The Africa / Australia Exchange program was initiated by Pilotlight, a new London based charity founded by Jane Tewson, former Chief Executive of Comic Relief in the UK; the organisation that created the ‘Red Nose’.
		Pilotlight works to bring together new ideas, new resources and new partnerships to support people who are dispossessed - those that are homeless, landless, and whose basic rights are under threat. Pilotlight has already attracted significant support from the British government, the National Lottery Charities Board, the Charities Aid Foundation, the Gulbenkian Foundation, Comic Relief, the Lance Reichstein and Stegley Foundations in Australia and others.   Landlessness is one theme under the banner of dispossession that Pilotlight addresses. It wants specifically to tackle the ‘disgrace of dispossession’ by empowering people to: challenge the forces that dispossess them, harness new resources to alert the world of their plight, and show what can be done about is. The idea of the Exchange came from Pilotlight’s Associate Director, an Australian, Dr Charles Lane. Who is a social scientist who has lived in Africa for ten years. It was in Tanzania that he completed his doctoral research with a group of Barabaig herders and has thereafter conducted an international campaign of defence of their land rights. His close association with the pastoral peoples of east Africa has earned him the Maasai name Loodo (tall one). As an agricultural officer, development worker, and researcher Charles has seen how indigenous Pastoralists are losing their lands and the consequences this is having on their lives and the environment they inhabit. This has led him to design programmes of work with the International Institute for Environment and Development and Survival International to support these peoples’ struggle to defend their lands.   With a grant form the UK National Lottery Charities Board, Pilotlight has arranged exchange visits between indigenous Pastoralists from east Africa and Australian Aboriginal people to address together the problem of landlessness.   By bringing together community leaders who are engaged in on-going and strategic land struggles, their lawyers and advisers in related cases, as will as selected MPs and /or judges from the two continents it is hoped to forge links between Africans and Australians that can mutually advance their struggle for land rights and provide enduring benefits to them both into the next Millennium.   Piltolight can be contacted at:   15 - 17 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3ED United Kingdom ph: 0171.396 7414 fax: 0171.831 2823 email: pilotlight@brunswickgroup.com   THE EXHANGE OBJECTIVES   The overall objective of the Exchange is to enable indigenous east African Pastoralists and Aboriginal people in Australia to meet and learn from their shared experience and draw lessons from distinctions in their circumstances and thereby develop more effective strategies for successful assertion of customary rights to land. Through a successful exchange between Aboriginal people and indigenous African Pastoralists it is hoped to :   1. enable them to learn from each other and plan future strategies together to address more effectively the problem of dispossession   2. assist indigenous Pastoralists look beyond their individual cases and adopt more strategic approaches to attaining land rights, based on longer term perspective’s and directed towards more fundamental reform of national policies and laws   3. enable participants to experience how they manage their lands and possibly learn from each other different methods of sustainable use of rangeland resources   4. provide the opportunity for each group to attract publicity to their cause at a time when national debates are open to influence and new policies are being formulated and legislation drafted, and also capitalize on the opportunities afforded by the impending new Millennium.   5. provide a sense of solidarity between indigenous Pastoralist and Aboriginal people and help them come together out of respect and a sense of shared experiences   6. build links between peoples of different commonwealth countries and explore the potential for including commonwealth legal precedents in cases within their respective jurisdictions, and learn to draw benefits from relevant facilities within commonwealth structures   7. expand their international links to better address problems for themselves and others in their own and in other countries   8. open the way for unexpected outcomes that can benefit individuals or groups on both continents in their efforts to enjoy rights to their lands.