When Mbuyiselo Botha decided to take the African National Congress League President, Julius Malema, to court for hate speech against women, he was confident from the start that the case had merit. But he also knew that this would be the most challenging test of his 15 years of gender activism.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on Ethiopia to lift all restrictions on Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts after the government summarily jammed the network's broadcasts in Amharic, amid accusations of peddling "destabilising propaganda".

A Nigerian civil rights group said Wednesday it would appeal an Islamic court order to shut down its chat forums on Facebook and Twitter which criticize the practice of Islamic law in northern states.

Uganda expects to stop importing fuel in five years when the east African nation anticipates to start fully producing petroleum products from a planned refinery, a senior government official said on Thursday.

Morocco plans to train schoolchildren to help lure other youngsters into the classroom under a government initiative aimed at boosting enrolment rates. Some 500,000 schoolchildren will be trained to take part in the "Child for Child" census-taking programme that the Department of Education launched on Thursday (March 25th). Students aged 6-15 will work with teachers and officials in April and May to encourage youth who are not enrolled in school to return to their studies.

Scientists say they have identified a potential treatment for sleeping sickness, a killer disease that infects about 60,000 people in Africa a year. British and Canadian experts say drugs could attack an enzyme the parasite causing the illness needs to survive.

A majority of a pre-trial chamber of International Criminal Court (ICC) judges today approved the ICC prosecutor's request to open an investigation into Kenya's 2007 post-election violence, Human Rights Watch said. The Kenyan inquiry is the first investigation begun by the prosecutor acting on his own initiative.

While agricultural research has made massive strides over the years in helping the world produce more food from the same amount of land, around one in six people, the 1.02 billion hungry, have not noticed.

High-quality education is the foundation for success and growth. There is a need for empowered teachers, strong school leaders, better curricula, and the ability for students to connect with one another and the rest of the world, says Anthony Salcito, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector – Education, Microsoft.

Dozens of farmers, veterinarians and farm workers have been infected with Rift Valley fever in South Africa, and at least two people have died, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) has reported.

There have been numerous reports from human rights organisations and from the MDC-T of an upsurge of violence in rural areas such as in Mutasa North, Mudzi, Bindura and Masvingo, by ZANU PF sponsored thugs. On Wednesday the pressure group Restoration of Human Rights (ROHR) reported that terror had broken out in Muzarabani, resulting in 16 families fleeing their homes.

Experts have called on the government to establish an agency that will coordinate and manage ICT activities so as to enhance the sector's growth. The call was made during at an ICT summit, which was held in Dar es Salaam to take stock of digital development in Tanzania and explore ways to catapult the sector to a new level. The experts and other stakeholders said the proposed body will also assume regulatory functions in order to create a level playing field in the fast growing industry.

Talks on the fate of the Western Sahara remained stalled last week as the UN envoy charged with facilitating diplomacy, Christopher Ross, wrapped up his regional tour. Ross, whose eight-day visit to Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and the Sahrawi camps ended in Algiers on Thursday (March 25th), said that while concerned parties "stressed their willingness to pursue the course of negotiations", their stances remained far apart.

The Seeing is Believing project uses very high resolution satellite imagery to give farmers in West Africa information on soil fertility and accurate land size. Smallholder farmers in West Africa, and many other tropical regions, are experts in precision agriculture, and have been for many generations.

For the nearly 50 million people of South Africa, the 2010 World Cup represents an opportunity to show the world its progress through sports. But for a new nonprofit organisation, soccer's biggest stage also offers an opportunity to publicise young women who tend to go unheard.

The children are afraid. There are armed bandits hiding with stolen animals in the thickets behind Nawoyaregae Primary School in Kaputir Location. Cattle rustling and gory battles between the neighbouring Turkana and Pokot communities are the order of the day in this area, some 700 kilometres northwest of Nairobi. A long tradition of cattle raiding has been sharpened by competition over grazing land and water.

The food insecure population in Southern Sudan has increased significantly since January, following escalated inter-tribal/clan and cattle–raiding conflicts during 2009, combined with poor rainfall that led to reduced crop and off-farm production. Areas affected by conflict include Jonglei, Warrap, Unity, and Lakes states, as well as Mvolo and Mundri East counties in Western Equatoria.

At least 400 children, mostly pedestrians, die in road accidents in Uganda every year, the Minister of Works and Transport has announced. 46% of those injured road accidents are urban children and it is twice the percent of falls and burns added together, according to the Injury Control Centre of Uganda report.

Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans living in South Africa are still living in desperate squalor, in a country that offers them no official sanctuary. This is according to a new report released by the Solidarity Peace Trust, titled: “Desperate lives, twilight worlds - how a million Zimbabweans live without sanction or sanctuary in South Africa.” The report released on Wednesday details the dire reality facing Zimbabwean immigrants who fled their country seeking safety and work in South Africa, a trend that is still continuing.

Use of cotrimoxazole, a cheap and widely available antibiotic, cut the death rate by half in the first 72 weeks on antiretroviral therapy in over 3,000 HIV-infected, symptomatic and severely immunosuppressed patients in Uganda and Zimbabwe, Sarah Walker and colleagues reported in an analysis of the DART trial published on March 29 in the online edition of The Lancet.