Under the overall guidance of the Country Director, and programmatic oversight of the Deputy Country Director (Programme), the Peace and Development Advisor will be a part of the Strategic Advisory Unit under the direct supervision of the Senior Economist. Deadline is February 1, 2010.

As the Kenya Parliamentary Select Committee conducts its review of a revised draft of the country’s constitution, Yash Ghai reminds the committee that its role is to ‘resolve contentious issues’ in the document, not to determine them.

In this week’s round-up of the African blogosphere, Sokari Ekine is disappointed to find little commentary from Africa on the recent Haiti earthquake. She looks to bloggers in the diaspora instead, to shed light on events and to investigate the historical connections between Haiti and Africa.

A fortnight after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, the initial phase of the US-led relief operation has conformed to three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history, writes Peter Hallward – the adoption of military priorities and strategies, the sidelining Haiti's own leaders and government, and disregard for the needs of the majority of its people. These same mutually reinforcing tendencies will continue to govern the imminent reconstruction effort too, Hallward cautions, unless determined political action is taken to counteract them.

Haiti’s earthquake has provided the first opportunity since slavery for slavery descendants in the Afro-Americas to alter and recreate the country’s socio-economic structures and physical infrastructure, writes Marian Douglas-Ungaro. But will former slave-owners and colonial masters hinder or assist with the process, Douglas-Ungaro asks, and will continental Africa notice or care?

There is something dismally familiar about the tide of news concerning Africa's increased suffering in the face of the recent global financial crisis. But there is another side to the story. African countries locked out of international capital markets for most of the past five decades have largely been spared the financial turmoil and economic downturn.

‘Haiti did not fail,’ writes Hilary Beckles, ‘it was destroyed by two of the most powerful nations on earth, both of which continue to have a primary interest in its current condition.' Buried 'beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda', says Beckle, is 'the evidence which shows that Haiti's independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.’

The 'failure of development' is to blame for the devastating effects of the recent earthquake in Haiti, writes Yash Tandon. Calling for democratic institutions accountable to the country's people to be put in place, Tandon argues that Haiti is ‘a microcosm of the disastrous outcome' of ‘development’ policies and the 'destructive effects of foreign interventionist policies’ in the affairs of the South.

Dear most honorable MP,
When will it ever end?
When will it stop, people are crying, dying,
Hunger,
Disease,
Ignorance,
When will it stop?
It’s been called disgusting,
Immoral,
Uncouth,
Cold,
Corrupt,
Yet it still continues,
When will it stop?
It’s hard to imagine,
It can be justified,
With all these problems,
Disgusting,
Stop it,
Stop now,
Stop the slaps on the face,
The vomiting on the shoes,
The cold heartedness,
To the hungry, sick, poor,
Of our nation,
By constantly increasing your pay packages,
And failing to pay tax,
We are FED UP,
And on a day soon to come,
We will show you how much.

Alemayehu G. Mariam attacks the common concept that economic democracy must be achieved before abstract political rights. Mariam holds that this ‘democracy before democracy’ notion is rooted in Kwame Nkrumah’s dangerous legacy of one-man, one-party rule designed to ‘avoid genuine multiparty democracy’ and buffer personal power. Mariam warns African rulers following Nkrumah’s ‘political formula’ that ‘Africans want Africa no longer to be the world’s cesspool of corruption, criminality and cruelty.’ Ghana is today, Mariam argues, ironically the best model of democracy in Africa. He concludes that in contrast to beliefs that economic needs precede political rights, Africa wants genuine multiparty democracy now.

The following is the full text of the final declaration of last Monday's meeting at the Miraflores Palace between Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Dominica Roosevelt Skerrit and the foreign ministers of the member countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).

Uhuru Solidarity movement

Cellou Dalein Diallo

At noon, January 25, a delegation of 200 women and men marched to Mhlahlandlela Government complex to deliver WOZA’s report on the education system in Zimbabwe entitled - Looking Back to look Forward. Once the Ministry of Education official had attended and received the report, members began to disperse. As they dispersed seven riot police officers ran out of the Police Drill hall, which is opposite the complex and started to beat the peacefully dispersing activists and innocent bystanders and vendors.

The African Union Chair Jean Ping has hailed the Governments of Chad and Sudan’s agreement to normalise the once soured relations between the two neighbours. The remarks followed the peace agreement signed on 15 January 2010 in N’Djamena.

People in developing countries often lack information that could transform their economic circumstances. Those in remote parts of Africa, in particular, could benefit from knowledge that would help them move up from subsistence farming to become successful, commercial smallholders.

After a number of textile companies closed up shop, unable to face the onslaught of the slowdown in the markets, the government of Botswana has finally decided to implement a rescue plan.

Members of Morocco's Parliament must declare their assets by May 2010, as the government implements a law passed in 2008 to govern the conduct of elected officials.

Recently-appointed Minister for Public Sector Modernisation Mohammed Saâd Alami has embraced his new position by vowing to curtail corruption in Morocco. Combating corruption "requires much thought from all players, be they the government, official institutions or charitable associations," he announced at a meeting on Tuesday (January 12th), when he convened an inter-ministerial committee to oversee government actions against corrupt practices.

The African Union's top diplomat, Jean Ping, opened talks seeking an end to Madagascar's year-long political crisis with a call to its feuding leaders to respect last year's power-sharing deals.

Herders of cows or camels in arid northern Kenya can obtain a new type of insurance against drought, the first of its kind in Africa using satellites to gauge rainfall.