• MBendi
• Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF)
• Foreignword

MBENDI

MBendi bills itself as "information for Africa . . . Africa’s leading business, travel and tourism Web site." As researchers often find nowadays, a portion of the information available is fee-based, but much of the information is free.

MBendi has directories of businesses, stock exchanges, publications, organizations and other categories. It offers searches by location or region and directories of embassies and travel interests.

Let’s take one of the directories for aspin. From the home page, under Directory, choose Business. The search tool that appears on the next page allows you to search by type of organization (company, government, association and others), industry sector (categories and subcategories such as agriculture, forestry, rubber, wool, shipping, information retrieval, media and many more) and location. You’ll get a list of results with hotlinks to the company’s information or to information about the country in which the company is located. Company profiles include contact information, nature of the business, where the company is registered, company nicknames, news links and other information, if you are lucky.

http://www.mbendi.com/

ASSOCIATION OF CHARITABLE FOUNDATIONS (ACF)

The ACF is an association of grant-making trusts and foundations from across the United Kingdom (UK). Use the menu bar on the left to search for information about those grant-making entities with an A-to-Z search tool. Once located, a brief foundation profile is accompanied by a link to more information (the foundation’s homepage or another source of data).

If you have philanthropic UK prospects, there are other interesting tools to explore. The "voluntary sector umbrella bodies" are not ribs, springs and handles; they are associations of nonprofits. ACF’s Other Links page is a collection of funding organizations, associations and information aggregators. Use the International link from the home page to find associations and foundation information providers in other parts of the world.

http://www.acf.org.uk/

FOREIGNWORD

Have you landed on a Web page displayed in a language you couldn’t identify? Foreignword has just what you need. A few of the tools here will help you decide what language you are viewing. You may paste short pieces of text into this site for translation from and into 60 languages. The ready box at the top of the homepage allows you to translate single words or phrases. There is even a snazzy Language Guesser link. That might be the place to start. We didn’t download the free translation wizard so we can’t review it, but you may decide to give it a try. The links to dozens of language dictionaries are sure to come in handy. Looking for a human translator? You can find that person here, too.

http://www.foreignword.com/

Cecilia Hogan

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