Since it’s formation in 1914, Nigeria as a nation has like many others gone through a plethora of ‘ups’ and ‘downs’. As a country, it has been shaped by generational experiences on multiple tiers and maintains its status as perhaps Africa’s most complex nation. Speaking about the nation’s problems for many is the next topic in conversation right after asking about the weather or the price of garri in the market.

All politics is local, to paraphrase the venerable Bostonian and Democratic, Tip O'Neill. To human rights workers, journalists, writers, and humanitarians who have intimate knowledge of the Great Lakes Region of Equatorial Africa, this short email conjures a place, people, and tragedy that has been met with a wall of silence on the campaign trail. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has addressed this great humanitarian breakdown, except in the context of political squabbling.

There are few studies on gender in Transitional Justice (TJ) and those that exist tend to focus almost exclusively on women as victims of sexualized violence. This risks reducing womens experiences of violence and repression to a single dimension, as well as perpetuating gender stereotypes. The objective of the book is to move beyond this narrow focus by contributing to a gendered analysis of TJ. Deadline: 1/11/2008.

The Intellectual Network for the South (INSouth) is now launched in the public domain. A pre-launch was done by H.E Mr. Benjamin W. Mkapa during the last meeting of the South Intellectual Platform project on 8th August 2008 attended by almost 60 delegates from various Missions of developing countries to the UN in Geneva. The Network brings together intellectuals from the global South amongst policymakers, research and academia, the media, the private sector and civil society.

Regarding : Well written, well reasoned, and logical. There are insightful politicians, leaders - like Mandela and Nyerere - who appreciated the importance of the positions they held and their ability to actually change the human condition by harnessing those bonds that all humans have. Gandhi had that insight too.

Our politicians are jackals in the wilderness of existence, men and women whose one vision is of "ME." As Ngugi tells it so well, today's leaders use their tribesmen as cannon fodder; the ladder's steps they step on to reach higher ground.

In my mind I think of Muhamad Ali Jinah's personal political ambitions and often wonder if the Indian Muslim population was left in a better place with the partition of India? Wouldn't it have been better for him to have been more humble and work things out for his followers?

In the end, the results of what we see in Africa is an inexorable and irreversible degradation of the countries' potential -- a tearing apart of whatever fabric each nation may have. Until (if that can ever be envisaged) the poor realize they are but tools of the wealthy of whatever tribe. From time to time we have seen the elite reach down to help the poor -- Castro, Che Guevara, Lenin, Marx and others who put their lives on line for what was right and just.

Maybe what will save Africa is another revolution?

The goal of this conference is to provide an international forum for the presentation and discussion of state-of-the-science HIV treatment adherence research, as well as current behavioral and clinical perspectives in practicum. Our ultimate hope is that this dialogue translates into evidence-based implementation of approaches for real world clinical and community settings. Abstracts must be submitted online at by December 1, 2008.

One month before it will appear before a federal jury in the landmark human rights case, Bowoto v. Chevron, facing charges of torture and wrongful death, Chevron, along with other leading extractive industry companies, will come under the scrutiny of the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law. In the hearing, “Extracting Natural Resources: Corporate Responsibility and the Rule of Law,” witnesses will bring to light oil, mining and gas companies’ complicity in human rights abuses perpetrated by public or private security forces in Nigeria, Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia.

South African Aids campaigners have serenaded the new health minister and rejoiced at the departure of her controversial predecessor. A group of activists sang outside the Cape Town flat of Barbara Hogan and drank champagne.

Nigerian police have arrested more than 200 suspected militants in raids in the oil-rich Niger Delta, authorities say. Some suspects are accused of recruiting youths to target oil installations around Port Harcourt. The military commander in Rivers State was cited as saying his men had found almost all militant camps there, and he would mount a campaign to destroy them.

Thousands of people have turned out to vote in two by-elections in Kenya's Rift Valley Province. The parliamentary seats fell vacant after two ministers from the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) were killed in a plane crash in June. The by-elections come a week after an inquiry into the disputed December elections called for radical reforms of the country's electoral system.

Over a billion people will continue to face desperate poverty and starvation in 2015 as a result of governments’ failure to crack down on corporate abuses and eradicate global poverty. This warning came today from global justice charity War on Want as British prime minister Gordon Brown joined other international leaders at the UN summit in New York on the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals.

The story of displacement and death in the Darfur region of Sudan is indeed horrific. And, since Sudan is one of the few countries in Africa which has been off-limits to US oil deals and capital penetration, the crimes of the Sudanese government have a special resonance in U.S policy-making circles.

The Ministry of Health in conjunction with Marie Stopes International-Uganda (MSI) today launched a project to treat sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and reduce maternal and infant mortality among poor people in western and southern Uganda.

A couple strolling hand-in-hand along a sandy beach in Kenya's coastal city of Mombasa could have jumped straight off the pages of a cheesy romance novel, except for one major difference: the man is local and in his early twenties, while the woman, a tourist, is middle-aged. The young men who trawl Kenya's seaside resorts for wealthy white tourists looking for more than just sun, sea and sand are known locally as "beach boys".

President-elect Kgalema Motlanthe took the Oath of Presidency on Thursday afternoon, swearing faithfulness to the Republic and obedience to the Constitution. Mr Motlanthe, who was elected by a majority vote of MPs in the National Assembly earlier in the day, was officially sworn in by Chief Justice Pius Langa at Tuynhuys, adjacent to Parliament.

For the last two months, investors at the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) have watched in horror as the market dropped to a three years low. The NSE 20 shares index, which is used to gauge the general performance of the market, dipped to a 4,000 low from about 5,400 in mid July (a 26% decline).

Open source software (OSS) has now become a well recognised and utilised brand. A brand that, if we were to get a broad sweeping perception poll on, would generally stand for free, fair and cost effective. However, despite this growth, the battle between open source and traditional software still rages on whereby the pros and cons for each can be endlessly debated.

The Rwandan constitution, ratified in May 2003, states that 30 per cent of decision-making positions are to be reserved for women. This clause has seen Rwandan women make remarkable gains in elective politics. In the last parliament, Rwanda had the highest percentage of women in parliament in the world.

On 26 September, a “pledging meeting” takes place at the World Bank in Washington to encourage donors to channel resources to the World Bank Climate Investment Funds (CIFs). The meeting has been promoted by the UK, and several European governments are planning to attend. The UK and Sweden have already made announcements to channel funds to the CIFs. France and the Netherlands are also likely to pledge money to these funds. And Germany is still considering.

The soaring cost of fuel and basic foods over the past year has left many countries in sub-Saharan Africa unable to adequately fund critical activities, such as health care and the provision of safe drinking water, their leaders told the General Assembly’s annual high-level debate.

At least 12,000 civilian residents of Mogadishu have fled their homes in the Somali capital since last weekend because of a surge in fighting between Islamist insurgents and Government forces backed by the Ethiopian military, the United Nations refugee agency has reported. Half of the newly displaced have found shelter in different neighbourhoods within Mogadishu, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while the remainder have escaped to the town of Afgooye, about 30 kilometres away.

A former prosecutor was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of genocide, extermination and murder by the United Nations war crimes tribunal set up in the wake of the 1994 killing spree in Rwanda. The ICTR found that Simeon Nchamihigo, former deputy prosecutor in Cyangugu Prefecture, instructed the Hutu-dominated rebel group known as the Interahamwe to seek out and kill Tutsis and moderate Hutus with the intent to destroy the Tutsi ethnic group and accomplices of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front.

The Congolese Prime Minister, Antoine Gizenga has resigned his position on Thursday. His letter of resignation has been submitted to President Joseph Kabila and awaiting response. He made his disclosure on National Broadcasting Television of Congo.

The Tsvangirai MDC on Thursday filed papers opposing a court challenge to the election of national chairman Lovemore Moyo as speaker of parliament. Independent MP Jonathan Moyo, with support from the Mutambara MDC, have filed a court challenge saying Moyo’s election was not proper, citing a variety of reasons. Arguments from the camp are that the vote was illegal, based on claims that Tsvangirai-MDC MPs showed their ballot to party Vice President Thokozani Khupe.

South Africa's powerful COSATU trade union, which wants the government to tilt away from pro-business policies, called on new President Kgalema Motlanthe on Friday to eradicate poverty and create jobs. Motlanthe pledged after being sworn in on Thursday to keep to the policies of predecessor Thabo Mbeki, who presided over South Africa's longest period of economic growth before the ruling African National Congress forced him to resign.

A group of university students in Nairobi has developed tallying software that could cut costs and eliminate errors at the Electoral Commission of Kenya. The students said the software could enable the controversial electoral body record and process results electronically at individual polling stations across the country.

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project have released version 1.0.1 of the Chisimba/KEWL3 Realtime Virtual Classroom. Avoir is a collaboration of 13 African universities specialising in creating free software relevant to African users.

A group of 16 refugee families have moved into rehabilitated houses in the Liberian town of Bensonville as part of a process to locally integrate some 3,500 Sierra Leoneans who cannot go home or are unwilling to repatriate.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the detention of journalist Lewis Medjo for the past two days in the western city of Douala. The publisher of the Douala-based Détente Libre weekly, Medjo was arrested by the head of the local plain-clothes police as he left a dinner in a Douala hotel on the evening of 22 September.

A lack of emphasis on agricultural research in development policy over the last quarter of a century is one of the main reasons for the deterioration of African farming, according to a UN report released this month (15 September). The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report on Africa's economic development also cites the small size of each country's research stations, isolated researchers and high staff turnover as other factors that helped "prevent the attainment of a critical mass of scientific and technical staff".

Zambia government, has called upon all broadcasters, both commercial and community, to desist from live phone-in broadcast programmes that involve members of public.

After years of calling on the owners of South Africa's oil refineries in Durban to upgrade their facilities to reduce pollution, local residents of the eastern port city have decided to take their case to the courts to secure a legal remedy.

Rather than encouraging enrollment, schools in Zimbabwe are asking children not to report for lessons. "We have received, with concern, continuing reports that some children [in Zimbabwe] are not going to school because there are no teachers," said Roland Monash, deputy representative of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). UNICEF keeps 150,000 Zimbabwean children at school by paying their fees.

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has just launched a recruitment for a Francophone Africa Researcher & Representative, based in Senegal. The position is half-time (2.5 days per week). The closing date for applications is 28 October. Applicants must be fluent in French, have strong English language skills, and must already have the right to work in Senegal.

This latest policy briefing from the International Crisis Group, examines the political and economic implications of the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) departure from Ogoni land and gives recommendations on resuming peaceful oil operations in the economically strategic and politically volatile region. “If handled carefully, this transition could persuade some of the Delta’s armed groups that non-violence can produce progress on their demands”, says François Grignon, Crisis Group’s Africa Program Director.

As to be expected South African bloggers are focused on the forced resignation of President Thabo Mbeki. Most bloggers whether supporters of Mbeki or not are concerned with the precedent set by “recalling” a president in the manner in which Mbeki was particularly as a further 11 minister have followed him and also resigned. Sokari Ekine reviews:

My Haven
Commentary South Africa
YBlog ZA
The Moor Next Door
Black Looks

With progress towards quality primary health care still slow some thirty years after Alma-Ata, Anthony Seddoh writes that an effective global alliance of global and country actors needs to set positive and realistic paths to implement the declaration’s intentions. In light of the continuing absence of a conceptual framework for addressing longstanding debates and organisational issues, the author considers whether primary health care represents a global orphan in need of fresh guardianship.

Thirty years after the 1978 Declaration of Alma-Ata, it seems the world is still at odds on how best to implement the principles of primary health care. The slow progress in improving health outcomes for all raises questions about the effectiveness of current ways of doing business. A concerted global alliance of global and country actors needs to set positive and realistic paths to implement the intentions of Alma-Ata.

Sixty years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated in its constitution that health is ‘a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing, not only the absence of disease or infirmity.’ Thirty years later, the Alma-Ata declaration on Primary Health Care (PHC) declared among other things that ‘health is a fundamental right’ and created a thirteen-point outline to ensure this right. This outline captured concepts of essential care, universally accessibility and affordability for individuals and families within communities, who would be able to participate fully in a spirit of self-determination. It located PHC as an integral part of a country’s health system involving all related sectors and aspects of national and community development.

The WHO constitution’s definition of health and the Alma-Ata declaration together prompt a diametrical but complementary state to be addressed concurrently in the promotion of good health. The first deals with the clinical determinants of health, pushing for the absence of disease in individuals. The second addresses the determinants of health that predispose or prevent individuals from attaining a state of mental, physical and social wellbeing as a fundamental right. These include appropriate governance, the absence of war, economic and infrastructure development, adequate infrastructure and aid policies. A unique moment occurred in 1978 to bring these complementary understandings together.

Even before the ink could dry on the Alma-Ata declarations it had however already generated polarised antagonism. From a capitalist standpoint, it was a ridiculous proposition, both too costly and defying economic reasoning, and too socialist in its excessive emphasis on state-managed intervention. The conservative duo of J.A. Walsh and K.S. Warren launched the Selective PHC debate, arguing that it would probably more be efficient to save children and limit population growth, while the two main PHC proponents, WHO and UNICEF, soon drifted apart, with UNICEF promoting a selective package of low cost interventions. With resource flows following Selective PHC, Primary Health Care translated in most countries into a basic collection of services to be delivered at district and community levels based on a select number of interventions with some outreach services, with an accompanying watered-down district health package.

Why nobody asked at the time whether there was any moral significance to be attached to a person’s life or pointed out that choices based on state preferences for total health gain can be justified over financial resource allocation efficiency is difficult to comprehend. Aside from efficiency-based arguments being ridiculous propositions founded on utility-based preferences or embodying unattractive equity assumptions, the economic bargain in a healthy population should at least have also appealed to responsible international choice.

Much has since been achieved from the advance in technology in dealing with specific clinical determinants of specific diseases. It could be argued that a saturation point has been reached, where increases in financial and human investments in existing technologies are yielding less than proportional gains. Despite this the selective interventions approach continues to define health and health services delivery. It was given a new lease on life by the World Bank through its 1993 World Development Report, entitled ‘Investing in Health’. This report, which scarcely acknowledged PHC, commoditised and de-linked health from development and moved the world closer to an interventionist approach to health; intervening at a selective point in the epidemiology of a disease or health system.

This approach has since had wide global appeal. Currently there are over thirty WHO resolutions on AIDS, TB or Malaria alone; more than all other subjects. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have further entrenched this disease-specific approach to resource mobilisation. There are over 80 major global health initiatives linked to the health MDGs, providing over US$100 million annually. The Italian Global Health Watch reported in 2008 that the Global Fund has allocated approximately US$3.5 billion to countries for interventions on AIDS, TB and Malaria, mainly in Africa. Together, these initiatives have thrown billions of dollars at addressing diseases and improving clinical health conditions and made up a significant part of health sector budgets.

PHC is hardly mentioned in these initiatives, seldom highlighted by member states outside of anniversaries of the initiatives or occasional references to district health system strengthening. For various reasons the world assumed an emergency mode to address what are considered new and urgent public health issues. Single disease interventions that lend themselves to easily recognisable financial accountability, quantitative monitoring and evaluation held greater appeal for funders, especially when twinned with arguments of weak domestic governance and public policy failures and capacity limitations.

While these initiatives on clinical determinants hummed with measurable outcomes on specific diseases, the nexus of poverty and ill health was exacerbated. On the back of a growing trend in urban slum development, decline in state services, market failures in privatised economies, growing food insecurity and massive deprivation of rights to health care, inequalities in health have deepened to a significantly greater level over the past 30 years.

Hence while a lot has been done to deal with disease in individuals, the unique opportunity provided by the Alma-Ata Declaration to also address the determinants of health have largely been lost. Thirty years later we see the costs of this omission in levels of poverty which belie the levels of knowledge and technological advance achieved globally.

As we approach another anniversary for PHC expectations are high. People expect that their physical and mental health will be promoted in a safe social, economic and political environment. They expect to have quality health systems that provide preventive services, and which diagnose, treat and manage disease injury and reduce the severity and repeated occurrence of disease. They do not expect to see wide social and economic disparities in these basic entitlements. In Africa, the region furthest from delivery on these expectations, the Ouagadougou declaration on Primary Health Care issued on April 30 2008 called for a renewal of the Principles of Primary Health Care and its implementation in developing countries and by the international community.

Such declarations are encouraging, yet their implementation calls for resolution of longstanding debates of the past 30 years. These debates are not academic. In choices made over policy measures, relative allocation of institutional, social and financial resources and complementary systems for dealing with the social determinants of health (mostly dealt with by actions outside the health sector), they present social and economic inequalities that arise due to the burden of disease (mostly dealt with within the health sector). There are no clear answers for how a conceptual framework of Primary Health Care in 2008 will address this.

And while there is a massive coalition of global initiatives dealing with diseases, there is no clear coalition of global institutions supporting or funding the determinants of health, the second factor in the PHC equation. At a global level, the Bretton Woods institutions and OECD initiatives for debt relief and poverty reduction have in some African countries led to short-lived increases in spending on health and education, with no global initiatives so far adequately addressing the determinants of health.

This leaves PHC as an orphan with no global guardian. The WHO’s attempt to foster PHC is inadequate given the pluralistic global environment. The state of poverty and the winds of change in international health resource priorities will make rational choices among the various dimensions impossible and predispose countries to the dictate of new interventions and their implementation. While debates over the conceptual understanding of PHC will not end in 2008, this year could at least mark the turning point for a new institutional response, one that builds a global alliance to generate the momentum and support for countries to implement PHC and that provide policy learning based on practice from the bottom up, reminiscent of another basis for the Alma-Ata declaration.

A WHO or UN resolution creating such a global alliance would be a befitting PHC birthday gift for the millions of people seeking more than another conference. It will squarely put implementation right at the doorstep of a recognisable entity that can mobilise the needed funds and offer effective support to individual countries.

World Health Organization Africa region inter-country support team, Harare, Zimbabwe

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Through exploring the importance of sustainable and long-term health financing, Rotimi Sankore argues that effective primary health care will only be achieved when key obstacles in the shape of a lack of clear policies and Africa’s critical health workforce shortage are addressed. He stresses the debate around ‘health systems versus disease specific interventions’ to be a phantom one akin to asking whether food is more important than water to human life, arguing that the real challenge for the future will lie in creating and implementing effective policies that tackle persistent institutional and resource-based issues.

Through examining the experience of the Ugandan Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development (HEPS-Uganda), Rosette Mutambi highlights the extent to which ordinary Ugandans remain without effective official health care. While stressing the role of government in empowering local communities, she argues that genuine improvement in primary health care rests on involving an informed population in the planning and implementation of the system overall, a consideration of even greater importance in a resource-poor nation like Uganda.

Citi and Ashoka's Changemakers are leading the way to unearth the the best solutions to make financial opportunity a possibility for all. The advent of new financing methods - from mobile banking to peer-to-peer lending - are changing the way we access, spend and save our money. "Banking on Social Change: Seeking Financial Solutions for All" aims to unearth the most innovative and cutting-edge methods that allow financial security to become a reality for everyone. The deadline is just days away on October 1st!

We are meeting at a difficult time for many Kenyans. In fact we are meeting at the crossroad of the history of our country. We are here to decide our future path as delegates of an important convention. We have been brought here because of the acts and omissions of an older generation. A generation that was born before our country was freed from colonial rule, and which has since Independence run the affairs of this country.

Independent Advocacy Project, IAP, Nigeria’s leading governance group has called on the federal government to immediately lift its suspension of the independent Channels TV, free staff members being detained and make a public commitment to restrain its agents from further clamping down on the media.

Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and ethnicity-based patronage politics. However, systemic violence has far more entrenched structural causes and the scholarly eye searches for these underlying conditions.

I stopped reading at the end of the first paragraph Oloo's .

Oloo forgets alot of things, or maybe he just tries to ignore them. I might be wrong, but i do not think any African in a slum situation cries, nor will he go to his family and whiningly narate his ordeal if he knocks his toe on a stone. (English uses the word tripping for such.)

Of course some do cry. But they know the reason why. (As selfish as it might be) but if he is a perenial crier everyone will know and it will be upto the particular.

It is time all people who describe complaining people as people who do not know what they are saying put some reasearch to back their theories. If that is the way to go. Let us listen to complaints and use our knowledge or education to provide a respectfull way forward. Please.

Ibrahima Yade climbs the stairs leading to the floor where his small company, SeneLogic, is housed. A start-up social economics company, whose slogan is “La sénégalaise des logiciels libres” [The Senegalese of free software]. From his height of two metres, Ibrahima, the forty-year old, tells his four younger colleagues that the software development session has been interrupted because of a power cut.

Environmental Rights Action / Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has condemned the September 2 arrest and detention of a group of around 25 people including journalists attending a community forum on gas flaring at Iwherekan community (Delta State). The arrests were made by Nigerian soldiers at the Iwherekan community gas flaring site operated by oil giant Shell.

Five brave and selfless advocates of human rights from Burma, Congo, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan have been awarded the prestigious 2008 Human Rights Defender Awards, Human Rights Watch has said. All five have been persecuted and threatened for their work. One winner, Saudi lawyer Abd al-Rahman al-Lahim, is under a travel ban, which Human Rights Watch urges the Saudi government lift so that he may receive his award in person in London.

We are hungry and angry Kenyans who have chosen to stand up and demand that the government ensures the right to food for all Kenyans. We are tired of eating "airburgers"; we are tired of watching our children go to bed hungry and we can no longer keep to the-skip-a-meal program.