- other-skills- from-anti- violence- group>

Global Youth Service Day 2008 was celebrated in Umuahia Abia State Nigeria by Development Generation Africa International (DGAi) with the Abia State Children and Youth Forum on HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria (ATM) enabling MDGs and the Abuja 15% Declaration with children and youth voices and action.

In a scene on a popular Benin TV series, a farmer named Codjo puts his wife out on the streets because she kept asking him for more and more money to buy groceries. But then, when he goes shopping by himself, Codjo discovers that prices have indeed doubled.

He laments having driven away his wife.

This fictional sketch is being played out in reality with the rapid rise in prices of basic foods in the capital Cotonou and other towns in Benin over the last six months.

"Compared to November 2007, prices are between 20 and 50 percent higher," said Claude Allagbe, director of commerce at the ministry of the interior.

IRIN found vendors in Cotonou selling a kilogramme of salt for 450 CFA francs, up from 250 CFA francs in November. Rice was selling at 450 CFA francs per kilo compared to 300 CFA francs and palm oil had leapt to 900 CFA francs from the earlier price of 500 CFA francs.

The psychological impact these price rises have had on families is palpable.

In Attogon, a village near Cotonou, market sellers are saying that it is now common to see men accompany their wives to market to check and compare prices.

At Glodjigbem, another village 35 km from Cotonou, elders said they recently had to calm the local mechanic who had flown into a rage at his wife's requests for more money.

Everyone suffers

The price rises are adding pressures at many levels of society. "The price of some products have increased even beyond the reach of people who work," said Anselme Amoussou, a teacher.

For Etienne Badou, a member of the Consumers Defence League in Benin (LDCB),
"the fissures within families and the society are more apparent in urban than rural areas but in fact they are much worse in rural areas where people are poorer".

The highest rates of nutritional deficiencies in Benin are in the rural north in the districts of Malamville and Karimama. But in total some 33 of the country's 77 districts are "at risk of food insecurity" according to the World Food Programme (WFP).

WFP says that 23 percent of Beninois children under five show signs of moderate stunting and 11 percent of children suffer from severe malnutrition.

Tax solutions

On 30 April Benin's government announced that it would undertake a series of measures to alleviate the price rises.

On 1 May, the tax levied on domestic and imported products to pay for social services called TVA (Taxe sur la Valeur Ajoutée) was suspended for rice, flour and other staples.

However the measure does not appear to have worked. "There were some problems with applying the policy change," Allagbe, the director of commerce, said.

The problem, says Beninois economist Rhetice Dagba, is that there is no way for the government to ensure that traders pass on their tax savings to consumers. "To apply this policy it would be necessary to go to every market and rigorously inspect the price of every good," Dagba said.

Self-sufficiency

Another measure to alleviate high food prices that Benin's government is pushing is food self-sufficiency which agriculture minister Roger Dovonou said would require the more than doubling of current production levels.

As in others African countries, Benin's agricultural policy for the past three decades "was "to encourage cash crops for export to the detriment of food production," according to Dagba, the economist.

The new policy of food self-sufficiency will take time to implement, she added.

Cereal reserves

Another shorter-term solution is dumping food reserves. "Cereals the government keep in reserve have been released onto the market," the director of the food reserve, Irene Bio Aboudou said.

Her hope is that as supplies increase prices will go down.

But the measure is costing the state more than 35 billion CFA francs (US$83 million), according to government statistics. And so far prices have kept rising, one housewife told IRIN spoke while she was shopping in the market.

"My family are finding it harder to live on what we can afford," she said. "They make me feel that I am at fault. That I am doing something wrong."

An elderly woman sits under one of the few scrawny trees in a parched landscape as she and 8,000 other displaced people wait for aid workers to begin handing out some 100 tonnes of flour, salt, sugar, and cooking oil.

The woman's name is Hawa Brahim and the displaced site is Koloma, near the town of Goz Beida in Chad's southwest. Brahim said that she has no idea how the food arrived here. "They bring it; we eat it," she says. "All I know is that back in my hut I have ten hungry mouths that need feeding," she said. More than 50,000 tonnes of international food aid finds its way to this remote region each year to feed hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees and displaced Chadians. But how does it get there?

The process starts by identifying the need then designing a food aid package, requesting donations, purchasing the food, transporting it, assessing its impact, reporting back to donors and doing it all over again.

At each stage there are complications, Moumini Ouedraogo, WFP deputy country director in Chad said. "People don't understand how it works, not even our partners," he said. "(They think it is as if) you walking into a shop and buy a few cans [but] it's not like that at all," he said. "It's a very long process." The time it takes between when a donor decides to donate food and the moment the recipient receives it can take more than one year.

Dear Colleague:

Alliance Library System, in cooperation with LearningTimes, will offer a one-day online conference exploring the possibilities of using virtual worlds to teach history and to promote its appreciation. The conference - entitled "Stepping into History: Exploring the Past through Virtual Worlds" - will be held entirely in the virtual world of Second Life on June 10, 2008. "In-World" online attendance at the conference is limited to 60 participants, however you may also choose to attend via the virtual classroom simulcast.

The cost is $45 USD per person. Registration is available at the website:

http://www.steppingintohistory.org

The highly interactive experience will include "field trips" into historical locations that have been created in Second Life. We will explore 19th century America, where participants will meet Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln; Virtual Harlem, to hear live music from the Jazz Age/Harlem Renaissance; and Renaissance Island, for a Shakespearean play in a replica of London’s Globe Theatre. Everyone will discuss what they have experienced with simulation creators and other conference participants.

The conference will continue with a panel discussion with a variety of experts and a late afternoon photo workshop. The program concludes with a period ball at the Lincoln era White House.

For more information and to register, please visit http://www.steppingintohistory.org .

And to keep up with LearningTimes activities in 3D Worlds visit:

http://www.learningtimes.net/3D

A new World Bank report launched today says African countries must continue to champion HIV prevention efforts to slow and reverse the rate of new HIV infections, and that HIV/AIDS will remain for the foreseeable future an unprecedented economic, social, and human challenge to sub-Saharan Africa. The region remains the global epicenter of the disease.

According to the new report-The World Bank's Commitment to HIV/AIDS in Africa: Our Agenda for Action, 2007-2011-for every infected African starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) for the first time, another four to six become newly infected, even as regional figures show falling prevalence in countries such as Kenya, and parts of Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. About 22.5 million Africans are HIV positive, and AIDS is the leading cause of premature death on the continent, especially among productive young people and women. As a result, some private firms in Southern Africa recruit two workers for every job in anticipation of losing staff to the disease.
In laying out its continuing plans to help African countries fight the epidemic, the Bank's new strategy says that more than 60 percent of people living with HIV in Africa are women, and that young women are six times more likely to be HIV positive than are young men. As a result of the epidemic, an estimated 11.4 million children under age 18 have lost at least one parent.

"With AIDS the largest single cause of premature death in Africa, we can't talk about better, lasting development there without also committing to stay the course in the long-term fight against the disease," says Elizabeth Lule, Manager of the World Bank's AIDS Team for Africa (ACTafrica), whose team consulted widely with African countries, people living with HIV, sister UN agencies, NGOs, private companies and others in devising its new HIV/AIDS strategy for Africa.
The World Bank has mobilized more than $1.5 billion to more than 30 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to combat the epidemic since 2000.

Next Steps Through 2011

With its African HIV/AIDS 'Agenda for Action', the Bank says it is moving away from its initial 'emergency response' role as the world's principal financier of HIV/AIDS programs, towards a new mission with four new strategic objectives.

These include: at the global level, advising countries on how best to manage the complexity of the international financing they receive; and at the local level, helping countries to accelerate implementation and take a long-term sustainable development response to HIV/AIDS; strengthening the monitoring and evaluation capacity of countries to track the efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency of their HIV/AIDS response; and building up stronger health and fiduciary systems.
Amalgamating HIV/AIDS services with those for reproductive and maternal health, nutrition, and other diseases such as malaria and TB, would remedy a long-standing defect in many national HIV/AIDS programs to date. The 'feminization' of the epidemic and its links to sexual and reproductive health, and the frequency of co-infection with TB (and the emerging Extensively Drug Resistant TB) and other opportunistic diseases, amplify the importance of providing people with integrated health services.

Specifically, the Bank would commit to: provide at least $250 million a year for HIV/AIDS initiatives, based on country demand and establish a grant incentive fund of $5 million annually to promote capacity building, analysis, and HIV/AIDS project components in key sectors such as health, education, transport, public sector management and other sectoral projects.

"After 25 years, it is time to apply the lessons of experience and scale up what is working. With this Agenda for Action, the World Bank reaffirms its long-term commitment to assist partner countries achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support by integrating AIDS into their national development agendas, scaling up responses, and strengthening national systems," says Peter Piot, Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

The World Bank is one of ten co-sponsors of UNAIDS, along with International Labor Organization (ILO), Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Health Organization. The Agenda for Action will be implemented in the context of this partnership.

The most worrying scenario in Africa today, as the hike in food prices ravage the world's poor, is not in the price of the food, especially the imported kind per say, but is the underlying fact that Africa's population which is largely agrarian is still a net food importer, even after decades of attempts to kick start some sort of green revolution.

This situation is a unique one in the world, and as much as we look to other examples, it demands a unique solution for sub-Saharan Africa. How do we move from a net food importer to a net food exporter like many Asian countries which a few decades ago were at the same development level like us?

The British industrial revolution was based on the movement of labor from manual-based industry to machinery-based option, in the process, mechanizing and industrializing agriculture and thereby reducing the people involved in food production while at the same time increasing the productivity rapidly. These developments meant that people who were moving away from manual labor were being trained into vital skills and directed into the ballooning textile, chemical industries etc, on the back of the invention of steam and coal power to replace wind, horse and man power.

Also, due to increased food productivity, the population growth accelerated to feed the hunger for labour that new industries were breeding. It is therefore no surprise that in Britain, and in many areas of the developed world, two percent of the population produces food on a large scale for remaining ninety eight percent, yet in Africa the reverse is closer to the truth.

Africa may not look into this model entirely because at the time of the industrial revolution in Europe, there was an excess of resources and capital from the new world, powered by slave trade and the huge British Empire that was created by British colonialism. But we get some key pointers. First, we must find a way of expanding our average farm sizes in order to utilize the economies of scale, and we have to think more in the direction of mechanization, the science of improved varieties, with higher yields and shorter life spans, use of pesticides and fertilizers, reduce dependence on rain irrigation and move away from many of the traditional agrarian practices that have been practiced for ages, in order to have a realistic increase in food production. All this would not be possible if the farmers cannot afford to move into this technology direction. Therefore the issue of farmer financing and credit comes in.

The above description is what actually took place in India after independence, in wheat and rice growing, in what is called the green revolution in India. Success was recorded in some parts of India as a direct consequence however the sustainability of this yield increase has been questioned in some corners, but still, increased productivity in wheat and rice not only in India but also in the wider Asia, translating to Africa's dependence on this region for food, is a reality rearing its ugly head, in the current food crisis.

Success in India was recorded where it was possible to control, apart from availing the resources, the available water sources. The highlight is that improved varieties need adequate amount of nutrients (fertilizers) and water for their potential in yield increase to be exploited. As much as India is certainly not at the European level of economic or agricultural development, it is at a growth stage, closer to sub-Saharan Africa.

So how do we move from Asia's to Africa's success? The uniqueness of Africa's engraved farming habits and conditions makes it a clear case of initially taking into consideration the differences between the state of agriculture in Asia before the green revolution and the state of sub-Saharan Africa now.

In many African countries, farmers are grappling with land fragmentation that reduces the farming to a very subsistence level which does not make much economic sense. The poverty levels in Africa are excruciating. Majority of Africans live on less a dollar a day, and poverty is actually increasing. In effect, unaided, the majority of African farmers can not afford the cost of new varieties, In this case the cost of exploiting their potential maximally. Our crop diversity is such that they are many piecemeal interventions taking place at ago that at the end may not be beneficial.

Irrigation, in many places sounds like rocket science. The traditional government-based agricultural extension system has failed for a long time, and is ill equipped to bring about the forms of innovative technology transfer on a mass scale as would be necessary. HIV/AIDS is straining the manpower available. All this only goes to prove the complexity of the matter but does not overrule the possibility of this obstacle being overcome.

The situation only calls for a holistic concerted approach by governments, private sector, international organizations, philanthropists, home-bred and international scientists to joint coordinated efforts towards increasing productivity, slowly and carefully, through a bottom-up participatory approach that will involve the primary stakeholders in the problem assessment and solution formulation, implementation.

The Koffi Annan-led Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is one such initiative at kick starting Africa's version of the green revolution from an African approach. AGRA's plan is quite multi-disciplinary, holistic and quite impressively organized, with the financial muscle (Rockefeller Foundation which was behind the Latin America and Asian versions of the green revolution and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) that should relive it from begging money from donors.

It will be a long, arduous journey that will not yield results tomorrow, but it is crucial that all the stakeholders stick to the commitments in order for Africa to achieve agricultural development and food security.

Global food prices have doubled in the last three years, and the cereal bill for low-income food-deficit countries in Africa is projected to increase another 74 percent this year. Across sub-Saharan Africa , 33 million young children are malnourished, even as food riots have broken out in more than half a dozen African countries. With Africa ’s own food production tragically low, the continent remains dependent on food imports and food aid.



Mr. Kofi Annan will address these issues, presenting both immediate, medium- and long-term solutions. He will present an ambitious program for an African Green Revolution geared toward doubling or tripling the productivity of hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers in Africa , and report on important progress towards boosting sustainable food production and reducing food insecurity in key African countries.

Dear All,

It is with sincere regret that we inform you of the postponement of the ATM Forum in Umuahia Nigeria scheduled to take place at the Michael Okpara Conference Centre, Nigeria from April 25-26, 2008.

We got a Check from the major sponsor which is the Abia State Government.

Till today, the check have not cleared and the programme could not proceed as planned. The board of DGAi meet on wednesday and unanimously agreed to postpone the programme to a new date. but could not reach concensus.

The GYSD event still holds in selected Schools in Abia State but our funds couldnot carry the whole programme.

We regret the inconvinences this postponement might cause you and ask that you stay alert for a new date which would be announced shortly!

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!

Yours sincerely,

Henry Ekwuruke
Programme Coordinator.

--
Henry Ekwuruke,
Programme Coordinator,
Development Generation Africa Initiative(DGAi)
#189 Aguiyi Ironsi Crescent, Umuahia 440001 Abia State, Nigeria
Ph: +234(0)8025249923, 07039791470
_ _ _
DGAi... fuelling the future!

President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua has called for accelerated action on the establishment of a Gulf of Guinea Guard Force to provide additional security for members of the Gulf of Guinea Commission and their energy resources.

The President, who was speaking at bilateral talks with President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, on Thursday, April 10 in Abuja, called for an urgent meeting of the Commission’s Ministerial Council to work out modalities for the establishment of the Guard Force.

He said that Heads of State of the Commission should meet soon afterwards to ratify the recommendations of the ministerial council for implementation.

President Yar’Adua assured President Mbasogo that Nigeria would continue to make significant contributions towards ensuring peace, security and political stability in the West African sub-region and the Gulf of Guinea adding that, Nigeria will respond positively to his request for more bilateral cooperation with Equatorial Guinea on security matters and in other areas.

A ministerial delegation from Equatorial Guinea is to visit Nigeria soon to follow up on the talks between both leaders.

A call for an indefinite stayaway by Zimbabwe's opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, had a mixed response on 15 April, the day protest action began as most private commuter operators withheld their transport but resumed normal operations by midmorning, when most businesses in the capital, Harare, opened their doors after adopting a wait-and-see approach.

"I could not put on a suit because I was afraid that I could be harassed by people who might have thought that I was betraying them," a public relations consultant, who identified himself only as "John", said..

"The truth of the matter is that I support the stayaway, but my boss is a ZANU-PF supporter and I fear being victimised." About half of his colleagues had said they could not come to work because there was no transport.

The MDC's call to informal traders to refrain from business was doomed from the start, although youths forced some vendors to pack up their stalls.

"I am in support of the call to have the results of the presidential election made known, for we are in a state of anxiety, but the stomach comes first. As an informal trader, the sole breadwinner in my family, the quandary is between running around to sell my second-hand clothes and being seated at home to show solidarity with the MDC," Tariro Chiwewete, 40, a single mother of three, said.

"I think [President] Mugabe and his lieutenants know that their time is over and are just trying to provoke people to stage mass protests so that they can find a reason to stay in power. How else can one explain their reluctance to announce the results? It shows they have been beaten," she retorated.

The MDC is adopting a more militant stance against Mugabe's ZANU-PF government over its refusal to release the results of the presidential poll on 29 March.

A time for destiny

A High Court petition by the MDC to force the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to publish the results was dismissed with costs on 14 April; in response the MDC has turned to its urban strongholds and called for an indefinite mass stayaway.

In a statement on 14 April the MDC said: "For over two weeks since 29 March, ZEC is failing to release the presidential poll results, a situation that has caused an electoral impasse, as the people of Zimbabwe who voted in their millions have been waiting patiently for the results."

The statement said the time was ripe for Zimbabweans to take "destiny into their own hands as the ZANU-PF regime is not letting them have peace and democracy", and urged workers, businesspeople and informal traders to stay at home until the ZEC released the presidential results.

The MDC insists that according to results published outside each polling station, their leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the presidential poll by the required 50 percent plus one vote, negating the need for a second round of voting.

The ZEC has announced senatorial and parliamentary election results, in which the ruling ZANU-PF lost its majority in parliament for the first time since independence from Britain in 1980.

After publishing these results, the electoral commission secretly moved its national command centre in Harare, and has argued that the delay was a consequence of it collating and verifying the presidential ballots.

The commission has heeded a call by ZANU-PF to recount votes in 23 constituencies where it claims Mugabe was cheated of votes. The recount will take place on 19 April, even though the High Court ordered the recount to be stopped, according to local reports.

The MDC described the 29 March elections as a referendum for "food, jobs and a better Zimbabwe", and said "a shocked ZANU-PF regime has failed to come to terms with the defeat and is doing everything in its power in order to subvert the people of Zimbabwe's will."

The police, who have banned demonstrations, said in a statement responding to the stayaway that "the call by the MDC Tsvangirai faction is aimed at disturbing peace and will be resisted firmly by the law enforcement agents, whose responsibility is to maintain law and order in any part of the country."

On the eve of the stayaway police patrolled the capital's suburbs in riot gear and on the day police trucks cruised the streets, with the police chanting revolutionary songs and beating the sides of their vehicles with batons in an in an apparent show of force.

Labour unions may join stayaway

Lovemore Matombo, president of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), a militant labour federation that has also urged the ZEC to speedily release the results of the presidential vote, warned that his organisation might join the stayaway call.

"This [mass stayaway] seems the most immediate option that the MDC has after all the other gentlemanly strategies: going to court, approaching SADC [Southern African Development Community] and talking to ZEC, failed," Matombo said.

"Adopting militancy is a potent strategy in our given circumstances, and my personal feeling is that the MDC took too long to realise that it should effectively use the urban voter as a vehicle to push the government to accept the importance of publicising the results," he commented.

Matombo said the delay in announcing the results was pushing the country "towards an explosion and chaos", and vowed that the ZCTU "would not sit back and watch as the political situation degenerates".

"Government might take advantage of a seemingly docile population and declare everything in its favour, but the time will come when we will pour into the streets and show them that we cannot be taken for granted," Matombo said.

The 2008 Appropriation Bill passed by the National Assembly was formally signed into law on Monday April 14 at the Presidential Villa by President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the President of Nigeria.

President Yar’dua’s assent to the Bill was witnessed by Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, the President of the Senate, Senator David Mark and the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Usman Bayero Nafada, amongst others.

Speaking at the occasion, the President said that he expects all agencies of the Federal Government to implement the 2008 budget with “the highest sense of responsibility and with total deference to due process”.

In a statement issued by his Special Adviser on Communications, Mr Olusegun Adeniyi, President Yar’Adua pledged that every effort to ensure that actual results, commensurate with the resources provided, were achieved with the 2008 budget, the main thrust of which, he said, is to deliver on the Administration’s promise of poverty alleviation and pursue its seven-point agenda.

Meanwhile, the President will leave for Wiesbaden, Germany later today to see his private physicians for a medical review of an indisposition believed to be due to an allergic reaction.

He is expected back in the country before the weekend.

The demand for grain to feed chickens in some 350 industrial poultry farms in Kano State, Nigeria has strained human food security, officials are saying.

"The [poultry] farmers are competing for grains against other consumers," said Shehu Bawa, a veterinarian who consults for the UN children's agency (UNICEF). For poultry farmers, "It's a survival issue because if they do not feed their birds they will die and their businesses will crumble".

As a result, grain traders say they are struggling to meet the demand for grains. "The demand is so high that we are trying to lay our hands on grains from anywhere we can," the head of the grains merchants association in Kano's Dawanau market, the largest grains market in West Africa, Muhammad Abdullahi Koya, said.

In normal years, grain from northern Nigeria is often exported to neighbouring countries, particularly nearby Niger, but traders say the reverse has been the case since September 2007.

"Food exports to neighbouring countries have slowed," Koya said. "On the contrary, our merchants cross into Niger to buy grains from farmers because it is cheaper there," he said.

He said that purchasing in Niger is cheaper because farmers there are in desperate need of cash. "[Nigerian grains merchants] take advantage of the cash squeeze," Koya said.

Meanwhile humans and chickens make demand in northern Nigeria higher. Chicken feed generally consists of 32 percent maize, and 20 percent groundnut and soya cakes 20 percent, both of which are also eaten by humans.

Poultry farmers are also competing with each other for grain, Koya said. "The farmers have outdone each other in purchasing grains, particularly maize in the last two months," although he said poor crop yields were the main reason for high food prices.

"Poultry farmers' demand even at full capacity has never been a factor in determining food prices," he said.

Whatever the reasons, consumers are suffering. A worker in Kano, Adamu Usman, told IRIN that the current cost of grain is "unbelievable". "In just a few months, prices have more than doubled," he said. "It is becoming more and more difficult for me to feed my seven children as well as my wife and I."

He said that maize is a staple for his family and they would normally go through a 50kg bag each month. "But this month I can only afford to buy half a bag because now it costs 5,400 Naira (US$47) a bag which is too much for me to deduct from my 10,000 Naira a month salary."

Both people and chickens also consume groundnut cake which has risen from $119 a tonne to $305 in the last six months, Auwalu Haruna, spokesman for Kano Poultry Farmers Association told IRIN. Even the price of wheat offal, which is not consumed by humans, has jumped from $6 six months ago to $17 today, he said.

Price hikes increase demand

Contrary to normal economic logic, the high grain costs may increase rather than decrease demand for grain as well as decrease demand for poultry, said Bawa of UNICEF. "[With lower purchasing power] consumers use the money they would normally use for buying eggs and chicken to purchase grains which is more important to them."

Thus poultry farmers are suffering doubly with high cost of inputs and low sales, he said.

In the last year many farmers have finally replenish the hundreds of thousands of chickens culled because of avian influenza outbreaks over the last two years. Now, with feed so expensive, the farmers are struggling to keep their chickens alive.

Hyperinflation and increasing insecurity have forced Somali businessmen to demand payment in US dollars, creating difficulties for ordinary people with limited access to the greenback, traders said.

"We are demanding payment in US dollars because it has become impossible to keep track of where the value of the Somali shilling will be from one hour to the next," Liban Yusuf, a businessman in Bosasso, said.

"Inflation is such that if a businessman sold goods for Somali shillings, half an hour later he stands to lose 30 to 40 percent," he added.

There was also the issue of security and where to store the Somali notes, given that the shilling was exchanging at 31,500 to the dollar, down from 15,000 a year ago.

"If you sell commodities worth $1,000 in Somali shillings, you will need containers to keep it," he said, because the highest denomination was only one thousand shillings.

According to traders in the capital, Mogadishu, and Bosasso, the commercial capital of the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland, the situation had been aggravated by demands that they pay taxes and fees in dollars.

"When I bring commodities into the country I have to pay the government in cash dollars or my goods will not leave the port," Abbas Mohamed Duale, spokesman for the business community in Mogadishu, said.

There was no immediate comment from the government.

Yahye Sheikh Amir, dean of economics at Mogadishu university, said the Somali currency had lost both value and credibility. "What is happening is that people are printing money on A4 paper in their homes and trying to exchange it for something that was bought with hard currency," he explained. "It is not sustainable."

The currency problems have pushed up the prices of basic commodities, including food.

There has been no legal printing of Somali currency since the collapse of the Siad Barre regime in the early 1990s. All the local currency in circulation is either printed in the country or imported by individual businessmen.

The problem is exacerbated by the lack of a properly functioning central bank to set monetary policy. As a result, Amir said, the "biggest losers are the very poor, especially the urban poor.

"In Mogadishu, an estimated 20 percent receive remittances," the professor said. "Add another 20 percent who live off those who receive money. The rest of the population will be out of luck with their livelihoods severely affected."

He urged the government to allow the re-circulation of old notes. "The only way this can be resolved is for the government to stop home-printing of currency and start using the Somali shilling.

Extended deadline fast approaching for the Call for Statements of
Interest

DEADLINE: April 30, 2008

Looking for Partner Organizations to implement

the CIVICUS Civil Society Index (www.civilsocietyindex.org)

If your organization's work focuses on strengthening civil society in
your country and you are interested in implementing the Civil Society
Index in your country, please click here for the full application
form, or let us know at index@civicus.org. Please note that amongst
the selection criteria are a broad-based constituency at the national
level, as well as experience and background in both advocacy and
research.

The deadline for complete applications, including all documentation,
is the 30th of April, 2008 and future partner organizations will be
informed in late May 2008. Applications received after the 30th of
April 2008 will not be considered. The project implementation shall
start in June 2008 and will span over 2008 to part of 2009.

Please circulate this email to all potentially interested parties, or
refer to the linked application form to apply yourself. If you have
any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

In Solidarity,

The Civil Society Index Program