Polio campaign begins in DRC | Mauritian daily fights pollution | Mozambique reforms education | Leading journalist dies

Polio campaign begins in DRC
UN agencies in the DRC have appealed to the warring parties to respect their commitment to stop fighting during the first phase of a national polio immunisation campaign, which started recently.

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the DRC and the country representatives of UNICEF and WHO called on the parties to the conflict to observe "Days of Tranquility," which was an "indispensable condition for the success of the National Immunisation Days". The campaign aims to vaccinate some 10 million Congolese children against polio.

The coordinator said numerous locations in the country were still affected by violence with some 20 health zones, notably around Kisangani, remaining inaccessible to vaccination teams.

"Over the past several months, thousands of people throughout the country have been striving to ensure the success of this event, which transcends the mere medical dimension and testifies to the way a society takes care of its most vulnerable component: its children under five years old," he added.

"It is the responsibility of all the parties to respect their solemn commitment...and to put the interest of the Congolese people above, all other considerations," he said. (IRIN)

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Mauritian daily fights pollution
In a bid to combat pollution, the Mauritian daily, L'express, has introduced a column where it publishes the registration numbers of smoke-emitting vehicles found on the roads. In its 28 August edition, the paper came out with registration numbers of 20 vehicles, their make and the name of the owners.

''The objective is to get the owners to take stock of their ghastly impact on the air we breathe, to force them to change their way and be more responsible,'' the editor said.

He regretted that equipment purchases, seminars of various guises, press conferences and law modifications have failed to convince the owners of smoke-belching vehicles to rectify them.

The editor indicated that ''until Mauritians can breathe and see quite freely the sky again, we propose to point out those vehicles that obviously do not know they are pestering the rest of the community.''  (PANA)

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Mozambique reforms education
Mozambican Prime Minister Pascoal Mocumbi has called for educational reforms saying that defining a new curriculum for basic education is a national question that demands the participation of all citizens.

He was speaking in Maputo at a recent opening of a forum on transforming the school curriculum.

Mocumbi stressed that "the plurality of our society should be a factor cementing national unity, a catalyst for cohesion and not for social exclusion". But such expectations could only be satisfied, he argued, by drawing up the educational curriculum on the basis "of looking for a consensus about what our society wants from Mozambican children and youths".

The Forum is part of a lengthy debate on the future of Mozambican education, involving government institutions and civil society organisations.

This debate, sparked off some three months ago by the National Institute for the Development of Education (INDE),centres on the content of primary education. It reaches out, not only to institutions, but also to those most directly affected - pupils and their parents.

Samira Patel, coordinator for bilingual education at the INDE, said that in other southern African countries the local communities had played an important role in defining the curriculum for primary education.

Primary education in other countries, she stressed, also used the local, African language, which is not generally the case in Mozambique.
The refusal to use vernacular languages has cost the country dearly, and is regarded by educational specialists as the main reason for high dropout and failure rates in primary education.

Plans are now under way to switch to bilingual education, whereby primary school pupils first become literate in their mother tongue, and are then taught the official language, Portuguese. (AIM).

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Leading journalist dies
Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Regional Information Co-ordinator, Chola Bright Mwape (33) died on 16 August 1999, after sustaining serious injuries in a motor car accident on 13 August.

Mwape, a Zambian national, died in the Medi-Clinic Hospital in Windhoek, Namibia. He was regionally and internationally known as one of the foremost media activists in the SADC region.

Mwape was in charge of MISA's Media Information Unit, which executes a broad range of projects including daily monitoring and international reporting of press freedom violations in 11 SADC countries.

He is survived by his wife Judy and their 20-month-old son Isaiah. (MISA NEWS)

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