As the international community commemorated Africa Industrialisation Day last week, United Nations officials expressed mixed emotions about a beleaguered continent plagued by a rash of political, economic and military crises. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that a continuing global economic crisis has not only reduced the demand for African exports but also constricted foreign aid and hindered the flow of remittances to the cash-strapped continent.

Kenyan citizens feel strongly that they have not been involved in the procurement processes at Local Authorities (LA’s) as per applicable laws, a new survey report commissioned by the Kenyan Alliance of Resident Associations (Kara) and supported by USAID/PactKenya now reveals. A majority (76 per cent) of members of the public in all LA’s sampled had not seen a copy of the Public Procurement and Disposal Act 2005 and Regulations of 2001/2006.

Although police deny it, residents in the embattled Khayelitsha TR Section that has been ablaze with protests for eight weeks, say an 8pm curfew is being enforced, with police firing rubber bullets at will. Over 50 residents spoken to in TR Section said police in blue SAPS uniforms, but with their faces covered with balaclavas, patrolled the area at night and shot at anyone they saw outdoors after 8pm.

On 12 November 2010, over 150 people marched from the Angolan Embassy to the Home Office in London in protest at the death of Jimmy Mubenga during a deportation. Campaigners from the Angolan community first delivered a letter to the Angolan Embassy to call on the authorities to intervene. The march, led by the family and friends of Jimmy Mubenga, then marched to the Home Office. Although marchers had only been given permission to use the pavements, the sheer volume of people meant that very soon they took to the roads and were eventually given a police escort on a circuitous route to the Home Office.

The United Nations health agency has mapped out what countries can do, including raising more funds and spending it more efficiently, to ensure that everyone who needs health care can access it despite rising costs. The World Health Organisation (WHO) notes that governments worldwide are struggling to pay for health care, which is rising as populations get older, as more people suffer chronic diseases, and as new and more expensive treatments appear.

The Moroccan government is stepping up efforts to check the rising maternal mortality rate in the country by implementing a variety of measures to help women who give birth without medical supervision, particularly in rural areas. Experts say about 132 deaths per 100,000 live births occur each year. At a meeting organised by Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP) - a Moroccan political party founded in 1975 – a number of factors were listed as the main causes of maternal mortality in the North African country.

New reporting guidelines herald an exciting new phase of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa – providing a framework for ongoing and constructive dialogue. Elize Delport explains.

Following the passing of Odipo Jacob Odhiambo, Philo Ikonya pays tribute to the Kenyan activist and shares personal experiences of their arrest together last year.

The death toll in Somalia's ongoing war has increased during the last two years, local human rights groups told AfricaNews. The increment comes as shelling and fighting between government forces backed by AU peacekeepers and rebels reaches high proportions in the capital Mogadishu. The emergency traffic ambulance service in Mogadishu said that at least 4,260 people were killed in Mogadishu during 2009 and 2010.

The regional SADC bloc says an independent investigation in Zimbabwe, to verify reports of violence and intimidation before a general election can be held, is needed. Civic society leaders from Zimbabwe on Monday met with the SADC executive secretary, Tomaz Salamao, in Gaborone to appraise him and his secretariat on what needs to be done before parties in the Global Political Agreement call for a poll.

Sudan's north said on Wednesday the semi-autonomous south of the country had declared war by supporting anti-government rebels from Darfur, just weeks ahead of a referendum on southern independence. Sudan's north-south civil war ended in 2005 with a peace deal that shared wealth and power, enshrined democratic transformation and allowed southerners to vote in a 9 January plebiscite which most expect to result in secession.

The US Government has finally given the names of the four top Government officials and a prominent businessman banned from setting foot in the US over drug trafficking. At the same time, US ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger handed over 'crucial information' to the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission on the closed Charterhouse Bank. Ranneberger said his government's decision was in response to demands that the names of those banned be disclosed.

A survey has found HIV infection rates as high as almost 40 per cent among farm workers in Mpumalanga and Limpopo. Almost 3,000 farm workers from 23 commercial farms in the Malelane, Musina and Tzaneen regions took part in the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) survey conducted over three months. At least 39,5 per cent of farm workers who donated blood anonymously were found to be HIV positive. This was more than twice the national prevalence rate of 18 per cent.

Prosecutions have gotten underway to put behind bars eight members of an illegal kidney transplant syndicate operating in South Africa. The accused, who were exposed earlier this month after reports of unlawful transplant procedures surfaced, appeared in a Kwazulu Natal court. They face charges of illegally harvesting and selling kidneys between 2001 and 2003 at the St. Augustine's Hospital in Durban.

Reflecting on progress towards the African Union (AU) Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on Women in Africa, Sidiga Washi outlines the steps and provisions which need to be made to move forward the ratification of the protocol in Sudan.

The Nigerian government needs to show commitment to the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa by passing relevant laws and allocating funds to women’s rights, argues Omoyemen Odigie-Emmanuel.

The United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) has launched its annual global Call for Proposals for programmes that support country-level efforts to end violence against women and girls. The criteria, eligibility requirements and application guidelines are available at The deadline for application is 20 January 2011.

Scores of women's organisations from Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia joined forces last week for a sensational campaign led by the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR). As part of the 'One Day, One Struggle' simultaneous event on 9 November, public demonstrations, film screenings, theatre performances and workshops were held in Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan, Turkey and Tunisia.

A randomised controlled trial has found that the HIV infection rate in HIV-negative gay men who were given a daily preventative pill containing two HIV drugs was reduced by 44 per cent, compared with men given a placebo. The efficacy in subjects who, by self-report and pill count, took the drugs more than 90 per cent of the time was 73 per cent. The other big finding of the iPrEx (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Initiative) trial was that while 93 per cent of trial subjects reported taking the pills correctly, on the basis of drug level monitoring in blood tests, only 51 per cent actually did so.

The economies of Africa, the world’s poorest region, are under severe threat from free trade agreements that they are under pressure to sign with the European Union, the world’s richest region. Under these economic partnership agreements (EPAs), Europe wants Africa to open up its economies to European goods, services and companies. But the African countries are understandably worried their small industries and service operators will not be able to survive free competition from giant European companies, banks and commercial firms, writes Martin Khor in The China Post.

Born in Mogadishu, Siham and Iman Hashi are the first female Somali artists to sign a record deal with a major American label. After the civil war broke out in Somalia in the 1990s, the girls and their family moved to Canada as refugees. They are currently in Los Angeles recording their first album as 'Sweet Rush' with Universal Motown, while finding time to raise awareness about the continuing suffering in their homeland.

luminium giant BHP Billiton’s Mozal smelter has begun bypassing its fume treatment centres, emitting potentially dangerous fumes into the air without treating them first – despite a pending court case on the matter. There has been strong opposition from civil society and community groups. A coalition established to fight the bypass, led by local groups Livaningo and Justica Ambiental (Environmental Justice), says that the community has still not been presented with adequate evidence that the bypass will not be harmful to their health.

Less common but perhaps more useful than the tourist map is the ‘harassment map’ that many Cairo women are beginning to refer to. HarassMap, a private initiative run by volunteer activists, allows women who have been subject to harassment to report the incident anonymously by SMS, e-mail or online social networking sites. The information is compiled into a database that utilises open-source mapping technology to create a digital map of harassment 'hotspots' in Cairo and other Egyptian cities.

Home to over half of Ethiopia’s remaining afromontane forest and the centre of origin for the wild coffee arabica, Kafa is a dense tangle of forest, bamboo thickets and wetlands 475 kilometres southwest of the capital, Addis Ababa. Decades of deforestation by smallholder farmers as well as large state and privately-owned farms destroyed 43 per cent of the Kafa rainforest. But the forest is now a model of sustainable forest management.

Laws and practices governing citizenship in too many African countries effectively leave hundreds of thousands of people without a nationality, says a new report. 'These stateless Africans are among the continent’s most vulnerable populations: they can neither vote nor stand for office; they cannot enrol their children in school, travel freely, or own property; they cannot work for the government; they are exposed to human rights abuses. Statelessness exacerbates and underlies intercommunal, interethnic, and interracial tensions in many regions of the continent.' The report, 'Citizenship Law in Africa' was written by Bronwen Manby, of the Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP) of the Open Society Foundations, based on a comparative analysis of the citizenship laws of 53 countries.

Gado suggests that the pope's assent to the use of condoms may encourage further demands on the Catholic Church.

Land Value Capture is a public revenue policy recommended for national action by consensus of all UN member states in both the UN Habitat II Agenda in 1996 and The Vancouver Action Plan, the 1976 founding document for UN Habitat. Land value capture can provide a substantial and practical means to raise the revenue needed to implement Local Agenda 21 sustainable community plans, meet the Millennium Development Goals, and provide needed community services.

A Women for Women International report being released on international Stop Violence Against Women Day (25 November) finds ‘violence against women is the single biggest threat to peace’ and countries are falling strikingly short on UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) and UN (SCR) 1325 development and security goals. The report found that at the ten year mark, goals signed up to by UN members to eliminate poverty and empower women, have fallen strikingly short of expectations. While many countries are behind on their promises to meet the MDGs, particularly those goals in which gender is explicit, conflict-affected countries, are further behind.

Without reporting by states that have ratified the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, how can we assess what progress they've made in implementing it, asks Karen Stefiszyn.

On November 16, the third committee of the United Nations General Assembly voted to remove a reference to sexual orientation from a resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The resolution urges states to protect the right to life of all people, including by calling on states to investigate killings based on discriminatory grounds. For the past 10 years, the resolution has included sexual orientation in the list of discriminatory grounds on which killings are often based. The Joint Working Group, comprising a coalition of organisations working on gay and lesbian issues, explain why the dropping of the term 'sexual orientation' is a bad idea.

At the fifth anniversary of the coming into force of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, Corey Calabrese and Caroline Muthoni Muriithi argue that the focus for women’s rights activists across Africa should be on the protocol’s legal domestication, ensuring its provisions become ever further embedded within individual country’s laws.

An uprising in a camp in occupied Western Sahara, freedom of speech in Morocco and Ethiopia, and ‘the need to change the sorry state of education in SA’ are among the topics covered in this week’s roundup of the African blogosphere, by Sokari Ekine.

At the end of next week, delegates from across the world will start arriving in Cancun for the follow-up to Copenhagen. They do so in the shadow of the World Bank’s announcement of $270 million for three countries - Bangladesh, Niger and Tajikistan – to help them cope with the effects of climate change, for instance by protecting coastlines and planting crops more resilient to flooding. These funds will be enhanced by others and ultimately the money comes from developed country governments like that of the UK. The problem is that much of the money will come not in the form of grants but low-interest loans. Why is this a problem? Because it contradicts the main principle which developing countries are fighting for in climate negotiations – that rich countries must not only reduce their emissions substantially but they must pay for poorer countries to clean up.

September 2010 cast a dark cloud over Zambia’s chances of ending gender-based violence in the country when two political leaders beat up their wives. Early September, Opposition Patriotic Front (PF) Member of Parliament for Kasama Central and prominent Lusaka businessman, Geoffrey Bwalya Mwamba, beat up his wife after a dispute at their residence in Lusaka. About two weeks later, Livingstone District Commissioner Francis Chika also assaulted his wife after a domestic argument. Both incidents were widely reported in the Zambian media.

Minorities in Somalia are being subjected to a previously unreported pattern of gross human rights violations including summary executions, reported beheadings and rape, Minority Rights Group International (MRG) says in a new report. The report, 'No redress: Somalia'’s forgotten minorities', says the situation for minorities is worse than for other groups in the current conflict because, unlike the majority population, they lack protection from the traditional clan structure.

Re-reading W.E.B Dubois’s 90-year old essay on race and modern imperialism, Bill Fletcher Jr finds that is still relevant today, in the wake of the US’s November 2010 elections and ‘the victories…by the political Right’.

US President Barack Obama has outlined a plan to disarm one of Africa's most feared rebel militias, the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army. It aims to defuse the spiralling bloodshed in central Africa by removing the LRA's leader, Joseph Kony. LRA fighters will also be encouraged to defect or lay down their arms.

A senior Iranian MP accused Gambia on Tuesday of bowing to pressure from the United States after the tiny African country severed ties with Iran, the official IRNA news agency reported. 'This move is seen as a result of American pressure as well as US policies aimed at damaging Iran's relations with different countries, including in Africa,' said Alaeddin Borujerdi, the head of parliament's foreign policy commission.

Entries for the UNEP Young Environmental Journalist Award Africa are now open. The competition, which is made possible through funding support from the Government of the United States of America, is open to African journalists between 25 and 35 years old, working for African news and media organisations.