Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said it is targeting 70 million voters in its planned fresh voter registration exercise, after the government acceded to the commission's de mand for 72 billion naira (about US$500 million) to compile a new electoral register ahead of 2011 polls.

The country representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in The Gambia, Dr. Thomas Sukwa, said the vaccination campaign for the Swine Flu, A(H1N1), though not yet reported in the country, targets only 10 per cent of the nation's population.The week-long, nation-wide vaccination campaign, spearheaded by the Ministry of Heath and Social Welfare, in collaboration with the WHO office in Banjul, started Wednesday.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned death threats and outrageous claims made last week by a member of Swaziland's royal family against local journalists over their critical coverage of the country's leadership. During a 21 July public forum called the Smart Partnership National Dialogue in the central commercial city of Manzini, Prince Mahlaba, brother of Swaziland's absolute ruler King Mswati III, was quoted by local media as saying: 'I want to warn the media to bury things that have the potential of undermining the country rather than publish all and everything even when such reports are harmful to the country's international image. Journalists who continue to write bad things about the country will die.'

The population of urban refugees is at risk in Nairobi following the issuance of a by the Government of Kenya requesting them to proceed to the already overcrowded camps of Dadaab. These camps are characterized by harsh living conditions, minimal economic activity, and insecurity, and are situated in remote semi-arid to arid regions with little surface water where the environment is barely able to sustain the local population

Four years after the moratorium on Terminator technology was reaffirmed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), proposals to develop and commercialize ‘genetic-use restriction technologies’ (GURTs) are back on the agenda for policymakers and the biotechnology industry. Terminator is a threat to food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity: ending the moratorium on Terminator will increase control of seed by transnational corporations (TNCs) and restrictions on farmers’ rights to save and plant harvested seed. Additionally, pollen from genetically-modified (GM) crops with Terminator will contaminate non-GM and organic crops, and native plant species.

The Zimbabwe Media Commission (ZMC) has granted licences to four new media houses, its chairperson Godfrey Majonga said. The registration comes two months after the new media watchdog issued licences to three daily newspapers -- The NewsDay, The Daily News and The Daily Gazette.

The UN refugee agency has urged Saudi Arabia to stop deporting Somalis, saying 2,000 people have recently been sent to Mogadishu. The UNHCR says those forced back to the Somali capital are at risk. There is almost daily fighting there between Islamist militants and government troops backed by African Union peacekeepers.

At the International Criminal Court (ICC) review conference last month in Kampala, negotiations to add the crime of aggression to the court’s docket topped the agenda. The crime of initiating offensive warfare had been prosecuted after World War II. But when the Rome Conference established the ICC in 1998 as the first permanent court to try crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, it deferred a decision on aggression to another day.

The global carbon market, which trades “pollution rights” to encourage industry to cut greenhouse gas emissions, grew in 2009. Far from signaling a success, this reflects a huge increase in fraud, the dumping of surplus emissions permits by industry, and a rise in financial speculation.

Somalia is one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a journalist. More than 30 reporters have been killed by armed groups since 1992 - including nine in 2009. The most recent journalist killing occurred on 4 May 2010, when three gunmen shot dead broadcast journalist Sheik Nur Mohamed Abkey as he was returning home from the state-run Radio Mogadishu. Members of the armed opposition group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the killing.

The high-level debate which opened in Kampala, Uganda, yesterday on “Promoting Maternal, Infant and Child Health and Development in Africa, ended this evening with an agreement by Africa’s leaders on an action plan to kick-start the effective implementation of existing resolutions and decisions on maternal, infant and child health in the continent.

Peacekeepers on patrol in the west of the war-ravaged Sudanese region of Darfur were ambushed today by unidentified gunmen, with seven blue helmets sustaining injuries, the United Nations reported.
According to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the troops returned fire on their attackers, who fled the scene. The joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur, known as UNAMID, immediately sent reinforcement troops to the scene of the clashes.

A local variety of the nutrient-rich, blue-green algae known as spirulina could boost incomes for women in Chad who harvest the product as well as help fight nutrition, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has reported. The agency is running a $1.4 million project in which women are gathering and processing the product, known locally as dihé, from the shallow pools of water on the edges of Lake Chad where it forms at certain times of the year.

Ghana has achieved 99.99 per cent reduction of the Guinea Worm disease since its inception two decades ago. From a high of 4,136 cases recorded during the peak of its outbreak in 2006, only eight cases have been reported in Ghana since the beginning of January 2010, the last case was recorded in May.

South Africa cannot afford pay demands from thousands of public service workers and hopes a deal can be reached next week before a strike widens to nearly a million workers, a minister said on Friday. Thousands of workers from the Public Servants Association union walked off the job on Thursday, causing little impact so far to Africa's biggest economy. But that could change if the country's biggest labour group makes good on its threat to join the strike next week, which could cripple commerce.

Rwanda's upcoming presidential poll will be free, fair and more competitive than 2003 when incumbent Paul Kagame won over 90 percent of the vote, its electoral commission said on Friday. Donors say the introduction of a revised electoral code should ensure a peaceful and technically sound ballot, following the European Union's recommendations after the 2008 legislative elections where they found procedural irregularities in over half the polling stations.

Continuing high rates of low to follow-up in antiretroviral treatment programmes among people already on treatment and those waiting to start treatment are a symptom of health system failures, not the fault of patients, the Eighteenth International AIDS Conference heard last week. In a session at the International AIDS Conference that focused on retention in care of ART patients, studies from Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique were presented that dealt with reducing loss to follow up and treatment default.

The August issue of IDRC's Lasting Impacts is entitled "Appropriate Technology". One of the topics discussed in this issue is the development of simple “mini” dehulling machines for use by small local enterprises. The technology was designed in the 1970s by the Prairie Research Laboratory of Canada’s National Research Council, and since modified and adapted by researchers in several African countries.

Sudanese refugee Josephine Poni Daniel can be as shy as any other 16-year-old when discussing unfamiliar subjects. But ask about her first love, music, and her face brightens and she becomes vivacious and outspoken. "Music is fun; when I write lyrics or sing the music I feel good and forget my troubles," says Josephine, lead singer for The Golden Blue Girls, one of three winners of a music contest that's raising money and awareness of refugees' education needs in far-off Japan.

The Malawian government has again stood firm in the face of calls by the European Union (EU) to sign an economic partnership agreement (EPA) -- even after top-level EU officials visited the southern Africa to convince it to put pen to paper. The EU delegation, led by the European Commission’s (EC) director for development and EPAs Peter Thompson and EU Ambassador to Malawi Alexander Baum, engaged Malawi’s top trade officials at a two-day meeting on Jul 26 and 27 in the country’s commercial capital, Blantyre.

Uganda has opposed the pending recognition of a South African gay rights group, Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL), as an official observer at all African Union conferences, and to contribute to the NGO’s forum. “The African Charter and the Constitutive Act setting up the AU tell us to protect African values among our key objectives. These (gay rights) are alien to our culture and values. We shall continue to resist and fight them because common sense dictates against them. They are outlawed in Uganda and most African countries,” the foreign service officer, ambassador Rosette Nyirinkindi, asserted.

Various Civil Society Organisations have called on the South African government to withdraw a homophobic statement made by SA representative at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva 16 June 2010 ,calling it “insensitive” to the persecution of Lesbian Gays, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) people and contrary to South Africa’s constitution which is opposes discrimination.

Africa's unified stance at the Copenhagen climate summit last December showed that the continent has woken up to potential 'climate cash' from international mitigation and adaptation programmes and confirmed African leaders' political commitment to tackling climate change. But the skills and infrastructure needed to use climate cash for making sense of local climate change impacts and also for designing and managing sustainable development projects are still thin on the ground in many African countries.

Broadband for All aims to provide broadband connectivity to South Africa’s under-served areas through a community-centric model rather than a telco-driven model. The model leverages wireless-mesh technologies to link priority government sites and high bandwidth users such as schools, municipalities and government offices, who in turn provide a link to smaller customers such as businesses, NGOs and individuals.

As many African countries battle to bring down staggering rates of maternal and child mortality, maternal and child health made for a fitting theme at the African Union (AU) Summit this week in Kampala, Uganda. At the summit, African leaders came under fire for failing to live up to the 2001 Abuja Declaration, in which they agreed to commit at least 15 percent of their national budgets to health. To date, only about five countries have done so.

It is a sunny day at the Mashango primary school in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) North Kivu Province. That is good news for teacher Dusaba Mbomoya who is holding a geography exam under a roof filled with holes in a classroom where flapping pieces of plastic do duty as walls. Even the blackboard has holes large enough for students to peer through. When it rains we allow the pupils to go back to their houses,” said Mbomoya. Those who want to wait out the rain at school sometimes shelter in newly-constructed latrines put in by an international organization.

The recent AU Summit in Kampala has brought to light the shocking lack of readily available health services for women in Africa, endangering women’s well-being and resulting in tragically high numbers of women dying in childbirth, writes Ir?ng? Houghton. Houghton brings the devastating statistics into focus, and scrutinises both government and society in the facilitation of a failure in the battle for gender equality and the right to reliable health care for all on the continent.

History and Africa will always remember Basil Davidson, not just for being a Pan-Africanist and prolific revolutionary scholar, but also for being a humanist, writes Horace Campbell.

As people all over South Africa ask why the government continues to ignore the demands of shack dwellers, not just for the right to the city but for their basic human needs to be met, Abahlali baseMjondolo reply: ‘Everybody knows that we are the people who do not count in this society…the truth that must be faced up to is that we have been sentenced to permanent exclusion from this society.’ But, write Abahlali, ‘we have recognised our own humanity and the power of our struggle to force the full recognition of our humanity. Therefore we remain determined to continue to refuse to know our place.’

Throughout the continent, ‘oil has correlated with imperial subjugation, local authoritarianism and flagrant human rights abuses’, writes Oilwatch Africa. Citing examples of the devastating consequences a growing global hunger for energy has had for communities and ecosytems in oil-bearing regions, the advocacy group calls for the world to start weaning itself from its ‘addiction to oil’ by ‘investing more in renewable energy, energy efficiency, better public transportation and small decentralised energy projects.’

[Yohannes Woldemariam's article is a] '… good comprehensive article that wastes no space or words and states the facts, historic and contemporary, quite clearly. Thanks.'

With less than one week to go before Kenya’s constitutional referendum, Muthoni Wanyeki has the sense that the country is going to give the proposed constitution the go-ahead. Despite an initial dip, over the past month support for the document has risen to ‘well over the 50 per cent plus one mark required for it to pass,’ Wanyeki writes.

Fahamu Refugee Programme & UNHRC invites lawyers and legal advisors to a course aimed at arming them with the information, networks and resources they require to represent those accused of witchcraft. Participants will learn how to best represent those whose claims to asylum are based upon accusations of witchcraft, an emerging area of refugee law in which there is a need for specialised knowledge and training.

4-5 September 2010
Oxford, United Kingdom
Registration fee: £150
If you would like to attend, please submit a completed to Fahamu by 21 August 2010.

cc Bishop Desmond Tutu, a book about four African women taken to Belgium to become commercial sex workers, a chance encounter with a ‘white Yoruba aunty’ on a train in London and Kenya’s revolt against tacky ‘traditional’ dance displays for tourists are among the topics talked about in this week’s round-up of the African blogosphere, compiled by Sokari Ekine.

In an audio interview with Muna Ali of CHRY, Sokari Ekine discusses a worldwide dominant discourse around sexuality, assumptions in Africa around the absence of LGBTI people, the role of right-wing and Christian fundamentalism, and the scapegoating of vulnerable people (available under the heading 'African Perspectives').

Following the al-Shabaab bombing in Kampala, current plans to send more AMISOM (African Union Mission in Somalia) troops into Somalia will simply jeopardise the possibility of a new moderate leadership emerging in the country, writes Abena Ampofoa Asare. Observers in the African Union, UN and international community at large would do well to look at Somaliland to the north, the author stresses. Solutions to Somalia’s civil war will not emerge in Kampala, Washington DC or Addis Ababa, Asare contends, underlining that a key lesson of Somaliland’s experience is that ‘effective government must come from within’.

Backed by strong support both domestically and from abroad, the South African shackdwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo continues to push for a full and independent enquiry into the violence suffered by the Kennedy Road settlement in September 2009, writes Bishop Rubin Phillip.

I have started to keep your letters close to my bedside, even closer than they were before. They are now stuffed in the pillow case, safe enough to ensure that the words will not escape my dream. Lucid dreams of you and I, the closest I have gotten to kissing and holding you.

Professor N’Dri Assie-Lumumba and Professor Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo were awarded, each separately and for their respective scholarship, the 2010 Distinguished Africanist Award offered by the New York State African Studies Association (NYASA) on March 27, 2010 at NYASA’s Annual Conference at SUNY Binghamton on the theme of "GLOBAL-AFRICA, GLOBAL-ASIA: Africa and Asia in the Age of Globalization."

In just ten years the HIV/Aids infection rate in South Africa has jumped from one per cent of the population to one-third. Seventy per cent of HIV patients are also infected with tuberculosis, which is now the biggest cause of natural death in the country. But doctors say better treatment and education could wipe out the completely curable infection altogether. Al Jazeera's Rosie Garthwaite reports from Khayelitsha township.

The University for Peace (UPEACE) is pleased offering the online course on “Peace and Conflict Studies; The Foundation Course”. This is a 10 weeks course, from 4 October to 10 December 2010. The course will be delivered by UPEACE faculty members: Dr. Amr Abdalla and Dr. Victoria Fontan. This course is offered for 3 academic credits or for a UPEACE training certificate. It focuses on understanding the complex and interconnected challenges to peace, as well as the need for different approaches to meeting these challenges.

In Niger 90% of the population depend on Agriculture. But with last year’s rain failure, the country is facing a catastrophic food crisis. Concern Worldwide, an international aid agency, is tackling the crisis by providing drought resistant seeds, distributing cash through mobile phone technology and using local food markets to provide aid. All this makes for a unique approach towards humanitarian aid.

In this week's emerging powers in Africa round-up, a big shift in trade relations is taking shape across Africa, China's Liu Zhenmin meets AU Chairman Ping, India targets more links in Africa’s food supply chain, World Cup lends South Africa confidence to unite continent, and NGOs slam EU-Brazil plans to develop biofuels in Africa.

With women having achieved little in terms of representation in decision-making positions in Zambia, a national women’s lobby group is hoping to change this in the 2011 general elections. While Zambia's electoral process may have built-in obstacles that hinder the meaningful participation of women as candidates, the Zambia National Women’s Lobby Group (ZNWL) wants to change this through a campaign dubbed "50 percent of women and men in leadership for equitable development."

Amnesty International has urged the Kenyan authorities to investigate the death of a market trader reportedly shot dead by police during a protest against forced evictions in a Nairobi settlement. Jackson Maina Kihato, 74, was killed on Monday after he tried to complain about the police beating a woman during demonstrations in Kabete NITD. Protests have continued in the settlement since an estimated 1,000 people lost their homes and market stalls in a mass forced eviction on 10 July.

The third National internet Governance forum was held in Kampala on 14th/July/2010 at Imperial Royale Hotel. It was organized by I-network, CIPESSA and WOUGNET in collaboration with Uganda Communications Commission(UCC) and the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MoICT). Its purpose was to prepare for the forthcoming East African Internet Governance forum scheduled for 11th to 13th August 2010.

Unsafe abortions account for more than one in 10 women who die in pregnancy in Ghana, according to new research by the US-based Guttmacher Institute, with ignorance of the law and inadequate facilities partly to blame, say health authorities. Abortion was declared legal in 1985 for women who have been raped, in cases of incest, or where the pregnancy will cause the mother physical or mental harm, but decades on, only 4 percent of women are aware of the law, according to 2009 government health statistics (based on 2007 data).

It is both preventable and treatable, but obstetric fistula plagues the lives of thousands of women in Kenya every year, leaving them incontinent and ostracized. Here are some reasons why: Information deficit
Lack of reproductive health education means there is widespread ignorance of the basic facts about fistula - a tear in the birth canal caused by prolonged obstructed labour, or by sexual abuse, surgical trauma, gynaecological cancers and related radiotherapy treatment. According to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), there are 3,000 new cases per year in Kenya, with about one to two fistulas per 1,000 deliveries.