Full Coverage: East Africa

30.06.2004 Kenya is to develop a national strategy for both promoting and regulating the use of traditional medicine, and providing alternative forms of treatment to the country's poor.

25.06.2004 Famines and Ethiopia have been linked in the public mind since Bob Geldof’s Live Aid Concert in the 1980s. Yet, as Sue Edwards reports, remarkable successes in reviving the traditional farming practice of pit composting have now convinced Ethiopia to adopt organic agriculture for the entire country.

22.06.2004 The Home Office has said it will continue to send failed asylum seekers back to Mogadishu against advice from the Somali government and the United Nations.

21.06.2004 NAIROBI, Jun 19 (IPS) - "The toll on children is most worrying," says James Elder, Communications Officer for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), about the situation in Darfur, western Sudan.

16.06.2004 Digital Links has developed laptops fitted with solar panels so that Rwandan children in remote villages can access computers at school.

14.06.2004 The closure late last week of one the last independent newspapers in Zimbabwe appears to mark another step by the government of President Robert Mugabe to silence dissident voices.

11.06.2004 Staff and associates of a development organization in India took part in the first of three workshops on the UN’s Guidelines for a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction. Coordinated by a U.S.-based group, the workshops are designed to build a framework for effective human rights-based poverty reduction strategies. The second and third workshops will take place in Bolivia and Zambia later this year.

08.06.2004 The International Institute of Communication and Development highlights some key problems schools in Zambia face in providing ICT services to its communities. The workshop discussions give a first hand account of the problems school authorities face in sustaining the services.

08.06.2004 Without substantial rains in the next two weeks, northern Somalia could suffer worsening drought conditions that would overtake the current capacity of aid agencies to provide relief, the United Nations officials have warned.

04.06.2004 Farmers in East and Central Africa can now get a better deal for their products as they can have access to market price information on commodities via FM radio, mobile phones, email and the internet. The project called Foodnet is benefiting millions of farmers in this region.

04.06.2004 Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), a non-profit in Uganda, is experimenting on sending message alerts on disease outbreak to health workers in rural areas through mobile phones. The sudden spread of diseases like SARS could be tackled this way.

03.06.2004 At the table, coffee tastes the same, whether it is fairly or freely traded. But it's a different story in the fields where farmers reap the benefit of fairly traded coffee seeds.

03.06.2004 Women of the Uganda Network (WOUGNET) participated in the Open Knowledge Network workshop held recently in Nairobi, Kenya. The workshop focused on building a network for content creation and ICT for development activities in East Africa.

02.06.2004 A devastating war that lasted from the 1970s to 1992 left the people of Mozambique among the poorest in the world. Since the peace agreement was signed, the government has endeavored to rebuild the country's infrastructure and to improve living standards. Poverty reduction is the primary goal of the government, as well as nongovernmental organizations and donors operating in Mozambique; it is an essential first step to determine the true extent of poverty and where it is most severe.

02.06.2004 Fifty-two children, who are former victims of abduction by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), are returning to their home communities in northern Uganda. The airlift is part of an ongoing programme organised by World Vision with UNICEF support, to help the children return to normal life after their experiences at the hands of the LRA.