Full Coverage: Africa

31.10.2005 Faced with impossible conditions for holding elections, a proposal by the U.N. and the African Union has allowed Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo to stay in office for up to 12 months, despite opposition from some citizens. The country continues in a state of "no war, no peace," as it has since a failed insurgency three years ago.

31.10.2005 IOM Harare has launched a nationwide multimedia information campaign called the “Safe Journey” campaign aimed at reducing the risks linked to irregular migration and HIV/AIDS. The six-month information campaign uses a variety of multimedia messages, including radio and television programmes featuring migrants’ testimonies, billboards and posters in Shona, Ndebele and English and the distribution of an IOM developed “Passport to Safe Migration”, a booklet which includes hard facts on the dangers of irregular migration and on avenues for legal migration.

31.10.2005 Watch the webcast of this reading and panel discussion with South Africa Supreme Court of Appeal Justice Edwin Cameron who talked about his memoir, Witness to AIDS. The reading is followed by a discussion featuring Gay McDougall, international human rights leader and executive director of Global Rights, Partners for Justice; Princeton Lyman, former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa and current Council on Foreign Relations Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies; Terje Anderson, executive director, National Association of People with AIDS; and moderated by ABC correspondent Michel Martin.

31.10.2005 In anticipation of renewed fighting with rebel forces, the Ivorian government is recruiting Liberian children alongside hundreds of other former combatants in Liberia’s civil war, said leading human rights group.

31.10.2005 The African Protocol on the Rights of Women received its 15th ratification Thursday, starting the process in motion for the treaty to come into force in November, guaranteeing women a host of economic, social, and reproductive rights.

28.10.2005 NAIROBI, Oct 28 (IPS) - A generator rumbles behind the two-roomed building, which looks like one of the maize mills that dot Kenya's rural landscape. But, you're not likely to find a harvest of any sort in here -- rather, food for thought.

28.10.2005 A season of public art, film, music, theatre, poetry and debate is being held in London, 21 October-10 November to mark the 10th anniversary of the executions of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight colleagues.

28.10.2005 Correspondents report on how governments in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America plan to fight a possible outbreak of "bird flu" in the face of poor public health infrastructure.

28.10.2005 In a radio and TV appeal for help, Malawi’s President Binguwa Mutharika said the country was facing a national disaster from the worsening food crisis.

* OneWorld Guide to Malawi

28.10.2005 Water is life. But the people of Mkuranga district in Tanzania cannot take that fact for granted.

28.10.2005 Four months on and with the "historic G8 deal for Africa" already in tatters, the Make Poverty History coalition is as silent as it was once ubiquitous. Ahead of December’s World Trade Organisation summit in Hong Kong, Stuart Hodkinson investigates.

28.10.2005 As voters on Tanzania's semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar prepare to choose a new president Sunday, the main opposition candidate is expressing concern about the vote and its aftermath. Despite voter intimidation and a precedent of post-election violence, Seif Sharif Hamad hopes his party will bring about peaceful democratic change this time.

28.10.2005 Fifty years ago, the Tonga people were evicted from their lands along the Zambezi River when the construction of the Kariba Dam flooded their valley homes. Now, an oral testimony project is highlighting the voices of the Tonga, exploring the history and contemporary experiences of communities that paid dearly for their country's development.

27.10.2005 Three activists have won the prestigious Human Rights Defender Award: Omid Memarian, a journalist and web-blogger from Iran, Salih Mahmoud Osman, lawyer and human rights activist from Darfur, and Beatrice Were, an advocate for the rights of women and children affected by HIV/AIDS in Uganda.
* The "ladies in white", wives and mothers of imprisoned dissidents in Cuba, this week received the Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought, along with Nigerian lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim and Reporters Without Borders.

27.10.2005 At least 600 000 schools in Africa will be connected to one another via a satellite network in a bid to help schools produce maths and science whiz kids.

27.10.2005 The situation in Sudan's Darfur region is deteriorating sharply, warns the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who says that a further calamity there could have "a devastating impact" on neighbouring countries.

27.10.2005 Heavy-handed tactics by the Uganda army against northern rebels are condemned by a leading development charity, which seeks international pressure on the government to protect civilians and aid convoys.

27.10.2005 U.S. Ambassador John Bolton recently called for U.N. to take action, not merely talk about the deteriorating situation in Darfur, but the arms embargo he's suggesting would be ineffective and insufficient, say Africa advocates, urging Bolton to do more.

26.10.2005 A Farmers Internet Café, established by the Zambia National Farmers Union (ZNFU), through support from United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the USA’s department of Agriculture, has helped linking the mother body with affiliates at district level, while at the same time providing access to information to individual union members. Through this café not only were the farmers able to access business opportunities, they were also able to know general marketing trends in the agricultural sector, to write letters to their relatives as well as enquire about any other services that the union or any other organisation of interest to them was offering.

26.10.2005 The Zimbabwean government is well known for its repressive treatment of critics and independent journalists. A crackdown on the press over the past five years has left the country with no independent daily newspapers, no private radio news coverage, and only two prominent independent weeklies. What is less documented is the toll that this crackdown takes on the country's journalists, including those flee overseas and struggle to rebuild their lives in exile, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).