The appointment of Margaret Nasha as the first woman to occupy the post of Speaker of the National Assembly in Botswana signals another step towards gender equality in southern Africa. However, the low number of women who made it into Parliament in the recent elections is a setback in a region committed to reach 50 percent parity in decision-making by 2015, in six years time, following just one more election.

To maintain sustained economic growth and meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), Sub-Saharan African countries have to invest up to US$ 50 billion annually in infrastructure, said Zemedeneh Negatu, the Managing Partner of Ernst & Young, LLP in Ethiopia. He made the comments at the Africa Investor “CEO Forum on Infrastructure, Energy and Clean Tech”, held at the Cape Town International Convention Center.

The Ggaba landing site on Lake Victoria is the nearest wholesale fish market to the Ugandan capital, Kampala. More than 6,000 people live and work in this fishing community. The water looks green and dirty from the quay. It smells like - well, like fish, or an abandoned, stagnant water pond.

The last 400 of more than 200,000 Burundians who fled to Tanzania 37 years ago travelled home on Friday, ending one of the longest-running refugee sagas in the world, the U.N. refugee agency said on Friday. The Burundians arrived in 1972, fleeing ethnic conflict at home. While many have returned under a U.N.-backed voluntary repatriation programme, some 29,000 were naturalised in Tanzania and 133,000 citizenship applications are still pending there.

Start local, then Africa, then the world. That’s the mantra app developers in Africa should be repeating to themselves as they build their game changing tools. That’s what Agosta Liko and his team at Verviant are doing with their new web and mobile payment platform: PesaPal.

Gibril Gottor, a reporter for Radio Kolenten, based in the Kambia district of northwestern Sierra Leone, was violently assaulted by a group of men on 10 October 2009 for allegedly "sabotaging" the government. The men are believed to be supporters of the ruling All People's Congress Party (APC).

Some 14,955 Mauritanian refugees, consisting of 3,888 families, have been repatriated from Senegal to Mauritania since the end of January 2008, under a tripartite agreement signed in November 2007 by both countries and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

United Nations torture expert Manfred Nowak said on Thursday he would recommend that the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) take action against Zimbabwe after his expulsion from the country. Zimbabwean officials denied him entry and forced him to board a South Africa-bound plane on Thursday after he was detained by security officials on arrival overnight.

A Rwandan man convicted of war crimes has been jailed for life by a Canadian court, without the prospect of parole for 25 years. Desire Munyaneza, 42, was found guilty in May in the first court case brought under Canada's 2000 War Crimes Act.

By hosting the next eLearning Africa, Zambia is confirming its commitment to placing Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at the heart of its development projects and is highlighting the different plans and programmes in progress that incorporate ICT as an essential development factor.

Senegal has admitted that it gave a "money gift" to an International Monetary Fund official earlier this month at the end of his three-year posting, citing an African tradition of offering goodbye presents. The gift, which the IMF said amounted to 100,000 euros and $50,000, was returned within days by IMF representative Alex Segura, who had been an outspoken critic of the West African nation's budget process during his posting.

Guinean youths have embarked on a hunger strike exactly one month after the massacre to demand justice and call for a political dialogue. The youths say the hunger strike will last for five days and they hope to draw their leaders' attention to engage in dialogue, and prevent any further violence.

Citizenship Law in Africa: A comparative study, published by two programs of the Open Society Institute (AfriMAP and the Open Society Justice Initiative), describes the often arbitrary, discriminatory, and contradictory citizenship laws that exist from state to state and recommends ways that African countries can bring their citizenship laws in line with international rights norms.

This paper looks at IMF agreements with 41 countries. These include Stand-By Arrangements (SBA), Poverty Reduction and Growth Facilities (PRGF), and Exogenous Shocks Facilities (ESF). The paper finds that 31 of the 41 agreements contain pro-cyclical macroeconomic policies. These are either pro-cyclical fiscal or monetary policies – or in 15 cases, both – that, in the face of a significant slowdown in growth or in a recession, would be expected to exacerbate the downturn.

With the growing use of satellite imagery and easy-to-use technology, geographical maps are being used more often by human rights organizations. Geo-mapping can help an organization map crises, places of heritage, visualize data, monitor the impact of conflict, uncover critical evidence, and more! The goal of this dialogue will be to take the stories shared by practitioners with experience using these tools and tactics and draw out lessons to enable other organizations to strategically apply these resources.

Twenty-seven civil society groups, among them, Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) rose from a brain-storming session in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, with a call on governments in Africa must initiate, implement and sustain policies that guarantee the protection of small scale farmers and provide them subsidies and needed inputs to ensure increased food production and general food sovereignty

In a statement published in a local newspaper, Oyia, the Libyan general people's committee of justice urged citizens deprived of their freedom by security agencies or those who have been proved innocent after being jailed, to fill the reconciliation application forms. The invitation is also meant for Libyan men who have been arrested without trial and those who have been released and wish to participate in the national reconciliation process.

An estimated 60,000 hungry refugees in the western Uganda settlement of Nakivale have staged a strike complaining of lack of food supplies for three months leading to deaths of mainly children.

As tensions worsen in Zimbabwe, the Movement for Democratic Change says an armed gang tried to abduct its security administrator in central Harare on Tuesday. Zimbabwe’s unity government is on the verge of disintegration after Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai pulled his ministers out of cabinet meetings.

A French appeals court has halted a lawsuit against three African leaders accused of embezzlement. Anti-corruption group Transparency International had accused the leaders of using African public funds to buy luxury homes and cars in France.