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ISSUE NO 50 USEFUL WEBSITES AND DISCUSSION LISTS

GHANA’S eSHOP AFRICA OFFERS BUMPER BUYS

eShopAfrica.com sells top quality African manufactured goods in bulk. It is based in Ghana and is using the internet to create a larger global market for African products. Its owners say:"The world has been told to buy more from Africa - we want to help them. We sell our goods in bulk - the more you buy the lower the price. As well as selling in bulk we offer pre-selected groups of items - Bumper buys - which attract a further discount".

It offers a search service for unique and hard to find African items and can make product recommendations to help retailers find what their customers want. See the Gold Service page of its site for more details. It monitors the quality of all its products and agrees quality guidelines with its suppliers. It enforces these guidelines rigorously to ensure high standards:"We do not disturb traditional supply and manufacturing lines and pay the fair market price for the quality we are buying. We put 10% of our profits back into the African community. Look at the Community page of our site for more details".

As well as products, the shelves inside its shop are stocked with interesting facts about Africa and tips on how to use its products. Retailers can pass on these facts and tips to their customers to give the products added value. For its opening in February 2001 most of its stock is from Ghana. However, it is establishing links with artisans in other African countries and will be increasing its coverage soon.

http://www.eShopAfrica.com or email info@eShopAfrica.com

SENEGAL’S FASHION WEEK AND CARNAVAL

The 5^th Simod (International Fashion Week) is taking place 19-29^th April 2001 and the 4^th Dakar Carnaval coincides with it on Saturday 21 April 2001. Oumou Sy, the founder of Simod and Carnaval, has just been awarded Prix Rfi Net Afrique (http://www.rfi.fr) and will be in Ouagadougou for a fashion show called Fespaco until 3March She will perform in Fespaco on 1 March, 8pm in "Salle des Banquets" inside Ouaga 2000 under the invitation of Madame Coumpaore, and three movies will be shown: "Battu" by Cheikh oumar Sissoko (official selection), a documentary byf Mouahamed Challouf (from the competition) and"Baobab" by Lurence Attali (short-movie section).

Further information and updates:
http://sites.metissacana.sn/simod_2001/

TELECOMS INFORMATION AND POLICY RESOURCES ON THE WEB

If you’re looking for information about telecoms, try the Telecommunications Information Resources on the Internet. It has a staggering 7000 plus links about telecommunications.
http://china.si.umich.edu/telecom/telecom-info.html

There is also a policy-based site called Telecommunications Policy Online
http://www.tpeditor.com/tponline.htm.

(source: Kim Zarkin and Barbara Fillip, Digital Divide list)

OFFLINE MEDICAL AND HEALTH LIBRARY ON A CD-ROM

A cooperative project to provide medical and health information to all (including 100 HIV/AIDS related Publications). The Medical and Health Library CD-ROM 1.1 contains 300 publications in the field of Medicine and Health, 5,500 images and a total of 35,000 pages information and knowledge. The final objective of this cooperative project is to provide those active in the areas of health, medical care and basic needs with access to a free or low-cost CD-ROM library of 2,000 publications containing most multi-disciplinary insights and solutions they need to help tackle local health problems. This humanitarian project is initiated by the Human Info NGO (Humanity Information Projects) and the Payson Center for International Development of Tulane University in cooperation with numerous organizations of which Peace Corps, GTZ-GATE, MSF, SKAT, United Nations University, World Information Transfer. For copies of the CD ROM and more information contact: Director: Dr Michel Loots, MD Humanity Libraries Project: humanity@globalprojects.org or Payson Center for International Development and Technology Transfer, Tulane University: info@payson.tulane.edu

Details of the Medical and Health Library CD-ROM:
http://www.globalprojects.org

WHAT HAPPENS IF I CAN’T READ ENGLISH?

The smart-ass reply is that you won’t have much joy reading this e-letter but more seriously..... There are a number of translation tools available on the web. Unfortunately none have yet made sub-Saharan African languages available as far as we know.

For Spanish-English translation try:
http://www.spanishdict.com/index.cfm

The old standby that translates many languages with occasional surreal errors is:
http://world.altavista.com/

Also try:
http://www.langoo.com/

Also check out Systrans at www.systransoft.com and Systranlinks at www.systranlinks.com.

http://tarjim.ajeeb.com/ajeeb/ appears to translate text and whole web sites into arabic. Can any arab-speakers amongst our readers verify?

There have been a number of efforts to produce a multilingual browser. There is also one called WebView (see http://www.softissimo.com in case it’s still there) which is meant to translate English or German sites into French. Results are at best variable.

(source: Peter Kovnat, Judyth Mermelstein, Munro Richardson and Lisa Derx via Digital Divide)

ONLINE PAPERS ON ICTS AND DEVELOPMENT

A new series of short online papers on ICTs and development is available from: http://www.man.ac.uk/idpm/dishort.htm Topics covered include ecommerce for development, software development, IT training programmes for Africa, and information systems without IT. Feedback to: Richard Heeks
(richard.heeks@man.ac.uk)

(source: Afrik-IT)

News Update is a free e-letter produced by Balancing Act that covers African internet content and infrastructure developments, It goes out to government, the private sector, education and NGOs. To subscribe, send a message saying "I want to subscribe" to info@balancingact-africa.com