Pambazuka News, produced by Fahamu (www.fahamu.org), is an electronic newsletter and website that functions as a forum for debate and distribution of information relevant to the human rights and social justice community in Africa.

Pambazuka News is rooted in the belief that there is a strong relationship between information and communication technologies on the one hand, and development and poverty reduction on the other. This emanates especially through three dimensions: access to information and knowledge supporting a stronger voice of the people in democratic processes and decisions affecting their lives, and networking and communication among people and organizations. In this analysis, new technology can help to build a participatory base of active citizens that will hold governments and policy makers accountable. It was under this rationale that Pambazuka News was established. Pambazuka News has 18,000 direct subscribers to its email newsletter, 250,000 monthly visits to its website and growing usage of its RSS feeds. The newsletter is widely read and forwarded by members of the human rights and social justice community in Africa, and in many cases is the only source of information available to this community. The information platform has been adopted by this community as a tool to express their views and opinions. This is witnessed by the more than 100 authors, who contributed more than 150 pieces of commentary and analysis to the newsletter in 2005.

Pambazuka News also acts as a platform for the advocacy efforts of civil society organizations and is involved in an ongoing campaign by nineteen civil society organizations operating under the banner of Solidarity for African Women’s Rights. The campaign resulted in the fastest ratification of an African Union Protocol—the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa—which was ratified on November 25 2005. Pambazuka News has supported this campaign through the production of special issues on women’s rights and the hosting of an online and SMS petition in support of women’s rights.


Links: http://www.pambazuka.org

In 1997, Fahamu, the publishers of Pambazuka News, set out to examine how developments in information and communications technologies could be harnessed to support the growth of human rights and civil society organizations in Africa. In 1998, we undertook surveys involving more than 100 human rights and civil society organizations in eastern and southern Africa. One of the outcomes of this initiative was that we began receiving requests from civil society organizations for assistance in finding information on the web. To make the process of response manageable, we compiled the information in the form of a newsletter and included editorial commentary and opinion pieces from activists in the region and elsewhere. The newsletter is now replicated on a website, www.pambazuka.org, but the text-based newsletter has remained the core of the project and is released every Thursday evening.