Jill Evans MEP at the Earth Summit In Johannesburg

YESTERDAY I spent a day away from the formal Summit to visit the Alexandra Township, once the home of Nelson Mandela.

The purpose of the visit was twofold: to see at first hand the abject poverty in which many people in South Africa live; and to look in particular at the importance of water and sanitation to a community.

The Alexandra Township is only three kilometres from Sandton where the Summit is being held, but in terms of wealth it could be a million miles away. On approach, this community of 350,000 people is a huge sea of rusty tin shacks crammed together.

We met the leaders of the Alexandra Renewal Committee who showed us the South African government's plans for rebuilding the township.

We saw some of the new homes that had been built to replace some of the worst shacks. The people we spoke to had been living alongside the river and had been flooded regularly.

The new homes they had been given were basic breeze blocks and corrugated tin structures with one main room and a bathroom. They were very basic but had clean water and sanitation. And compared with the next homes we visited in some of the worst areas of the town-ships, they seemed like palaces.

Jill Evans meets Miriam Makeba during her visit to Johannesburg's Alexandra Township

As we toured the slums of Alexandra the stench was sometimes over-whelming. Sewage flowed from rows of Portaloos and ran down the streets.

People were crammed together in a rabbit warren of shacks with tiny spaces between them, sometimes only just large enough for a person to squeeze through. Children played on the streets amongst pools of stagnant water.

Yet everyone we met was welcoming and wanted to talk to us. We watched a superb and very moving play performed by the Alexandra Theatre Organisation, a group of young people who use drama to teach others about the dangers of HIV/Aids. With an estimated one in three people in South Africa affected by the virus, the importance of their work was enormous, and their interpretation was extremely effective.

And meeting the staff and pupils of Minerva High School was another inspirational event. Although it was school holiday time, when we arrived they greeted us with a colourful and exciting dis-play of song and dance reflecting the different cultures in the school.

The principal, Linah Mabungu, explained to us how they taught through the medium of four of the eleven official languages in South Africa.

There are 1,400 pupils in the school who learn English and one or more African languages. So despite all the problems the community faced, its linguistic and cultural diversity was being protected.

The day was very challenging and very informative. And more than anything else it has brought home to me just how crucial are the issues being discussed in this Summit.

I saw with my own eyes the reality of poverty, underdevelopment, lack of clean water and sanitation and damage to the environment. This was really the "global apartheid" that the President Thabo Mbeki spoke of in the opening ceremony.

It is hard to believe that some government leaders are arguing against increasing aid and market access to developing countries only a short way away. If the Summit had been held in Alexandra Township perhaps we would be hearing a more positive and radical message.

As it is not, I call on all the world leaders to visit the township that's just on their doorstep before the end of the summit to see for themselves how urgent a real agreement is for the wonderful people I met today.

Diwedd/Ends.