ASX/Media Announcement
Uranium Roll-Front Discovery at Livingstonia, Malawi
Globe Uranium is delighted to report that RC drilling at the Company's 100% owned Livingstonia Project in Malawi has resulted in the discovery of roll-front style uranium mineralisation in Karoo sandstones at the Chombe prospect.
Summary
The reported results confirm the presence of significant uranium mineralisation within the Livingstonia EPL, and highlight the prospectivity of the Karoo sequence in the area. The interpreted roll-front at the Chombe prospect, and other targets within the EPL, are now major priorities for the Company in 2008, and will form the ideal compliment to the Company's multi-commodity Kanyika Project, where resource estimation and scoping works are underway.
Globe Uranium's Managing Director, Mark Sumich, said, "These are highly significant uranium values. Chombe is a `pure-play' uranium target with a known mineral processing route in an extremely supportive jurisdiction. It is very early days at Livingstonia, but we couldn't be more pleased with how we are placed moving into 2008".
"The EPL was applied for on the basis of a radiometric anomaly exposed along the eastern scarp. The drilling was designed to test the roll-front model and identified oxidized and unaltered zones. The field team recognised the possibility for a roll-front between these zones, as the geological model would predict, and proposed a few additional holes that led to the discovery. It's a great technical success and testimony to the quality of our team".
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
As African countries overhaul education, a school succeeds against the odds
Here at the Chiseka school on the rural outskirts of town, many children attend class outside, sitting among weeds in the shade of a towering blue gum tree. There are 1,531 students, six classrooms, no running water and no light bulbs.
Yet Chiseka has the best academic record in its district by far. Last year all 40 students in the eighth grade passed their exams. And 30 did well enough to qualify for secondary school -- a significant achievement in a country where less than 30 percent of students finish primary school.
Chiseka vividly shows one of the biggest challenges Africa faces today: Saving a generation that is growing up with hardly any education. One in two African children don't finish primary school, and millions don't go at all. Those who do often end up in crowded schools with untrained teachers.
Malawi is one of several African countries that are now overhauling education, in an effort to meet the United Nations goal of having every child of the right age enrolled in primary school by 2015. Countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania are working with donors and the United Nations to improve schools and train teachers.
But Malawi stands out because it is designing its ambitious 10-year education plan itself, in the belief that only a program designed by Africans for Africans will work in the long run. It gives children books by Malawi authors and teaches them science through their own environment. And it touts Chiseka's recent success as a sign of slow but steady progress.
The aim isn't to produce doctors or engineers, but simply to teach everyone to read, to do enough math to hold down a basic job and eventually to write a check and balance a checkbook. What rides on that goal is the future of the next generation, and ultimately the country's own chances at development.
"We want to learn, we try hard to get an education. I want to be a teacher someday," says Jeffrey Joseph, 14, a slight and timid eighth-grade boy at Chiseka, the son of a farmer.
Jeffrey, sitting beside the village's hand-pumped well, is uneasy at sharing a dream he knows will be difficult to achieve. He scratches nervously in the dirt with a stick. He is embarrassed that he has never read a book, and can barely speak English, the language of education in Malawi beyond the fourth grade.
"That is how life is," he says softly in Chichewa, his native tongue. "If you are born into a poor family that is your destiny."
___
Malawi, nestled beside a great lake in Africa's far southeast corner, is landlocked, short of natural resources and one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth. Its educational problems are shared by most of the African countries south of the Sahara.
The figures are dismal: In more than half of African countries, only 50 percent of children finish primary school and 12 percent complete high school. Only in a handful of countries -- Botswana, Ethiopia, Seychelles, Sudan and South Africa -- do more than 90 percent of primary students go on to high school. Even in Zimbabwe, years of chaos and violence have destroyed one of the best education systems in Africa.
Some African countries are now trying to rescue education. Kenya has allotted more money for schools and is closing the gender gap at younger ages. Tanzania has raised the pass rate of children leaving primary school from 22 percent in 2000 to almost 62 percent in 2006 through more teacher training and community support. Ghana has drawn up a plan that uses distance education to train more teachers, among other changes.
Malawi has a bold history of educational reform, not always successful. In 1994 Malawi was the first of at least 10 African countries to abolish primary school fees.
Today that decision is seen as a colossal blunder, premature in a country tragically unprepared for the consequences. Overnight, enrollment nearly doubled in a school system already woefully short of teachers, classrooms, textbooks and other teaching aids. The government hired many teachers right out of secondary school, and gave them just three weeks of training.
"We were recruiting every Jack and Jill who just wanted a job. They were not qualified," says Augustine Kamloneera, director of planning at the Education Ministry.
Malawi quickly learned that a generation of children cannot be educated simply by ordering it to happen. For the promise of universal primary education to mean anything, the country had to find a way to train teachers fast and reduce class sizes.
Yet Chiseka has the best academic record in its district by far. Last year all 40 students in the eighth grade passed their exams. And 30 did well enough to qualify for secondary school -- a significant achievement in a country where less than 30 percent of students finish primary school.
Chiseka vividly shows one of the biggest challenges Africa faces today: Saving a generation that is growing up with hardly any education. One in two African children don't finish primary school, and millions don't go at all. Those who do often end up in crowded schools with untrained teachers.
Malawi is one of several African countries that are now overhauling education, in an effort to meet the United Nations goal of having every child of the right age enrolled in primary school by 2015. Countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania are working with donors and the United Nations to improve schools and train teachers.
But Malawi stands out because it is designing its ambitious 10-year education plan itself, in the belief that only a program designed by Africans for Africans will work in the long run. It gives children books by Malawi authors and teaches them science through their own environment. And it touts Chiseka's recent success as a sign of slow but steady progress.
The aim isn't to produce doctors or engineers, but simply to teach everyone to read, to do enough math to hold down a basic job and eventually to write a check and balance a checkbook. What rides on that goal is the future of the next generation, and ultimately the country's own chances at development.
"We want to learn, we try hard to get an education. I want to be a teacher someday," says Jeffrey Joseph, 14, a slight and timid eighth-grade boy at Chiseka, the son of a farmer.
Jeffrey, sitting beside the village's hand-pumped well, is uneasy at sharing a dream he knows will be difficult to achieve. He scratches nervously in the dirt with a stick. He is embarrassed that he has never read a book, and can barely speak English, the language of education in Malawi beyond the fourth grade.
"That is how life is," he says softly in Chichewa, his native tongue. "If you are born into a poor family that is your destiny."
___
Malawi, nestled beside a great lake in Africa's far southeast corner, is landlocked, short of natural resources and one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth. Its educational problems are shared by most of the African countries south of the Sahara.
The figures are dismal: In more than half of African countries, only 50 percent of children finish primary school and 12 percent complete high school. Only in a handful of countries -- Botswana, Ethiopia, Seychelles, Sudan and South Africa -- do more than 90 percent of primary students go on to high school. Even in Zimbabwe, years of chaos and violence have destroyed one of the best education systems in Africa.
Some African countries are now trying to rescue education. Kenya has allotted more money for schools and is closing the gender gap at younger ages. Tanzania has raised the pass rate of children leaving primary school from 22 percent in 2000 to almost 62 percent in 2006 through more teacher training and community support. Ghana has drawn up a plan that uses distance education to train more teachers, among other changes.
Malawi has a bold history of educational reform, not always successful. In 1994 Malawi was the first of at least 10 African countries to abolish primary school fees.
Today that decision is seen as a colossal blunder, premature in a country tragically unprepared for the consequences. Overnight, enrollment nearly doubled in a school system already woefully short of teachers, classrooms, textbooks and other teaching aids. The government hired many teachers right out of secondary school, and gave them just three weeks of training.
"We were recruiting every Jack and Jill who just wanted a job. They were not qualified," says Augustine Kamloneera, director of planning at the Education Ministry.
Malawi quickly learned that a generation of children cannot be educated simply by ordering it to happen. For the promise of universal primary education to mean anything, the country had to find a way to train teachers fast and reduce class sizes.
Who Are These People?
Over the weekend, I managed to avoid reading the article in the New York Times about agriculture in Malawi for about four hours. I knew what would happen, and when I finally read the article, it happened -- I was livid. In case you haven't read it, it is entitled "Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts". The experts happen to be the folks at the World Bank.
Judging by the article, what they are expert in is not soil science, growing food, generosity, or humanity. The gist of the article is that for years the World Bank, in its punitive way, "advised" the government of Malawi not to subsidize fertilizer handouts to the farmers, but to let the "free market" work. The result was famine, starvation, and the almost total depletion of local soils, as starving farmers planted without fertilizing the soil and depleted it more and more, thus killing themselves and wrecking the environment. This seems to have been fine with the World Bank, who were acting on principle: "In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi's farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food."
What was that again?
Their advice was, don't feed your children or elderly relatives, or even yourselves, but grow things like, I don't know (I really don't), sugar cane or tobacco, export it using lots of high-priced fuel, and then import a few, I don't know, potatoes or ears of corn, and hope for the best.
According to the article, part of the hunger problem in Africa is a lack of fertilizer (something they have plenty of in Washington, D.C.). The World Bank opposes fertilizer subsidies in order to -- well,it boggles the mind. In order to what? Get rid of the population? Degrade the soil beyond repair? I cannot think of any other reasons.
What is the goal here? Regularized financial markets? More billionaires? Really, it makes you almost vomit to imagine how the minds of these people work. Don't they understand free market capitalism? Free market capitalism operates by lurching here and there and then correcting itself. Every correction is a correction for a reason -- people made bad choices and then had to pay for them, often with their houses, sometimes with their lives or those of their relatives.
In the US, the agricultural free market has brought us lots of booms and busts, depleted soil, contaminated groundwater, superbugs, obesity, the end of the family farm, and numerous other
disasters. But the World Bank says "More of the same". Free marketers never seem to understand what an investment is -- it is something that cannot actually be "corrected" at all easily, and so people who make them (as in ethanol factories for processing corn kernels into fuel) want to protect them. In order to protect them, they fight tooth and nail against innovation and "correction". You and I might call this stupidity. The free marketers call it "creative destruction". During "creative destruction", lives and livelihoods are lost.
Doesn't that sound fun?
Of course, if you are sitting in your luxury office high in some building somewhere, perhaps it is fun to watch people starve. Perhaps it is fun to pronounce "expertly" when you don't know beans about how things grow and how agriculture works. Perhaps it is fun to coerce people into acting on your stupidities. But really, the rest of the human race has to wonder where these World Bank experts gained their expertise -- oh, I mean their sociopathic personality disorders.
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