Of 585 000 maternal deaths worldwide each year, 99% are in developing countries. What factors underlie this striking imbalance? Research involving the Malawi College of Medicine and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine studied this issue in a rural community in southern Malawi. Maternal education and access to healthcare facilities influence pregnancy outcomes, it showed.

This year’s conference seeks to tackle the broad theme of North-South power relations within development. The aim of this broad approach is to maximise active participation from as diverse an array of presenters as possible. As in previous years we hope to combine postgraduate students presenting their own work in a relaxed environment of research-exchange with a number of speakers from both academic and practitioner backgrounds.

To mark the Day of the African Child, observed worldwide on 16 June, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) launched a "child-powered" global survey on Tuesday, in a bid to account for children who are not in school. In a statement, UNICEF reported that approximately 121 million children were out of school worldwide, the majority of them girls.

More children in Zimbabwe's cities are going hungry, according to a UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) study examining nutrition in Southern Africa. "Malnutrition levels in Harare [the Zimbabwean capital] have doubled over the past four years and significantly worsened in Bulawayo [the second city]," according to UNICEF's nutrition and health officer, Claudia Hudspeth, who conducted the study.

Delegates attending the Somali peace talks in Kenya have nominated members to a committee that will oversee the setting up of a parliament for the strife-torn country. The parliament will in turn elect the president. The committee would ensure that the process of selecting members of parliament was fair and serve as an arbitration forum to settle potential disputes over the distribution of seats, sources close to the talks told IRIN on Tuesday.

Calm has returned to Kalehe in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) province of South Kivu after government troops regained control of the town from dissident soldiers, Sebastien Lapierre, a spokesman for the UN Mission in the country, known as MONUC, told IRIN on Tuesday. The dissident troops, led by Gen Laurent Nkunda, had on 8 June retreated to Kalehe from the South Kivu capital of Bukavu, following a weeklong occupation of the latter town that left nearly 100 people dead.

Lazing submerged in the river, the hippopotamus may seem a docile creature, but to many rural communities in Burkina Faso it has become a menace - so much so that the government has made hippo hunting legal again. There were fewer than 100 hippos in Burkina Faso just two decades ago and the large pachyderm appeared to be on the verge of extinction in this landlocked and semi-arid West African nation. However, a recent government survey showed numbers have rebounded to around 1,400 following the imposition of a state hunting ban in 1991.

After a three-week delay, Malawi's new President, Bingu wa Mutharika, has unveiled a leaner cabinet, which analysts say will find favour with international donors. The new cabinet announced on Sunday contains 21 ministers and eight deputies, compared to the 46-strong cabinet under his predecessor, Bakili Muluzi.

Day to day survival is the chief concern of most Angolans, rather than the current debate among politicians over the date of the country's next general elections. Low levels of government expenditure on health and education, and escalating unemployment have made many Angolans apprehensive about politics and politicians, analysts told IRIN.

A coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), farmers associations and social movements from around the world are using the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XI) as a platform for a Global Call to Action against "free trade" agreements that destroy peasant based agriculture and lead to corporate-controlled de-industrialisation in the South. This Global Call to Action will take place during the week of 19-24 July, 2004; the week immediately prior to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) General Council meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

Millions of the world's refugees are children. Joyce Ihuju's parents were killed fleeing Sudan when she was four. She is now 14, and lives in a refugee camp in Uganda. Along with other young people, she tells her story in a book published by NGO International Rescue Committee (IRC) to coincide with Britain's Refugee Week -- June 14 to 20. In "Making It Home", children aged six to 15 describe their experiences of war in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia and Sudan.

Through an open letter delivered this week in Rome, hundreds of civil society organisations from across the world denounced that a recent report by FAO (the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) was a disgraceful public relations tool for the genetic engineering industry. The FAO report ("Agricultural biotechnology: meeting the needs of the poor?") was publicly presented on the 17th of May, and in the space of a few weeks more than 650 civil society organisations and 800 individuals from 120 countries have drafted and supported the letter which strongly condemns its bias against the poor, against the environment and against food production in general. Amongst them are many peasant organisations, social movements and scientists.

Africa’s political tragedies are loaded with regular doses of instability forced onto a people by rogue nationalists who block essential freedoms and narrow political activity, writes Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai in the Zimbabwe Observer. Tsvangirai asks - and answers - the questions: What are you up to when you shut the door to the sole democratic passage to development? When a regime seals off the country and shrinks the democratic space to the barest minimum, what does it expect the people to do? Do you prepare and participate in an election when you know the result? How do you restore the people’s confidence in a climate of insecurity, fear and, above all, when there is no guarantee that your vote can make a difference? Why waste time?

Unless governments in poor countries implement domestic policies that benefit the entire population and not only the rich elite, fair world trade will not be enough to help nations achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, Eveline Herfkens, executive coordinator for the MDGs campaign, told U.N. Wire in an interview at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development's 11th ministerial meeting. According to Herfkens, who has been participating in plenary discussions and briefings here since Monday, poor countries are partly to blame for economic inequalities, since rich people in poor nations are frequently the ones making decisions on trade and other policies.

In at least 25 countries of the world there is no specified age for compulsory education; at least 33 States have no minimum age of employment and in 44 girls can be married earlier than boys. In at least 125 countries children may be taken to court and risk imprisonment for criminal acts at an age between 7 and 15, often the age range for compulsory education. Moreover, in the same country, it is not rare to find that children are legally obliged to go to school until they are 14 or 15 years old but a different law allows them to work at an earlier age or to be married at the age of 12 or to be criminally responsible from the age of 7. The publication 'At what age?' brings to light problems that are not - but should be - effectively addressed: at what age do children become adults and loose their protection under the Convention on the Rights of the Child?

The odds remain stacked against many girls in Namibia when it comes to getting an education, the United Nations Children's Fund said in a report on Namibia last year. But how extreme the difficulties can be that face an education-hungry girl may be revealed in violent detail later this year in the murder trial of a man who is accused of killing a young female relative - all because of her wish to get a school education.

In the Central African Republic, a country of 623,000 square km and 3.5 million inhabitants, the education system experiences a high disparity among boys and girls (39 per cent of net enrolment for girls and 46 per cent for boys). This difference is mainly explained by socio-cultural factors. Since girls’ education is perceived by many as a meaningless investment for the family and the community. However, many families do appreciate the importance of education for girls and boys. Josiane Pounoua, age 14 is one girl whose family believes in the value of education.

A new study commissioned by the South African Cities Network (SACN) urges local municipalities to develop a multi-sectoral strategy to tackle the effects of HIV/AIDS on their communities. The report, titled 'South African Cities and HIV/AIDS: Challenges and Responses', noted that while there had been a number of initiatives to support local government in developing an HIV/AIDS response, there was little attempt to assess the challenges facing the cities.

About 90 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province have teamed up to work with the government in rolling out antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, in the first structured civil society response of its kind in South Africa, and possibly even on the continent. When the government announced a national rollout plan for free ARVs in September 2003, Cati Vawda, director of the Durban-based Children's Rights Centre, and a number of her NGO colleagues, quickly realised that "government alone cannot do it".

African church leaders said on Friday that they would make available in church-supported health facilities, drugs used to lessen the severity of HIV/AIDS infection and become more involved in fighting the stigmatisation of those living with the virus. "We will make treatment available at church-supported mission hospitals, clinics, dispensaries and health posts," the Rt Rev Nyansanko Ni-Nku, the president of the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC), told a news conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, following a three-day meeting of 200 Protestant church leaders from 39 African countries.

In a a departure from the previous practice of awarding grants in response to unsolicited applications,Foundation for Human Rights calls for proposal for the following categories:
Public Interest Litigation
Human Rights
Access to Justice
Security of Tenure on Farms

Ask most children who have never visited Africa about the lives of their age-mates there, chances are that they will have a mental picture of them playing outside huts or herding cattle in a spacious rural landscape. Less likely would be a picture of an African child like Canésius Ndihokubwayo eking out a living on the streets of towns and cities. As the continent marks the Day of the African Child on Wednesday, Ndihokubwayo's story illustrates his plight and that of those like him. At 13 years old, Ndihokubwayo is already a veteran of the streets. When, after his father died, he left his village in Bubanza Province in 1999, he was confident of finding a job and hopeful for a better life; but disappointment swiftly followed. Ndihokubwayo ended up living on the streets because his surrogate father, who had promised him work, failed to deliver.

The Nigerian government said on Wednesday that it planned to start repatriating more than 17,000 people who fled from eastern Nigerian into Cameroon following ethnic clashes two years ago. The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), in a statement obtained by IRIN, said that the return of the mainly pastoralist Fulani people to a mountainous frontier area in Taraba state would start next week. Salisu Makarfi, the director general of NEMA, said in the statement that four reception centres for the returnees had already been set up in the towns of Mbang, Dorafi, Mayo Bule and Kan Iyaka in the Sarduana local government area.

Transparency International (TI) has invited contributions for the ‘corruption research’ section of the Global Corruption Report 2005, TI’s annual survey of the state of corruption around the world. The Global Corruption Report reaches policymakers, journalists and researchers worldwide. It is a key forum for new and innovative research on corruption and governance. The Global Corruption Report 2005 will include short summaries of recent research.

A Mozambican judge has sentenced seven people to between eight and 14 years in prison for their roles in the country's biggest bank fraud case, which saw a top journalist murdered as part of a cover-up. The sentences closed a case that had gripped Mozambique for years and exposed a web of corruption among the business elite.

A businessman at the centre of an inquiry into Kenya’s biggest financial scandal has claimed that former President Daniel arap Moi made him buy a bank to cover the trail of Moi’s millions of pounds stashed abroad. Pattni’s testimony to an inquiry further implicates Moi in a corruption scandal that cost the cash-strapped East African nation hundreds of millions of pounds at a time when the economy was spiralling toward recession, largely because of government mismanagement.

"Secondary Education in Africa: Lifeline to the Future" is the theme of the second conference with a sharp focus on secondary education in Africa (SEIA) currently being held in Senegal. But can the theme become a reality? The first SEIA conference took place in Kampala, Uganda in June last year Here in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, delegates are assessing and reviewing progress in secondary education since Kampala, as well as exploring the challenges and searching for solutions to the many problems that remain in the sector. These include finance and the relevance of what is taught and learned by secondary schoolchildren in sub-Saharan Africa.

A teenage bride has escaped from the home of a Mandera businessman whom she accused of torturing her. The 15-year-old girl, who had been forcefully married to the 60-year-old businessman, made her dramatic escape and appealed to the government and human rights organisations to rescue her from the forced marriage.

The Coordinator of the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Mr Joseph Modi, has said Nigerian women produce more than 50 per cent of the country's food needs but they still live in penury and deprivation, due to lack of modern knowledge and skill to preserve their farm produce. Modi said this at a four-day workshop on food processing organised by NDE.

In 2003, the Brazilian government initiated a resolution on sexual orientation and human rights to be presented to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (CHR). Since, organisations involved in the international lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual (LGTB) movement have come face to face with the UN system. On March 29, 2004 Brazil was informed that it could not present its resolution on sexual orientation due to intense pressure from the Organisation of Islamic Conferences (OIC), the Vatican and the Protestant right. Despite this set-back, the LGTB movement has had a substantive opportunity to learn about and influence UN processes and strategies.

Fast Search & Transfer? (FAST?), the leading developer of enterprise search and real-time alerting technologies, has announced that HURIDOCS, a global network of human rights organisations and activists, has deployed a hosted application of the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP?) to power HURISEARCH (www.hurisearch.org), a non-profit human rights search engine. With FAST ESP, HURISEARCH provides a single point of access to human rights information published by more than 1,300 non-governmental organisations (NGO) worldwide in 77 languages. This helps activists capitalize on a wealth of existing information in support of human rights.

It has been over 50 years since the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed by most governments in the world and yet the abuses continue to grow. Freedom of Speech and Human Rights are taken for granted in the west, but recent years have seen conditions deteriorate around the world. As early as 1997 for example, Human Rights conditions were reported to remain unchanged compared to previous years, or in some countries, actually worsen around the world. In 1998 for example, the UN reported that even though over a hundred governments had agreed to help outlaw some of the worse violations of rights, torture was still on the increase.

The Reform Agenda has established a human rights desk to handle reports of torture and harassment of their supporters, an official has said. Naboth Muhairwe, the assistant secretary general in charge of research and policy said this on Sunday while addressing sub county delegates at Kasese catholic social services hall. This follows reports that the group's supporters were being intimidated by government agents.

The ratification of the protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, is one of three strong motions that was tabled by both ruling and opposition parties in Parliament on Tuesday.

The Rwandan government has officially requested the presences of a third party verification mechanism, consisting of UN and African Union (AU) officials, to help resolve tensions with the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Muligande made the announcement following talks between President Paul Kagame and an AU delegation led by the chairman of the AU Peace and Security Council, Ambassador Mame Balla Sy.

20 June is World Refugee Day, a day to reflect on the state of the world’s 12 million refugees. One of these 12 million is a young Somali student named Abass Hassan Mohamed.

Abass is the second-oldest of six children. His family fled to Kenya, along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees, in the midst of the violent implosion of Somalia in 1992. He says very little about his early days in the refugee camp, apart from the fact that it was dusty, hot, violent, and that people died on a daily basis.

12 years later, he still lives in a refugee camp near Dadaab, in the Northeast Province of Kenya, just 80kms from the border with Somalia, along with almost 135,000 other refugees.

This February, one year late, Abass received the results from his national secondary school exams. Competing against students from across the country, Abass sat in exams in subjects as diverse as English, Chemistry, Commerce and Swahili. His results were extraordinary. He ranked first in the Northeast Province of Kenya, and eighth in the whole of Kenya.

Although he does not brag, Abass overcame incredible odds to achieve this remarkable result. Of the 44 students in his class, only 32 graduated. His days were full not only with the extra-curricular activities like football, the debating club and the school environment club, but also with more demanding tasks, like standing in the blazing sun and 45C heat for hours to receive the family’s fortnightly rations of a few kilograms of maize. He learned to survive in one of the most violent camps in Africa, where rape, murder and armed robbery were almost daily occurrences.

There were only 300 desks in the whole school, so Abass had to share with two other students, with whom he also shared textbooks. He tried to work on his homework in the evenings, when the chores were done, but his family rarely had the fuel for the single kerosene lamp.

Abass now works as a teacher in one of the primary schools in his camp run by the aid agency CARE, earning 3,775 KSh/- a month, about £26. If a scholarship can be found, Abass plans on studying medicine. In a community where there is only one doctor for 135,000 people, Abass feels that training in medicine is the best way that he can help his people, both in exile and when they return to Somalia. Abass believes that day will come.

Abass is but one example of the millions of refugees around the world, young and old, who have skills and abilities they want to contribute, but who are wasting away in isolated and insecure camps, trapped in a protracted refugee situation. The UN recently reported that, in Africa alone, there are over 3 million refugees who have spent over 5 years in the confines of a refugee camp, with no freedom of movement, dwindling donor support, and slim prospects of a solution for their plight.

This year’s World Refugee Day celebrates the 30th Anniversary of the entry into force of the Organisations for African Unity’s (OAU’s) Refugee Convention. This Convention is hailed by many as one of the most liberal refugee regimes in the world, expanding the refugee definition from those fleeing an individual fear of persecution to those also feeling civil conflict. But looking at the current state of refugee protection in Africa, there is little to celebrate.

Host countries across Africa continue to limit the quality and quantity of asylum they offer to refugees, fleeing both persecution and civil war. Refugees are increasingly ‘warehoused’ in remote camps, cut-off from local communities and fully dependent on international assistance. Unlike the ‘golden age’ of asylum in Africa, when refugees were allocated land to pursue self-sufficiency, host countries today often cite security concerns, environmental degradation and lack of support from donor governments as a justification for placing restrictions on the asylum they offer. In cases of mass influx, states are increasingly likely to try to close their borders to new arrivals or, as in the recent case of Darfur, hinder access to humanitarian agencies.

The result is a crisis in asylum in Africa.

This crisis is compounded by a reluctance on the part of Western governments to support the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in fulfilling the Mandate it received from the UN General Assembly in 1950: to provide international protection for refugees and to find a permanent solution to their plight. States have agreed, since 1951, that the granting of asylum places a heavy burden on certain states, and that the solution to the world’s refugee problem cannot be achieved without international co-operation. Yet the West does little to cooperate.

When asylum seekers flee the insecurity of regions of refugee origin, they find increasing barriers to protection in Europe and North America. When the UNHCR appeals to donor countries to fund its programmes in Africa, insufficient contributions are made. UNHCR has appealed for over $50 million to respond to the unfolding humanitarian emergency on the Chad/Sudan border, but has received only $18 million.

This funding crisis directly affects the level of protection that refugees across Africa receive on a daily basis. A lack of funds means that programmes will not be implemented to prevent the rape of refugee women, that protection staff will not be deployed to register new refugees, that education programmes will need to be cut, and that food assistance to refugees, already below internationally recognized standards, will need to be reduced.

A lack of donor engagement also inhibits the prospects of finding durable solutions to the plight of refugees. Three durable solutions have historically been used to resolve refugee situations. First, refugees have been able to integrate into their host community. Through the 1960s and 1970s, refugees fleeing wars of national liberation and civil wars in Africa were welcomed into their newly independent neighbours and encouraged, with the support of the international community and aid agencies, to settle on under-utilized land and rebuild their lives in a new country. Thousands were given citizenship, and many refugees were able to make significant contributions to their adopted countries. Such programmes are no longer possible in Africa.

Second, refugees have been able to voluntarily repatriate to their country of origin when the conflict has been resolved and when the mechanisms have been established to support their return and reintegration. With the end of the prolonged civil war in Mozambique in the early 1990s, almost a million refugees were able to return from Malawi. Sustained programmes ensured the success of their reintegration. In stark contrast, many instances of repatriation are less than voluntary. Many Burundian refugees are returning from Tanzania not because they believe that they will find peace in their homeland, but because they want to escape the unbearable conditions in the refugee camps. Many say that if they are going to die, they would rather die at home.

Even when the UN does believe that conditions in the country of origin could support large-scale repatriation and reintegration, the necessary funds are not forthcoming. In March 2004, the UNHCR appealed for donor support to lay the foundations for the repatriation of refugees to seven African countries. Two of these countries were Liberia and Sudan. While repatriation is not immediately possible to these countries, investment is essential in the coming months to ensure that the infrastructure is in place to support repatriation in the coming years. UNHCR appealed for $8.8 million for preparatory activities in Sudan. It has received $3 million. Likewise, it has appealed for $39.2 million to support operations in Liberia for return and reintegration of both refugees and internally displaced persons. It has received only $3 million.

If a refugee cannot return to their country of origin, and if they cannot remain in their country of asylum, the only remaining solution for them is to be resettled to a third country. Resettlement is a long and demanding process, but it is the only possible durable solution for many refugees, especially refugees with special needs. Given the protracted nature of many of today’s refugee situations and given the severity of many of the protection environments in which they survive, this durable solution is increasingly essential, but alarmingly scarce. While most of Africa’s 3 million camp-bound refugees would qualify for resettlement, only 100,000 resettlement opportunities are made available by Western countries for resettlement programmes around the world. At the same time, UNHCR lacks the capacity and the institutional will to fill even this meager quota.

But more money to UNHCR is not the answer to the plight of Africa’s refugees. UNHCR is only part of the solution, and greater financial contributions without the backing of political will is wasted. Full funding for UNHCR’s programmes is an important first step, but it is not enough.

A solution to the plight of the world’s refugees must begin with the recognition that the problem of displacement is a global problem, and requires a global solution. The answer on the part of the international community should not be to pull-up the draw-bridges and sharpen the swords. The answer must be found in understanding how various aspects of foreign engagement – trade, aid, military, and foreign policy – can both cause refugee movements and affect the quality of asylum they receive.

Second, the leaders of the West must understand that it is in everybody’s interest to resolve the world’s protracted refugee situations. It is not only immoral to keep refugees warehoused in camps across Africa; it is uneconomical, can foster insecurity, and contributes to the growing resentment on the part of ‘host’ governments. Just as the plight of chronic refugee groups in Europe was resolved in the 1960s, there is urgent need for the political will and creative thinking to formulate comprehensive solutions for today’s protracted refugee situations in Africa.

Finally, refugees themselves should be involved in the process of determining their future. 30 years ago, refugees mattered. They were fleeing wars of national liberation in Africa or communism in Eastern Europe. In the context of the Cold War, they had political utility. Today, they are seen as hopeless and helpless, anonymous victims and huddled masses on our television screens.

But hopeless and helpless they are not. Like Abass, refugees have hopes and dreams for the future, and the ability, desire and skills to contribute to resolving the world’s refugee problem. But contained in camps, they can do little. With the financial and political support of the international community, they could do great things.

The coming into force of the African Refugee Convention 30 years ago was a great step forward for refugees. Since then, we have taken many great leaps backwards. It’s time to reverse the trend.

* James Milner is a Trudeau Scholar and doctoral student at the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. He has formerly worked as a consultant for UNHCR in India, Cameroon, Guinea and Geneva, and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles.

* Please send comments to

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. While we are pleased that several print publications have used our editorials, we ask editors to note that if they use this article, they do so on the understanding that they are expected to provide the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

This year the newly established Veteran Child Soldiers Association of Liberia is taking part in the celebration of World Refugee Day organised by the Liberian Welfare Council in the Buduburam refugee settlement in Ghana. The celebration will bring together most local NGOs, music groups and dance collectives.

A new study shows obesity rates are rising in poor and developing countries, particularly among women, marking a major departure from historical trends and long-held beliefs, Reuters reports. The joint U.S.-Brazilian study included data from 37 countries including Brazil, China and India. "In many poorer nations, obesity has become more prevalent than malnutrition," said Barry Popkin, a researcher at the University of North Carolina. "Worldwide, the burden of obesity increasingly rests on the poor and less educated, even in many developing nations we never thought of as having an obesity problem."

Amnesty International has strongly condemned continuing serious human rights abuses in the city of Bukavu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). "General Laurent Nkunda and Colonel Jules Mutebusi, whose forces seized the city, should ensure that combatants under their command uphold international humanitarian law and stop attacking civilians," the organisation urged. Amnesty International is also urging MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force in DRC, which is also present in Bukavu, to do its utmost to protect civilians in the city and its environs.

A Training Session for 50 Libyan officials and police representatives, organized by the International Organisation for Migration and the Libyan People's Committee for Public Security will discuss issues such as border migration management and assisted voluntary return for stranded migrants. Libya is a country of transit and destination for migrants and is therefore engaged in addressing the phenomenon in a comprehensive manner both bilaterally and multilaterally.

Thousands of Eritrean refugees are being moved away from the contested border with Ethiopia, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Monday. Some 2,400 refugees who had been living in makeshift camps in Ethiopia close to the disputed 1,000-km border began moving last week "further into Ethiopian territory for their own safety", Mahary Maasho, the UNHCR spokesman in Addis Ababa told IRIN.

The Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) has sent a written submission to the Department of Justice in response to its draft discussion document for a proposed hate speech bill. The objectives of this proposed law are to, among others, criminalise hate speech and also to give effect to the Constitution as well as South Africa's commitments to international law, including its obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Intensively educated about HIV/AIDS, refugees in East Africa have made progress in the fight against the infection by changing their sexual behaviour, according to a HIV/AIDS expert in the UN refugee agency.

The food security situation is desperate for thousands of returning refugees to Angola's northern Malanje province, as their access to markets in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been blocked, IRIN was told on Monday. The World Health Organisation recently reported that the situation had deteriorated to the extent that more than 25 people had died after they resorted to eating poisonous plants.

Zambia is to continue with its "open door policy" towards refugees fleeing renewed fighting in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a senior official said on Monday. "So far there are no confirmed reports that there has been an influx of Congolese [into Zambia] since the renewed violence, but it is still too soon. On average we receive around 20 refugees a week from the DRC because of the general instability in that country. But should we see larger numbers coming in, we will remain welcoming," the Zambian Ministry of Home Affairs Commissioner for Refugees, Jacob Mpepo, told IRIN.

The 500 students at Morgenster Teacher's College in Masvingo were on Friday left stranded after the indefinite closure of the institution as a result of intermittent strike action by the students. Heavily armed policemen maintained presence at the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe institution where the students were given 30 minutes to pack their belongings and leave.

It's a phenomenon that became noticeable in the 1980s, and is now a permanent feature of the urban landscape in Nigeria: children hawking goods on the streets. Take 10-year-old Bimbo Dada, for example. Last week, IPS found her meandering between vehicles in one of Lagos' many traffic jams - also referred to as "go slows" - selling sachets of water to motorists. Although the Lagos State government has banned trading in traffic jams because of the dangers it poses to hawkers, the practice continues unabated due to lack of enforcement.

More than 100 million girls over the next decade will marry before their 18th birthday, including many aged as young as eight or nine, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) warned at an international meeting in Washington. Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, Executive Director of UNFPA said: "Married adolescents have been largely ignored in the development and health agenda because of the perception that their married status ensures them a safe passage to adulthood," adding "nothing could be further from the truth."