In the month of September one of the major activities at the SPES Vocational and Multimedia Centre was to start a survey on the various educational audio broadcasts of WorldSpace Afri-satellite, in the ALC- Africa Learning Channel in English and also in the French Canal EF- Educatif Francophone.

The surrounding photographs depict the many hours of attentive listening and discussions amongst some of the teachers/assessors/designers/ high-tech and craftspeople, who are very committed community-based social developers. They have all expressed their determination to participate at the WorldSpace Foundation social education initiative, and sincerely hope that these satellite radios become available throughout Africa for global-village development.

It was found that it was a very stimulating experience to listen individually or in groups to the WorldSpace radio satellite round the clock programmes.

These broadcasts provide valuable information on topics of great interest to our African society, as they provide Knowledge Access on subjects that concern our region, such as Health problems prevention, learning needs, peaceful development, small scale business enterprises, and many appropriate technology transfers and exchanges that aim at bridging the digital divide gap.

Above all these educational programmes seem to succeed in communicating the imperative need for better understanding of the essential lifelong-learning-attitude to keep acquiring new skills, in order to create sustainable peaceful global development through human capacity-building, integrating cultural and traditional ways with the new ways of ICT- Informatic Communication Technologies.

International: Regional SPES collaboration with SMEs

The executive committee of SEPAC / SWIL – Small Enterprise Advisory Council of the SADC regional was held in Harare, Zimbabwe, and the SPES chairperson took an active part being responsible for the SEPAC Working Group on: Information and Technology transfer.

This meeting was very productive and interesting activities for the promotion of SMES were planned by all the various Working Groups and the FES/SEPAC Secretariat situated in Botswana.