Chocolate companies in the West are finally starting to wake up to the reality that child labour is being used on the cocoa plantations that supply the companies with the raw material to make their chocolate. Some key players in the U.S. and Britain are starting to make noise on the issue, although they have a long way to go.

About 40,000 people in and near Accra are still affected by floods that swept coastal Ghana in late June, a senior official of Ghana's National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) told IRIN on Friday.

Five people are reported dead and some 139,000 others have been affected by flooding and waterlogged conditions caused by recent downpours in Ghanaian coastal towns, including the capital Accra, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Monday. The southern districts of Adoagyir, Nsawam, Zongo, and the Odaw Channel have been the worst affected by the flooding, OCHA said.

Ghana has expressed readiness to send its troops as part of the "international protection force" to monitor peace in Burundi, Ghanaian defence minister, Kufuor Kwame, told journalists in Bujumbura on Wednesday. The country would send the troops "if the situation stabilised," Rwandan radio quoted him as saying.