Amy Niang

Claude Ribbe

Michel Hunault

Jean-Marc Ayrault

Jean-Paul Lecoq

Jacques Remiller

Axel Poniatowski

Zambia's opposition alliance split Friday (18 March) after the minority United Party for National Development (UPND) pulled out due to leadership squabbles with country's main opposition Patriotic Front. The two parties have feuded over whether PF leader Michael Sata or UPND chief Hakainde Hichilema should challenge President Rupiah Banda in elections due later this year.

Hundreds of residents have been left homeless in Juba town following demolitions at Custom Residential Area. The demolitions came following a week long notice given to the residents to vacate the area. Authorities of Central Equatoria State warned the residents that the State government wanted to use the land for constructing a government building.

After stalling for some time, negotiations for an economic partnership agreement (EPA) between the European Union (EU) on the one hand and the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), Mozambique and Angola on the other have recently restarted. In a letter sent to the South African Minister of Trade and Industry on 7 October 2010, SECTION27 raised concerns 'that South Africa may face undue pressure from the EU to agree to certain provisions [in the EPA] that – if adopted and given effect in domestic law – will undermine access to medicines.'

An estimated 51 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - or three quarters of the population - have no access to safe drinking water, even though the country holds over half of Africa's water reserves, the United Nations Environment Programme said in a new study. The country's troubled legacy of conflict, environmental degradation, rapid urbanisation and under-investment in water infrastructure has seriously affected the availability of drinking water, UNEP said in the study, unveiled to coincide with World Water Day.

Part of the delay in the finalisation of the economic partnership agreements (EPAs) is due to the so-called non-execution clause that gives the EU the power to take steps against its African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) trading partners if they violate human rights, democracy and good governance principles. 'African governments and civil society resist this clause because EPAs are commercial agreements where the two parties give and take,' explains Cheikh Tidiane Dieye, the civil society representative of the West African EPA negotiating team.

Despite the collapse of the formal economy and of central government in Somalia, a remarkably resilient 'parallel' economy has emerged, notes this briefing paper from Chatham House. Based on traditional clan relationships, a lack of bureaucracy and well-established channels for remittance payments from the diaspora, this model has travelled with Somali émigrés to Kenya. Some businesses that began in the informal sector are making the transition to formal enterprise and Kenyan authorities should seek to encourage this with an enabling regulatory environment, says the briefing paper.

The Ugandan police Rapid Response Unit frequently operates outside the law, carrying out torture, extortion, and in some cases, extrajudicial killings, Human Rights Watch says in a new report. Ugandan authorities should urgently open an independent investigation into the unit's conduct and activities and hold accountable anyone responsible for human rights violations, Human Rights Watch said. The 59-page report, 'Violence Instead of Vigilance: Torture and Illegal Detention by Uganda's Rapid Response Unit', documents the unit's illegal methods of investigation and serious violations of the rights of the people it arrests and detains.

Publishing US diplomatic cables helped shape uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has said. The computer expert, who infuriated the US government by publishing thousands of the secret cables, said the leaks may have persuaded some authoritarian regimes that they could not rely on US support if military force was used on protesters.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Saturday (19 MArch) vowed to intensify its role in labour protests in Swaziland calling for an end to the reign of King Mswati III. Cosatu also commended the Swazi people who held protest marches on Friday. Public service workers marched through the streets of the capital, Mbabane, protesting plans by the country's government to cut salaries and jobs in an attempt to get its finances in order.

The ReVoDa mobile application seeks to potentially turn the 87,297,789 Nigerians with mobile phones, 43,982,200 with Internet access and 2,985,680 on Facebook into informal election observers. ReVoDa allows voters to report as independent citizen observers from their respective polling units across Nigeria. Click on the link provided to find out more.

Unregulated large-scale land acquisition in south Sudan by foreign companies threatens the rights of the people, with an area bigger than Rwanda earmarked for use by outside businesses, a report warns. Investigations commissioned by Norwegian People's Aid calculated that between 2007 and 2010, 'foreign interests sought or acquired a total of 2.64 million hectares of land (6.52 million acres) in the agriculture, forestry and biofuel sectors alone.'

Nobody seems to like the Land Tenure Security Bill, writes PLAAS Senior Researcher Ruth Hall. 'It has raised the ire of both of the constituencies whose interests it sets out to address: those who own commercial farms and those who live and work on them. Contrary to its name, the Land Tenure Security Bill appears to deal largely not with how to secure people’s land tenure, but rather how to manage their resettlement off farms.'

Italy's interior minister is to visit Tunis for talks aimed at stopping the flow of migrants to the Italian Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. More than 15,000 people, mainly Tunisians but including some Libyans and Moroccans, have arrived since January's uprising in Tunisia. The UN refugee agency says tensions are rising between migrants and the local population and there is 'chaos and disorganisation'.

Several organisations used Human Rights Day to voice their dissatisfaction with the eThekwini municipality, accusing it of violating human rights by failing to deliver services to needy communities. Hundreds marched to the Durban city hall, with some threatening to boycott the local government election on May 18. Representatives and supporters of Right2Know, shack dwellers’ organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement SA, the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, ratepayers’ associations, the Durban Social Forum and KZN Subsistence Fishermen were among the marchers.

The African Virtual University (AVU) launched the interactive Open Education Resources portal OER@AVU in January this year. The portal can be accessed at and contains quality resources developed together with twelve universities in ten African countries.

The Libyan government should release all Libyan and foreign journalists detained because of their reporting and allow them to cover the crisis in Libya freely, Human Rights Watch has said. Since anti-government protests began in Libya on 15 February 2011, the government has harassed, detained, and beaten journalists trying to cover the story. A Libyan journalist and a Qatari cameraman have been killed by gunfire in unclear circumstances.

Armed with a few Kodak Zi8 cameras, 6 HTC Wildfire mobile phones, energy, expertise in training citizen journalists, Small World News is working to share stories from Libya with the larger world. Small World News is on the ground in Benghazi training Libyans to capture and tell video stories of events in this volatile region. Along the way, the team has also captured footage that no other main stream media outlet has been able to get.

Google has created a way for it’s users to continue chatting with friends via Gmail, even when they’re away from their computers. As a Gmail user, you can send SMSes to your friends for free, and when your friends reply, they will be charged the same as a regular SMS.

Communities in Ejere and Gonde, central Ethiopia, are storing their best seeds in local seed banks. These communities are taking steps to be independent of seed companies, and exercise full control over seeds that have taken generations to develop. Many of the world’s original wheat and barley varieties were cultivated in Ethiopia, largely by women farmers. In recent decades, Ethiopian farmers have begun to substitute their own varieties for 'modern' varieties developed with a focus on higher yields. With climate change and new fungal diseases such as UG99, farmers in Ethiopia are looking not only for yield but also for genetic diversity and adaptability. These are traits found in abundance in local traditional seed varieties.