Nearly 150 CSOs write to IFC urging consultations with individuals and communities directly impacted by its projects as it reviews three years of implementation of the Performance Standards. BIC was among a coalition of 150 organizations who signed onto a letter urging the International Financial Corporation (IFC) to ensure consultations with individuals and communities directly impacted by its projects in the review process of its Policy on Disclosure of Information and its Performance Standards on Social and Environmental Sustainability Policy (Policy & Performance Standards).

Guinea-Bissau's electoral body has declared Malam Bacai Sanha as winner of Sunday's presidential run-off vote. Sanha, former head of state (1999-2000) and candidate of ruling party PAIGC, scored 224, 259 votes (63%) defeating rival Kumba Yala, another ex-head of state, who got 129,973 votes.

Egyptian police shot dead an African migrant trying to cross the border into Israel on Friday, security and medical sources said, the latest killing in an upsurge of violence at the sensitive frontier. The man, who was shot in the chest and right leg, was announced dead on arrival at Egypt's Rafah hospital, a medical source said. His nationality was not immediately known.

61 families living in the settlement of Tumbleweed, Howick, have been threatened with imminent, unlawful eviction by the municipality and the local Inkosi. Three armed police officers and a representative of the municipality told the community that they had 24 hours to vacate the area, or an eviction team would return tomorrow and on Friday with bulldozers to demolish their homes. All will be left homeless.

A meta-analysis of data on vaginal practices and HIV infection from ten African cohorts has found that both vaginal washing with soap and wiping the vagina with cloths, tissues or paper were associated with an increased risk of acquiring HIV, researchers reported at the Fifth International AIDS Society conference in Cape Town last week. The use of products to dry or tighten the vagina, often referred to as ‘dry sex’, did not however have a statistically significant association with HIV infection.

The Moroccan government reshuffled its cabinet on Wednesday (July 29th) to restore its parliamentary majority. King Mohammed VI appointed one minister of state and three junior ministers.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) could further raise its growth forecast for Africa next year to reflect an elevation in demand in China and some industrialised nations where signs of recovery are beginning to show. According to Antoinette Sayeh, Director of the IMF’s African Department, the end of the global recession is still some way off and African economies are feeling the dramatic decline in demand, investment, and commodity prices.

Cairo's airport has been unusually busy the past month as Egypt's security apparatus steps up its campaign against online political activists. Several prominent Egyptian bloggers have "disappeared" from the airport's arrivals hall, while others report suspiciously long delays that they claim were cover for state security officers to search their laptops and luggage.

Reporters Without Borders deplores physical attacks on journalists by supporters of the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) at Lusaka international airport. The facts of incident were not disputed by President Ruphia Banda, who condemned the assault. “The president’s comments are reassuring, but apologies are not enough and concrete measures are now needed,” Reporters Without Borders said.

The Community Education Computer Society (CECS), an ICT training NGO established in 1985 in South Africa, is conducting two-day workshops on free and open source software (FOSS) in five Southern African countries. Workshops will build awareness of FOSS and build capacities to conduct OpenOffice Writer courses in Lesotho, Malawi, and Namibia; and build partnerships with organisations and individuals in Angola and the Democractic Republic of Congo, to translate the FOSS portal to Portuguese and French.

At the community centre in Mukuru, a slum in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, teenagers spend hours engrossed in a video game, but they are not battling other-worldly forces with super-human weapons; instead, they are finding their way through a familiar-looking city, trying to negotiate real-life situations and learn how to avoid HIV infection.

In trade, investment and development assistance news this week, China signs a construction contract with the Tanzanian government to build a cardiac surgery treatment and training center in Dar es Salaam, and funds a car plant in Angola.

China Development Bank plans Brazil, Russia, Egypt Offices, increasing its economic and political footprint in Latin America and elsewhere, and Beijing courts the Middle East with Arabic TV channel.

A 2006 study by several Chinese research institutions showed that almost 90 percent of the country's top leaders in sectors encompassing finance, foreign trade, property development, construction, and stock trading were princelings, and China's ambitious $124 billion effort to provide basic health coverage for the vast majority of its 1.3 billion citizens by 2011 is a brimming opportunity for large global drugmakers.

This increasing interest in Africa demonstrated by rising Chinese FDI to the continent, presents opportunities and challenges to the development prospects of sub-Saharan African countries. There is therefore a need to carefully identify and analyse these developments if sub-Saharan African countries are to maximize the positive effects of the opportunities and ameliorate the adverse effects of the challenges. This paper by Olu Ajakaiye, Raphael Kaplinsky, Mike Morris and Felix F. N’Zue, focuses on China–Africa investment relations drawing insights from the AERC scoping studies.

The main focus of this publication by Peter Kagwanja is the link between South Africa’s grand pan-African ambitions, especially in the area of peace, security and governance, and its own capacity to pursue these objectives. Specifically, the paper examines Pretoria’s involvement in Africa, and internal capacity to support its mediation, peacekeeping and strengthening the abilities of African institutions for peacemaking.

In light of the sustained problems of mismanagement and corruption burdening South Africa's provincial authorities, many have called for these institutions to be scrapped entirely. This, argues William Gumede in this week's Pambazuka News, would be a step too far and likely to make matters worse. Far more important, Gumede contends, is the need to dismantle a culture of cronyism and political impunity. The provinces in fact need greater power, the author argues, but this must be under the authority of figures genuinely motivated by tackling poverty and creating jobs.

Following Barack Obama's recent visit to Ghana, Ihechukwu Njoku tells Pambazuka News of his hope that the choice of destination will be seen as a celebration of a laudable government rather than a political snub.

John Otim discusses Okello Oculi’s 1968 work 'Prostitute' – 'a fast-moving early post-colonial piece of writing published by a young Makerere University student' – which he tells Pambazuka News readers makes for impassioned reading.

Once again the heavy-handedness of the Kenyan police has resulted in the arrest of 27 young members of Bunge La Wananchi this week in Limuru. They were locked up for simply voicing their concern as citizens of Kenya for the accountable use of CDF funds in Kenya. Solidarity Network Kenya calls for their immediate release.

Madonna's ability to adopt a Malawian child in spite of an original court verdict against her is deeply worrying, writes Ama Biney. Madonna's action belongs in an established neocolonial tradition, Biney argues, one in which Malawi's Supreme Court judges have played a role not dissimilar to that of slavery-era African chiefs as the facilitators of human transfer. Recalling the forewarnings of Kwame Nkrumah around the shadow of neocolonialism, Biney contends that retaining Africans' self-respect will depend on challenging dehumanisation and putting such subjugation to an end.

Reflecting on the US president's Accra speech in this week's Pambazuka News, Ama Biney finds Obama's dismissal of neocolonial explanations for Africa's difficulties worrying. Though apologetic towards his Arab audience for past US meddling while in Cairo earlier this year, Obama showed no inclination to acknowledge his country's support of African dictators such as the former Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Kenya's Daniel arap Moi. If Obama is not simply to be the new George W. Bush, albeit under a more humanitarian guise, he will need to advance a foreign policy genuinely grounded in economic and political equality, Biney writes. Echoing the words of the late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Biney stresses however that Africans should in reality prioritise pan-African solutions to their continent's challenges, rather than merely competing to be the US's 'brown-eyed ally'.

Stephen Marks reflects on the recent detention of four Shanghai-based executives of the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto on spying charges earlier this month. Whereas Western governments and business leaders feared the possible implications of the incident for Western firms doing business in China, Marks argues that the incident may well signal a shift of gear in China’s economic strategy.

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Tee Ngugi shares with Pambazuka News why he believes the Malawi Supreme Court has made the right decision in allowing Madonna to proceed with her adoption of orphan Mercy Chifundo, despite vehement opposition from the continent’s beard-stroking 'cultural nationalists'.

It’s no wonder President Robert Mugabe is keen to use the Kariba Draft as the basis for Zimbabwe’s new constitution, writes Tapera Kapuya in this week’s Pambazuka News. Negotiated in secret in 2007 by a representative from each of the three ruling parties, the document would give him ‘unchecked and exclusive authority, placing him above all citizens and the law’. Pessimistic about the MDC’s ability to gather ‘enough strength and conviction to fight off the possible imposition’ of the draft, Kapuya highlights the need for an independent body to lead the process of making a people-driven constitution, based on the views of all citizens.

In the wake of studies that suggest that by age 14, a quarter of black American children born in 1990 had a father in jail, Dan Moshenberg calls for the US to take action to prevent the incarceration of primary caregivers. New research suggests that having a parent in prison ‘doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behaviour, social isolation, depression and problems in school’, underscoring the need, argues Moshenberg, for ‘a distinctly human – and African – solution to a distinctly American risk for the children descended from Africa.'

Although the UK government’s new

Nelson Mandela is undeniably ‘one of the most charismatic, suave and diplomatic statesmen that South Africa and the world ever had’, writes Mphutlane wa Bofelo, as Madiba celebrates his 91st birthday. Despite ‘efforts to romanticise and deify’ him, however, wa Bofelo reminds Pambazuka readers that Mandela was also ‘the architect of neoliberal, neo-capitalist dispensation’, publicly recanting the Freedom Charter’s stance on the nationalisation of the mines and mineral resources, following opposition from big business. A ‘great human being’ and ‘a statesman par excellence’, Mandela is ‘human still, prone to error, capable of misjudgement on issues, and open to questioning’, says wa Bofelo.

I certainly do not agree with as something Obama should have given. Obama's speech in Ghana was well thought out and very apt. After 40 years plus of independence in most African countries we cannot continue to blame the west and western corporations for our failures.

Currently, the country of Honduras in Central America is experiencing its worst political crisis in decades. In the aftermath of the military coup that forcibly removed President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, there have been various developments that have raised our concern about the security of citizens’ rights and the impact of the situation on people of African descent.

Police in Khartoum began a crackdown on Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees in the past few days. The Amharic service's Tizita Belachew interviewed leaders of the refugee community in Khartoum on Thursday and Friday who said the raids began on July 5 and each day since then truckloads of police and other Sudanese government security have raided the homes and business of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees, confiscating the contents of their restaurants and homes and beating and raping women and children.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) would like to comment on the ongoing debate about prosecution of perpetrators and financiers responsible for the post-election violence versus the role of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) in handling the question of justice. To begin with, KHRC wishes to remind Kenyans that the post-election violence as result of the disputed presidential elections in December 2007 led to massive deaths, displacement, injuries and destruction of property.

Only 20 percent of the world’s governments are providing adequate information for their citizens to begin to hold them accountable for managing the public’s money. This finding comes from the Open Budget Survey 2008, an extensive new survey of government budget transparency in 85 countries issued on February 1, 2009, by the International Budget Partnership (IBP). The Survey also found that nearly 50 percent of the 85 countries evaluated provide such minimal information that they are able to hide unpopular, wasteful, and corrupt spending.

The activities of Muslims for Human Rights (MUHURI), a civil society organization (CSO) based in Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrate the significant role budget transparency plays in improving accountability. MUHURI’s work also shows how public engagement in the budget process can strengthen oversight and lead to improved public service delivery. At the same time, MUHURI’s impact has been restricted by the lack of a Freedom of Information (FOI) law in Kenya, along with other broad transparency challenges in the country.

Burkina Faso was one of several countries that where a rapid rise in food prices led to rioting in the streets in 2008. Policy-makers had sensed a crisis developing, but the country was not able to build up sufficient reserves of imported commodities such as rice, wheat and oil to avoid it. There is now an emphasis on achieving food security. Bonou tells IPS that Burkina Faso is one of the handful of countries respecting the Maputo commitment to spending at least ten percent of its budget on agriculture.

At a recent prayer breakfast in Kenya, religious matters were pushed aside and instead gluttony was the order of the day. President Mwai Kibaki struggled to eat a whole chapatti in one go, Prime Minister Raila Odinga spilt tea down his suit and Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka struggled after getting a sausage stuck in his mouth. Luckily, these were just puppets being filmed in the cramped dining room of a Nairobi home for the latest of 13 episodes of the XYZ show.

President Mamadou Tandja of Niger, operating under his emergency powers on July 8, 2009 gave sweeping powers to Daouda Diallo, chairman of the Conseil Supérieur de la Communication (CSC), the media regulatory body, to unilaterally deal decisively with the country's media.

Karim borrowed money to expand his bakery. When the money ran out, and facing the prospect of imprisonment if unable to repay his debts, the 36-year- old Egyptian baker sold his kidney. His case, among hundreds documented by the Coalition for Organ-Failure Solutions (COFS), a Washington-based NGO working to end organ trafficking, reveals an alarming trend: poverty is driving Egyptians to sell their organs.