Remittances update

http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/rem1003.php

Editor’s Note

A 2009 report from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) notes that some 30 million African workers outside their countries send home approximately $40 billion a year in remittances. But with only as many “payout” locations on the continent as in one Latin American country (Mexico), the process is expensive and dominated by two large money transfer companies which work primarily with banks. There are large untapped opportunities for lower costs, particularly for rural Africans, if more governments allowed and fostered the participation of post offices and micro-finance institutions in remittance transfers.

A 4-page newsletter, Financing Facility for Remittances, with a report on the 2009 Global Forum on Remittances is at:http://www.ifad.org/remittances/newsletter/1.pdf

For statistics on remittances to and within Africa, see: http://www.ifad.org/remittances/maps/africa.htm

For a previous AfricaFocus Bulletin on remittances, see: 
“Africa: Sending Money Home,” at 
http://www.africafocus.org/docs07/rem0711.php 
END editor’s note 

 Global Integrity released its 2009 Report on corruption on 23/02/2010.

Some of the Ugandans held in South Africa meet a ugandan delegation led by Minister Matia Kasaija and Gen. Kayihura. Photo by A. Kloppre 

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year’s TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

Our Mission: Spreading ideas.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.

(excerpted from www.ted.com)

While the entire site is fascinating, the section on “The Rise of Collaboration” (http://www.ted.com/themes/the_rise_of_collaboration.html) has interesting perspectives on technology-enabled collaboration.

Quite an interesting list of books, sent to me from Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/series/PSHR.html

“Open Access provides the means to maximise the visibility, and thus the uptake and use, of research outputs. Open Access is the immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without the severe restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements. It is definitely not vanity publishing or self-publishing, nor about the literature that scholars might normally expect to be paid for, such as books for which they hope to earn royalty payments. It concerns the outputs that scholars normally give away free to be published – peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and datasets of various kinds.”

– Taken from Open Access: What is it and why should we have it? , posted on http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=130&Itemid=390

This website is a great resource for more information on the Open Access Movement

Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook – http://www.openoasis.org/

Author’s Rights

Author’s Rights, Tout de Suite gives journal article authors a quick introduction to key aspects of author’s rights. The guide includes references to online documents and links to pertinent Web sites to foster further exploration of this topic.

http://www.archive.org/details/AuthorsRightsToutDeSuite

If they could (according to a worldwide Galluip poll), about 700 million adults worldwide — more than the entire adult population of North America and South America combined — would like to move to another country permanently. The United States and Canada top the list of most desired destination countries.

If everyone who wanted to move to Canada actually did, the country’s population would grow by 170%.

More information on this poll is available at the Gallup website.