We were truly excited, and we felt honoured and blessed to be able to attend the 16th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture given by President Barack Obama at the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg last week.

Civics Academy, a project by the Hanns Seidel Foundation in South Africa, recently conducted the second pilot workshop of the "Youth Making Local Government Work" project, together with its partner organisation Activate. The two-day event was held at St Adams Mission in Goso, Ngcobo in the Eastern Cape.

This was the topic of a panel discussion held by the Hanns Seidel Foundation together with Embrace Dignity, a renowned South African NGO, and the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office (CPLO) in Cape Town recently.

The Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office in Cape Town (CPLO) and the Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF) recently hosted a dinner at which three of the main speakers were Ms Yvonne Phosa, member of the National Assembly and Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Appropriations; Ms Thamo Mzobe, the Chief Executive Officer of the National Development Agency, and Dr Peter Ramsauer, a visiting German MP and Chairperson of the Bundestag’s Committee on Economic Co-operation and Development.

The chairman of the Committee on Economic Cooperation & Development in the German Bundestag, MP Dr Peter Ramsauer, from the Christian Social Union (CSU), visited Cape Town recently to discuss the building of sustainable political coalitions with high-ranking South African politicians, and to strengthen the economic and development cooperation between South Africa and Germany.