Taking its name from the Xhosa word for ‘Twin’, Amawele facilitates partnerships between schools in Ireland and South Africa, to promote cultural and educational exchanges between the two countries. Each school is twinned with one other, and the students and teachers exchange information to gain insight into some of the practical realities facing their counterparts.

Amawele is currently working with around 70 schools in the Eastern and Western Capes, identifying needs and supporting them through developing facilities, materials, training, food and healthcare.  It is planned to increase this to 200 schools by 2010.  The main focus is on raising the number of young people in South Africa who have access to properly structured education at both primary and second level. Amawele’s aim in Ireland is to give Irish young people the opportunity to grow in understanding about the world in which they live and to develop a confidence about the difference that they as individuals, and their communities, can make in the world and in their own lives.

Amawele receives funding from private donors and, since July 2008, has been in receipt of funding from Irish Aid ensuring the programmes expand and continue.

The Niall Mellon Township Trust's 8th Building Blitz is taking place in Wallacedene from 7th to 13th November 2009. Wallacedene has a population of 21,000 and is one of the poorest townships in Cape Town. Wallacedene is an informal housing settlement was formed between 1985 and 1989 and some of the residents have been on housing waiting lists for fifteen to twenty years. There is severe over-crowding in the area with anything from seven to fifteen people living in just one shack. Levels of HIV/AIDS and TB are very high, as with other townships. It is estimated that one in three suffers from HIV and it is recorded that there is a particularly high incidence of HIV amongst children aged thirteen and upwards. Secondary School education for local children on average ends at grade 8 (first year in secondary school). There are four schools (three primary schools and one high school) and Amawele has created partnerships for these schools with schools in the Southill area of LImerick, a project supported by the Limerick Regeneration Agency.

September 14th 2009 - Steven Pienaar who played an important role in the friendly against the Republic of Ireland in Thomond Park on September 8th and Everton's wiry winger grew up in Westbury, what used to be a township on the edge of Johannesburg. He remembers being asked to serve as lookout for drug dealers and hearing gunfire punctuate the night silence.

"Westbury is well known in Johannesburg for gangsterism and drugs and that kind of thing," Pienaar said. "But there's a lot of talent there too, like in all South Africa. You've just got to try and get people out of there and develop it.

"I was fortunate I was scouted at the age of 10 so I was taken out of Westbury. But it is still the place I come from so when I go back to South Africa I go there." CLICK HERE to read the full article from www.telegraph.co.uk