Oil bearing and hosting communities of the Niger Delta, Nigeria's main oil and gas basin, and Environmental Rights Action (ERA) concluded a meeting in Effurun, Delta State, resolving to mount pressure on the Federal Government to urgently regulate oil activities in the country. In a communique, the two parties explained why government should regulate the extractive industry. According to them, 'the Nigerian Government should exercise its statutory powers to regulate oil and other extractive industry activities to bring an end to impunity and environmental degradation in the Niger Delta and other parts of the country.'

When violence broke out in the western Libyan town of Zawiyah, Bangladeshi migrant worker Mohammed Nienn, 28, was doing a shift as a steelworker. In a hurry to leave, he persuaded his Libyan supervisor to hand back his passport, but not the wages he was due. Then he jumped into a taxi with four other Bangladeshis and headed for the Tunisian border, where a bus eventually took him to Choucha transit camp, 25km from the frontier town of Ras Ajdir. Ten days later, he was still there, waiting for a flight to Dhaka.

The government of Swaziland has banned the daily live transmission of BBC Focus on Africa programme after one of the news clips, broadcast through the English channel of the state radio, Swaziland Broadcasting and Information Services (SBIS), was critical of government. The programme broadcast daily in the mornings, mid-day and evenings has been off air for the past week. The state radio has been running apologies to listeners of the programme for its absence, stating that it was due to technical problems.

As the deadline to register candidates for Djibouti's 8 April presidential election has passed, no opposition candidates have registered. The boycott comes as further anti-government protests are planned. Sources confirmed that there will be only two names on the ballot paper: the incumbent President Ismaël Omar Guelleh and Mohammed Warsama, the former President of the Constitutional Court and an ally of President Guelleh.

Southern Sudan has suspended talks on independence with the north's National Congress Party, accusing the north of planning to overthrow the south's administration. Pagan Amum, the secretary-general of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), reiterated the accusation on Sunday (13 March), saying that the northern government was arming local tribes to use as proxy forces.

Rights activists are speaking out against rapes targeting lesbians in South Africa. About 25 demonstrators rallied outside Parliament on Monday while their leaders met with government representatives. Luleki Sizwe - which means guide a nation - is a small group of lesbian activists in the townships of Cape Town who also circulated an online petition calling on Justice Minister Jeff Radebe 'to address 'corrective rape'.

With the number of protests happening in the Middle East and North Africa, it's sometimes hard to keep track of what is happening. This page from National Public Radio looks at which countries have seen protests and provides details on the state of each country.

Since the unveiling of the 2011 political campaigns, the Nigerian media landscape has been very busy. Nigeria comprises 36 states and Abuja, and there is at least one television station each, as well as a handful of privately owned television houses. Lagos State, being home to almost every ethnicity in Nigeria, has the biggest share of these stations, more so considering its status as the former capital. To avoid political conflicts in campaign strategies, most politicians prefer to go to the private television stations for their television commercials, otherwise known as TVCs, says this article from Free African Media.

EG Justice has released a policy paper titled 'Transparency and Accountability in Equatorial Guinea: Policy Recommendations for the Obama Administration'. The paper outlines the ongoing political and economic challenges confronting Equatorial Guinea, including corruption, a lack of respect for civil liberties, democratic procedures, and the rule of law, and the inability of civil society organisations to operate freely without government intervention.

This policy series paper from the Southern African Migration Project looks at remittances in Lesotho. 'Lesotho is one of the most migration dependent countries in the world. Migrant remittances are the country’s major source of foreign exchange, accounting for 25 per cent of GDP in 2006. The majority of households and rural communities are dependent on remittances for their livelihood. Households without access to migrant remittances are significantly worse off than those that do have such access.'

Italy has prevented a ferry carrying 1,800 people, mainly Moroccans fleeing the fighting in Libya, from docking in Sicily. The ship had sailed from Tripoli and asked for permission to refuel on the island after being refused entry to Malta, Italian media said. Meanwhile, 41 people are feared drowned after a boat carrying migrants capsized off Tunisia, UN officials say.

When the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria suspended funding to Zambia in late 2010 it made international headlines and rocked donor confidence, but the stock-outs and drug rationing in the wake of the scandal have received little attention. In March 2009 a whistle blower's allegations of corruption in the Zambian Ministry of Health (MoH) triggered an investigation by the auditor general, and a web of corruption in the health sector began to unravel. The audit found that the largely donor-funded ministry could not account for more than US$7.2 million, about five per cent of which was estimated to have come from Global Fund coffers.

This paper from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights analyses Israel's response to a recent influx of African asylum seekers. Since early 2006 Israel has become a destination country for thousands of Africans who are willing to take a long and risky journey to Israel. As with other industrialised countries, Israel has responded with a range of exclusionary and at times contradictory policies which aim to control and limit entrance to its territory. Unlike other such countries, however, until very recently Israel did not have an asylum system, and its ongoing institutional evolution is partly a response to the recent influx.

A recent Constitutional Court judgment rendering the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) unconstitutional must not be allowed to throw decentralisation policy making into disarray, says this policy brief from Sindiso Mnisi of the Law, Race and Gender Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. 'Decentralisation holds much potential for lively, participatory democratic law making and enforcement, through which rural women can gain greater power and secure more rights. However, there are many challenges in the often fraught context of decentralised law and power.'

A major offensive by African Union troops in Somalia, in which dozens of peacekeepers from Burundi and Uganda were killed, reclaimed 'significant' territory from insurgents, an African Union envoy has said. Burundi has announced that at least 43 of its soldiers were killed, but Uganda has yet to acknowledge any deaths.

Zimbabwe police raided Harvest House, the headquarters of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) arresting five people whose charges are yet to be known. The MDC said 30 police officers besieged Harvest House at around 7pm on Sunday night (13 March) and arrested officials and youths who were at the headquarters. The party said the five arrested are still in police custody.

Grace Mwalabu lives in Chikalogwe, Balaka District, in southern Malawi. On a warm day, she stands smearing cucumber seeds on the outside wall of her kitchen. She explains, 'It is our tradition. I smear them one or two metres from the ground. The advantage is that the seeds dry quickly, do not rot and survive the dry season.' Hybrid seeds are popular in some areas of Malawi. They often yield more than local varieties. But they are expensive. Farmers need to buy them every year, so they are dependant on seed companies and distributors. They know that saving local seeds from harvest is cheaper and more reliable, reports Farm Radio Weekly.

When it comes to Zimbabwe, tough questions lie ahead, not just for South African foreign policymakers, but for the general South African public, says this article from Free African Media. Langton Miriyoga, a Zimbabwean national working for People Against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty, a community-based non-profit organisation, said: 'South Africans and Zimbabweans living in South Africa can and should do more to put pressure on the South African government to intervene more decisively and proactively to stop Mugabe’s human rights abuses.' He added that people in Zimbabwe are either too scared to do anything, fearing retribution, or have completely bought into the propaganda that there can be no Zimbabwe without the Zanu-PF.

This report from the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa examines the impact of attempts to formalise street trading in the City of Durban since 2000 on the livelihood of traders, particularly female and migrant traders. 'Durban has been at the forefront of developing policies to manage and control informal economy activities; however, as the report notes, the effect of the push for formalisation is exclusionary and mimics the influx control regimes of the apartheid administration, which prevented black communities from pursuing business opportunities in central business districts,' says the abstract of the report.

The International Criminal Court judge who declined to issue summonses to six Kenyans suspected of being behind the post-election violence says the cases should be dealt with locally. In his dissenting opinion published on Tuesday (15 March) night, Judge Hans-Peter Kaul said that Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo had not convinced him that the crimes committed in Kenya meet the threshold of crimes against humanity.