This 88-page report documents abuses against the displaced by all warring parties in all phases of displacement – during the attacks that uproot them; after they have been displaced and are living in the forests, with host families, or in camps; and after they or the authorities decide it is time for them to return home. The report is based on interviews with 146 people displaced from their homes in eastern Congo, as well as government officials, humanitarian workers, and journalists.

Former Nigerian anti-corruption Czar Nuhu Ribadu has joined the country's presidential race, widening the field ahead of the Jan. 2011 presidential election. 'I'll contest for President to remake Nigeria,' the local press Friday quoted Ribadu as saying during a breakfast session with journalists in the capital city of Abuja.

The resident representative of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Cameroon, Charlotte Faty Ndiaye, has called for a 'cross-border intervention' involving Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad to tackle the cholera epidemic that is ravaging the three countries. Cameroon has recorded 417 cases from 6,239 cases, Chad has recorded 65 deaths from 10,040 cases while 614 have died from 11,359 cases in Nigeria, according to Ms Ndiaye.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are failing the world's poorest people because governments are ignoring and abusing their human rights, Amnesty International said as heads of states prepare to meet to review progress on the MDGs at a United Nations (UN) summit in New York on 20-22 September. More than a billion people living in slums are not even included in MDG efforts because the MDG target on slums only commits to improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers.

Home-based voluntary HIV counselling and testing (HCT) provided an opportunity to identify 60 new paediatric HIV cases among 1300 high-risk children between the ages of 18 months and 13 years of age in a single community in rural western Kenya between June 2008 and June 2009, researchers reported in a retrospective analysis published in the advance online edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

The Commission for Africa has criticised the “glacial” progress of talks aimed at eliminating the regime in which rich countries stack the odds in favour of their traders and farmers at the expense of those in developing countries. An excerpt from the commission’s new report, dealing with talks being conducted through the World Trade Organisation, the current round of which began in Doha, Qatar, in 2001

Civil society is calling for an end to impunity for the harassment of human rights activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The renewed call comes as an activist kidnapped at the end of August have described their detention and torture by uniformed captors. Bwira Kyahi, president of civil society in Masisi, a town in the province of North Kivu, and another human rights advocate, Balisi Kapumba, who works as an organizer with the NGO Solidarity Action for Peace and Development, were kidnapped during the last week of August in Goma. Kyahi was found Aug. 30, 2010.

The Eritrean authorities continue to gag all forms of free expression and recently arrested another journalist as he was trying to flee the country, Reporters Without Borders said, on the eve of the ninth anniversary of the start of a brutal political purge in Asmara on 18 September 2001. The organisation wrote to the British authorities yesterday urging them to prosecute one of the purge’s organisers, who now lives in Britain.

Nigeria's science and technology policy, widely seen as inadequate, will be rewritten to serve the wider goals of the country, its science and technology minister said at a stakeholders' meeting in Abuja. Mohammed Ka'oje Abubakar told representatives from government ministries, international agencies and professional bodies that a review of the policy is necessary to harmonise it with socio-economic policies in the country.

It is mid-morning and the workday is underway. People are moving in all directions, going about their daily chores. But it is mostly women who move the fastest, many of them carrying water through the impoverished and overcrowded streets. In Mgona, on the outskirts of Lilongwe, most men have ignored the many problems faced by the community, chief amongst them issues of waterborne disease.

The third African meeting on Solidarity with Cuba was held in Luanda, Angola, 11-12 September, to consolidate the friendship between the African and Cuban people and contribute to strengthening African solidarity towards the Caribbean island nation. The general secretary of the Association of Angola/Cuba Friendship, Fernando Jaime, told the Angolan News Agency (ANGOP) that the event aimed to consider the difficult financial situation in Cuba due to the economic blockage imposed over the past 50 years by the US.

The Tipping Point Film Fund launches its very own Film Club at The Lexi Cinema in Kensal Rise on Monday 20 September with a screening of Stephanie Black’s award-winning ‘Life and Debt‘. The film, which starts at 7.15pm, will be followed by a panel discussion and includes guest speaker, broadcaster and academic, Dr Robert Beckford.

Experts worry that African governments are failing to take the threat of HIV seriously enough by not dedicating enough of their resources to prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) efforts. For Graça Machel, Chair of the Campaign to End Pediatric AIDS (CEPA) Council, the struggle to stop the spread of the disease is a matter of inequality.

East African countries will face more devastating food crises in future unless governments take action now, international aid agency Oxfam warned Thursday in a new report aimed at tackling world hunger within the next five years.

The heads of the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have called for a broad global commitment to policies that focus on creating jobs to reverse the economic downturn be devilling the world. The call was made at a conference in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, hosted by the country's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, and co-sponsored by the IMF and the ILO.

The head of the United Nations agency entrusted with defending press freedom has urged Ugandan authorities to launch a full investigation into this week’s murder of a radio news presenter, the second journalist

Ahead of the United Nations Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on 20-22 September 2010, UNAIDS today released data on progress towards MDG 6 and called for leveraging the AIDS response to support all MDGs. The data shows that countries with the largest epidemics in Africa—Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe—are leading the drop in new HIV infections. Between 2001 and 2009, 22 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have seen a decline of more than 25% in new HIV infections. The number of new HIV infections is steadily falling or stabilising in most parts of the world.

In this week's emerging powers new roundup, Fahamu Emerging Powers in Africa Programme launches its newsletter, AfDB to consider more funding for South Africa's Eskom, is land-grabbing, a new form of sharecropping?, China makes inroads into Zim bank sector, and India ups training slots for Africans.

"Even if globally the poverty rate is reduced by half by 2015, as the latest United Nations progress report on the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] suggests, about one billion people will still be mired in extreme poverty by 2015. ... The report argues that current approaches to poverty often ignore its root causes, and consequently do not follow through the causal sequence. Rather, they focus on measuring things that people lack to the detriment of understanding why they lack them." - UNRISD Report on Combating Poverty and Inequality, September 2010

Reporters Without Borders condemns the jamming of some of the programmes of Short Wave Radio Africa (SWRA), a London-based radio station staffed by Zimbabwean exile journalists that broadcasts to Zimbabwe. Various sources said they thought Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) was responsible for the interference, which began on 1 September.