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Historically, the death of a king of England was announced with the splendid epanalepsis: "The King is dead, long live the King!" As one king died, in other words, the new one immediately took his place, following the the law of le mort saisit le vif: that the transfer of sovereignty occurs instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch. The phrase was meant to signify continuity, yet change.

So it is with the Wahenga website. As the original creator of Wahenga, the Regional Hunger & Vulnerability Programme, fades into the mists of history, so Wahenga passes instantaneously and imperceptibly to its new owner, the Africa Platform for Social Protection. Continuity, yet change...

And, in the sense that this does represent change, it represents change for the better. Rather like one of those word ladder puzzles where you can change "cat" to "dog" by modifying just one letter each time to create a new word (cat - cot - dot - dog), so the evolution of the owners' acronym from "RHVP" to "APSP" is highly instructive:

• From "R" to "A" - i.e. from "Regional" to "African". Up until now Wahenga, like RHVP, has had a focus on southern Africa, with a mandate just for SADC countries. Now, under APSP, it will broaden its horizons, to cover the whole of the African continent. It has also - unperceived by the reader - migrated its hosting from Johannesburg to Nairobi, thereby also returning to its linguistic roots: "Wahenga", after all, is a Swahili word signifying "people you can trust for good advice".

• From "HV" to "SP" - i.e. from "Hunger & Vulnerability" to "Social Protection". This too signifies a positive shift, from a preoccupation with the problem to a focus on the solution. Back in 2005 when RHVP began, and before APSP was even conceived, no-one could have envisaged the rapid trajectory of social protection up the development discourse - to which ascendancy both RHVP and APSP have of course contributed over the intervening years.

• From "P" to "P" - from "Programme" to "Platform". Here again the change is very much in the right direction: from an unsustainable, donor-funded project run substantially by a group of non-Africans - variously, if impolitely, referred to as PSMs ("pale stale males") or 4Ms ("myopic, middle-aged, male mzungus"!) - to a vibrant, home-grown, pan-African network of national civil society organisations. Progress indeed!

For all these reasons, we hope that the new manifestation of Wahenga will be even better than the old. We thank our many supporters for their support, and we wish our successors every success, with that well-known Swahili proverb which loosely translates as: "May all your troubles be small ones, and may all your Comments be controversial".

Over and out! RHVP is dead: long live Wahenga!

Nicholas Freeland, Programme Director, RHVP

November 2011