The Global Fund has denied Uganda $270m (about Sh700b) needed to put over 100,000 more people on lifesaving ARVs because the country’s policies are deemed harsh on sexual minorities. The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria was created to dramatically increase resources to fight three of the world’s most devastating diseases, and to direct those resources to areas of greatest need. The Uganda government’s New Vision newspaper reported today that the Aids control manager in the Ministry of Health, Dr Zainab Akol, had said the rights of minorities were derailing the fight against HIV/Aids.

The President of Ghana, John Evans Atta Mills, intends to pull Ghana out of the International Monetary Fund in a final bid to end moves by the Christine Largarde-led funding agency to suffocate the US$3 billion loan the NDC government wants from the China Development Bank (CDB). With just a little over a year left of its four-year mandate, and following what appears to be deep-seated challenges that have crippled the roundly marketed STX housing project, analysts say the Mills government badly needs huge foreign capital injection if it is to honour a string of mouth-watering campaign promises on whose back it rode to political power in January 2009.

The number of refugees and migrants arriving in Yemen by boat was 12,545 last month - the highest monthly total since UNHCR began compiling data about the mixed migration route between the Horn of Africa and Yemen in January 2006. As well as exceeding the previous record of 12,079 arrivals in September, the October total brings to 84,656 the number of people who arrived in Yemen by sea between the start of January and the start of November - more than the earlier annual record in 2009 of 77,000 people.

ARTICLE 19 says the Draft Kenya Data Protection Bill 2009 currently undergoing internal review and stakeholder consultation is critically limited and calls on the Constitution Implementation Commission to revise it to be in line with acceptable international standards on the right to freedom of expression and freedom of information. Over 70 countries have now adopted data protection laws covering the collection and use of personal information. Over 50 of those countries also have freedom of information laws.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study, the top 40 mining firms enjoyed a 1,900 per cent cumulative increase in net profits in the six years between 2002 and 2007, says Yao Graham, the co-ordinator of Third World Network-Africa. 'But very little of this additional income and profits went to the mineral exporting African countries, thanks both to the lopsided fiscal terms enjoyed by mining firms, and to their use of tax avoidance schemes such as doing business with shell companies in tax havens.'