With four years to go, Tanzania still lags behind other East African countries towards the realisation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), says the latest report by the Centre for Global Development (CGD). The US-based think-tank puts Tanzania at fourth position, having one out of eight points, only surpassing war-torn Burundi which has 0.5 points on the eight core MDG targets of ridding extreme poverty, hunger, improving education, ensuring gender parity, reducing child mortality and maternal mortality, HIV/Aids, and attaining sufficiency in water provision.

Major trading powers agreed on Friday to push for an outline deal in the decade-old Doha trade talks by July as world leaders appealed for all nations to make concessions or risk losing the opportunity for years. European Union Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht said the ministers from seven key economies had also agreed to instruct officials to negotiate a deal in the Doha round across the board and leave the trade-offs for ministers to tackle to a minimum.

Women continue to reap less benefits from employment in agriculture than men in rural areas, and the recent global financial and food crises have slowed down progress towards gender equality in farming-related labour, three United Nations agencies said in a joint report. The report – entitled 'Gender dimensions of agricultural and rural employment: Differentiated pathways out of poverty' – notes that women need access to education, training, credit, markets, technical assistance and labour protection. They also need equal, secure access to land and other assets and 'social capital', including the ability to participate equally in farmers’ organisations.

With no sign at present of an end to the political deadlock in Côte d’Ivoire, the country remains partitioned. The economic repercussions of the crisis are being felt in both south and north. In Abidjan and the south, where Laurent Gbagbo and his administration are still in control, in the face of regional and international condemnation and isolation, prices of key commodities have risen dramatically. In the north - long held by former rebels Forces Nouvelles, and providing the main support base for Alassane Ouattara, internationally recognized as the elected president - livelihoods are being crippled and basic services reduced to a minimum in regions which have been marginalized for decades.

The Revenue Watch Institute (RWI) is a non-profit policy institute and grant-making organization that promotes the transparent, accountable and effective management of oil, gas, and mineral resources for the public good. RWI provides expertise, capacity building and funding to help countries maximize the long-term economic benefit of their natural riches.

Nigerian soldiers opened fire on students in central Nigeria in late January in a fresh round of violence that also saw churches and mosques set ablaze, officials and witnesses said. A hospital official said 24 people were admitted with bullet wounds and one person had died, but the commander of a military task force in the region said only four students were shot and injured when soldiers fired in self-defence.

A group of engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow (which Google acquired last week) have built a speak-to-tweet service for protesters in Egypt. The service, which is already live, enables users to send tweets using a voice connection. Anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail on one of three international phone numbers: +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855. Tweets sent using the service will automatically include the hashtag #egypt.

Egyptian air force fighter planes buzzed low over Cairo, helicopters hovered above and extra troop trucks appeared in a central square where protesters were demanding an end to President Hosni Mubarak's rule. State television said that a curfew has been imposed in the capital and the military urged the protesters to go home. But the thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square chose to stay on Sunday. The show of defiance came as Egypt entered another turbulent day following a night of deadly unrest.

Orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) comprise a fifth of Swaziland's roughly one million people, 80,000 more than predicted in a doomsday scenario back in 2004, but a social meltdown feared by some, has not happened. In 2004 the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) projected a grim future for the landlocked country as a consequence of the world's highest HIV prevalence rates - 26.1 per cent of people aged 15-49 are living with the virus - but although the nation is struggling, it is managing to cope.

Parliament threw MPs debating the contentious Protection of Information Bill a lifeline on Friday with a last-minute extension of their deadline. The mandate of the ad hoc committee set up in March last year to process the bill was due to expire on Friday. But the chairman, ANC MP Cecil Burgess, said at the last scheduled sitting that though he could not cite the rule making it possible, he had been assured that the speaker, Max Sisulu, would announce an extension before the current mandate ran out. He told reporters later the deadline had been extended to March 31.

A report on the management of acid mine drainage in Gauteng has been put to the cabinet but details of its recommendations will not be released until Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa approves it. The report, driven by her department but drawn up by a team of experts, apparently seeks ways to draw private sector mining companies that are still operating in Gauteng into the process of extracting the acid mine water and cleansing it. The level of the underground acid water is now 500m below the surface, 50m higher than in the middle of 2010.

The African Union (AU) has been charged to set up a mechanism to monitor the decisions taken by its various authorities to ensure implementation, Désiré Assogbavi, an official of the Oxfam NGO said Saturday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 'AU holds at least two ordinary summits and several high-powered meetings every year. Important decisions come out from them for African populations but only ten per cent of the total of those AU measures are applied in the end. We must get out of this situation,' Mr. Assogbavi, who is the director of Oxfam liaison Office to the African Union said in a PANA interview. The African Union member countries have agreed to devote ten per cent of their public spending to agriculture and 15 per cent to the health sector.

The theme of Davos this year was 'shared norms for the new reality', one of those phrases where the words can be rearranged in any order and remain utterly vacuous, says this article in the London Guardian about the just-concluded World Economic Forum. 'Business leaders, policy leaders and the world's smartest academics had five days in the high Alps to work out what this actually meant. Despite much head scratching not one of them could.'

The Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) Student Caucus is pleased to announce that the Annual Student Conference will take place on 29 and 30 April at York University, Toronto, Canada. This event offers graduate and undergraduate students across disciplines with a keen interest in migration and refugee issues the opportunity to present and discuss their research ideas with fellow students, academics, professionals, frontline practitioners, researchers, scholars and all those interested in forced migration issues.

Pambazuka News has set up a condolence page for David Kato, the murdered Ugandan gay activist. Visit where you can leave messages of love and solidarity. Please also spread the word about this page. Please note that the comments are moderated so your message may take a little time to appear. We are currently posting all the organisational statements that we have from GALZ, GALCK, G-Kenya, Afra, ISHTAR, AMSHER, LGEP, UAF etc. Please add statements if you come across others.

Judges at the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor have admitted into evidence two Wikileaks documents that appear to question the impartiality of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The decision comes just days before prosecutors and defense attorneys present their closing arguments in Mr. Taylor's war crimes trial.

Namibia’s opposition parties have taken issue with government once again, this time over what they termed as the ruling Swapo party’s unfair rubberstamping of laws without adequate deliberations in the country’s legislative chambers. Swapo used its two-thirds majority in the legislative chambers last December to rush through a bill that gave optimum power to the President to appoint regional governors, as opposed to the former system where governors were selected from among regional councillors.

Nigeria’s opposition parties failed to agree on a joint candidate to face President Goodluck Jonathan, the flag bearer of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, in April’s presidential election, the parties said. The inability to reach an accord comes ahead of the deadline for all parties to submit the nomination papers of their candidates to the Independent National Electoral Commission. 'Each party is at this time pursuing their fortunes separately,' Dapo Olorunyomi, chief of staff to Nuhu Ribadu, the candidate for the Action Congress of Nigeria, said in a telephone interview.

On Twitter, friends express concerns for Egyptian blogger and Google Middle East staffer Wael Ghonim, who has been missing since Thursday. Ghonim, who studied in Cairo and is now Head of Marketing at Google's UAE office, had tweeted his intent to be at the 25 January protests.

Zimbabwe has seen a surge in political violence and intimidation as the government prepares for national elections, an independent advocacy group said. The Southern Africa Coalition for the Survivors of Torture said in a new report on Sunday that tensions rose markedly in January. They reported mob attacks, threats, assaults, questionable arrests by police and at least one shooting in the capital of Harare and its suburbs.