Cape Town, 17 October, 2008— About 200 Somali businessmen in South Africa’s Western Cape Province are being threatened with violence if they continue doing business in the townships. They recently returned to the areas after fleeing a wave of xenophobic attacks in May 2008. A group of local township businessmen, acting under the banner of
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Dakar, 17 October, 2008— An international NGO is using cartoons to spell out to African soldiers the rights and wrongs of how to treat a child. Save the Children Sweden (SC-S) on 17 October wrapped up a five-day ‘train the trainers’ workshop for senior military personnel in Saly, Senegal, 80km south of the capital Dakar.
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Kwadukuza, 17 October, 2008— Computers are increasingly ubiquitous in the developing world as software and internet companies create operating systems, computing programmes, and web-based portals in hundreds of indigenous languages. Following the rapid growth of local-language technology in mobile phones and open-source programmes, many software and internet companies are scrambling to gain a foothold in
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Dakar, 17 October, 2008— Despite growing for centuries in some of the driest, toughest agricultural zones of West Africa, the fonio cereal has been neglected by most agricultural development programmes, according to the World Bank. But skyrocketing rice price increases that have slammed rice-dependent West Africa and declining profits in other cash crops like cotton
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Port Morseby, 17 October, 2008— The 38-year-old woman first arrived at the Family Support Centre (FSC) at Port Moresby General Hospital in August 2008. “The violence has been going on for years,” she told IRIN. “In July my husband gave me a black eye and bruises.” She was referred by the FSC to the Individual
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Dakar, 15 October, 2008— More than 11,000 teachers are demanding better work conditions and more pay as they continue a nationwide strike in Gabon that started on 6 October, according to Marcel Libama, the secretary general of the National Education Union (SENA). “We have decided to strike now because the education system in Gabon is
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Katuna, 15 October, 2008— Said*, a long-distance trucker from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is married with six children. His work keeps him on the road for weeks at a time, and on those long, lonely nights he turns to his girlfriend, who lives in town of Malaba on the Kenya-Uganda border. “I decided to
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Dhaka, 15 October, 2008— More than 16 million children in 73,000 primary and secondary schools in Bangladesh will mark the first global hand-washing day on 15 October with a vow to keep themselves free of diarrhoea and pneumonia – two major killers of children spread mainly via dirty hands. “Children are the most powerful agents
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Harare, 15 October, 2008— Tendai Moyo, 28, living in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, goes into a shop in the downtown area and heads for a shelf where, a day ago, she saw a feeding bottle she wanted to buy for her three-month-old son. She picks it up and goes to the till, convinced she can
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Lome, 6 October, 2008— For the first time in recent years, primary school students started a new school year on 6 October in Togo without paying enrolment fees. The government has waived primary school fees as part of a more than US$80 million investment in the education system. While parents celebrated the savings, administrators taken
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