The third high level forum (HLF-3) convened in Ghana this week to discuss aid effectiveness. Aid agencies that attended the forum said donors have not made enough progress since the 2005 Paris Declaration in dealing with long-time problems related to aid effectiveness. During the forum, Ghanaian president, John Kufuor, called on developing and developed countries to deploy and manage development assistance so that poor countries can cease being aid dependent. He further urged stakeholders to come up with ‘ambitious resolutions, to minimise existing impediments to aid effectiveness in recipient countries’.

Civil society organisations note that ‘with all the attention given to High Level Forums on aid effectiveness, it is easy to lose sight of the simple fact that after all aid effectiveness is not about the effectiveness with which aid is delivered, managed, aligned or harmonised such as how much comes through budget support versus project funding; but the positive impact it makes on the lives of the people at the grassroots such as those of Accra’s Sodom and Gomorrah and South Africa’s Free State which at best remains subtle’. In addition, participants of the HLF-3 discussed the aid effectiveness in situations of fragile and conflict states, suggesting that donors, in order to have greater risk-bearing capacity, should channel funds through the budgets of recipient countries.

While formal publishing companies in Nigeria languished through the economic crises that accompanied the structural adjustment programmes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, young Hausa writers began writing about their lives and contemporary problems they faced. Bypassing formal publishers, they self-published their novels, often with the help of a writers' cooperative.

Although the books were dubbed ‘littattafan soyayya’ (romance novels) for the predominant themes of love and marriage, the novels -- written in colloquial Hausa that reflects the rhythms of everyday speech -- also serve as muckraking critiques of a corrupt elite and the failures of the older generation.

Women writers dominate the field, perhaps because of the large female readership; their work explores the daily life and tensions of women’s lives in contemporary Northern Nigeria. According to Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, the head of Kallabi Writer’s Association, a group of women writers, there are over 300 Hausa women publishing novels in Northern Nigeria.

The large female readership has caused anxiety, mostly from male authority figures, about a supposed negative effect the novels have on young girls. In May 2007, A Daidaita Sahu, the Kano state agency for the ‘reorientation’ of society, organized a book and film burning at a local girl’s school.

That book burning, however, was a tame threat compared to the new requirements that the Kano State Censorship Board, under the leadership of Director General Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim, is seeking to impose on writers. In a letter to Kano's five writers' organisations dated Aug. 12, the board confirmed that it wanted each writer in the state to register individually before they can publish or distribute writing.

At 25, Sa'adatu Baba has twenty-three books in print and another twenty that are not yet published. She is also an executive committee member of the Association of Nigerian Authors and a student of Languages at Bayero University.

She spoke with IPS writer Amina Koki Gizo in Kano on 16 August about her writing and the current crisis Hausa writers are facing.

At the first sound of nighttime rain on the scrap-metal roof of her shack, Ines Monteiro wakes her husband and four children. She hustles them from the two beds they share, out into their metre-wide yard. And they stand there, for as long as the rain falls – sometimes as many seven hours. In daytime rains, they stand out, too: their house is perched on the sideof a mountain of garbage – of plastic bags, empty bottles, crushed boxes, scraps of food.

The election was held on 5-6 September 2008. Originally scheduled for the 5 September only, voting was extended to the 6 September as a result of delays caused by logistical problems.

Have no doubt. Only one party can win Angola's parliamentary elections next Friday and that is the MPLA, the party of government since independence in 1975. More difficult to predict is whether or not it will win an absolute majority and, even harder, how the remainder of the vote will split. Beyond the MPLA's former civil-war enemy Unita, the Angolan opposition tends to be ignored as small parties only in the game for money and prestige.

I have read Walden Bello's 2008-08-05 article "The Destruction of African Agriculture" and the comments on it made by Regina Birner (IFPRI) and Dan Taylor (Find your Feet).

Analysis of cause is, of course, important. Yet the essence is to actually do something to solve the issues which have arisen.

NGO Stichting Bakens Verzet ("Another Way") promotes a Model for self-financing, ecological, sustainable local integrated development projects for the world's poor. The Model enables grass-roots NGOs and interested parties in developing countries to draft their own advanced integrated development projects and apply for their seed financing. The Model provides simple, down-to-earth practical solutions to poverty- and development-related problems. It sets out step by step how the solutions are put into effect. By following the steps social, financial, productive and service structures are set up in a critical order of sequence and carefully integrated with each other. That way, cooperative, interest-free, inflation-free local economic environments are formed in project areas. Local initiative and true competition are then free to flourish there.

This work is in the public domain. It can be accessed and downloaded from website and is available for use free of charge. The website is ranked by search engines as one of the world's leading resources on a wide range of development-related topics.

A series of four short Powerpoint presentations on the Model are directly acessible from the website homepage.

It is hoped Pambazuka and its readers will consider setting a link up with the website and that researchers may see fit to cite and make use of our work in their future publications.

Western companies are pushing to acquire vast stretches of African land to meet the world's biofuel needs. Local farmers and governments are being showered with promises. But is this just another form of economic colonialism?

A Chadian court on Friday sentenced a former president and 11 rebels to death for crimes against the state, an official said. Former president Hissene Habre is currently awaiting trial in Senegal for torture and murder. A Chadian commission of inquiry concluded Habre killed tens of thousands of political opponents during his eight years in power until he was ousted by rebels in 1990.

Zimbabwe's main opposition party has lost faith in power-sharing talks with President Robert Mugabe and will leave him to form a government alone rather than be forced into a deal, a party official has said. The official, who asked not to be named, said the Movement for Democratic Change no longer had confidence in the mediation of South African President Thabo Mbeki and wanted the United Nations and African Union to rescue the process.

A cabinet reshuffle in Burkina Faso saw the appointment of six new ministers and shifting of ministerial portfolios. In a presidential decree, President Blaisse Compaore has retained all officials of the 34-sized cabinet headed by prime minister Tertius Zongo.

On the eve of the Accra High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF) being held on 2-4 September in Ghana, Transparency International (TI) warned that corruption would continue to undermine poverty reduction efforts without immediate action on transparency, accountability and citizen participation by aid recipient and donor countries.

What happens to a nation whose people depend on the largesse of international donor agencies for their existence, once support is withdrawn? If forecasts for the small landlocked African nation of Swaziland are an indication, the granting of temporary relief may be followed by a new humanitarian emergency.

The Polisario Front on Saturday (August 30th) said it was prepared to enter into "serious and intensive" negotiations with Morocco over Western Sahara, two days after the United Nations confirmed that a new mediator will replace special envoy Peter van Walsum, whose mandate expired last week. The Polisario said it would resume dialogue "on the basis of international legality on decolonisation, through holding a free and fair referendum overseen by the United Nations".

Cabinet ministers accused by the official human rights watchdog of organising or funding the post-election violence have come out angrily protesting their innocence. In a series of interviews with the Daily Nation, the ministers accused the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights of spreading lies and rumours in the report presented to the Commission of Inquiry led by judge Philip Waki.

Zambia's ruling MMD party chose the country's Vice President Rupiah Banda as its candidate for a presidential election due in November, a party official said on Friday.

Zimbabwe’s power sharing talks looked set to completely collapse on Thursday after Mugabe issued an ultimatum to the MDC to join a proposed unity government or be left out. The ZANU PF leader threatened to appoint a new cabinet if the MDC did not sign up. “If after tomorrow (Thursday), Tsvangirai does not want to sign, we will certainly put together a cabinet. We feel frozen at the moment,” Mugabe told the state owned Herald newspaper.

United Nations humanitarian agencies are expanding their relief efforts across West Africa, where rising flood waters have displaced hundreds of thousands of people in seven countries, damaged major infrastructure and sparked the threat of widespread outbreaks of infectious diseases.

New estimates from the World Bank reveal that there are more poor people in the world than previously thought. The World Bank has updated its global poverty estimates, which now reveal that while overall global poverty has declined since 1981, there are more poor people today than previously estimated.

Development and environmental management are inextricably linked. The Earth’s physical resources (land, atmosphere, oceans) and biological systems provide the humans with goods (food, timber, medicines) and essential services such as purification of air and water, soil generation, maintenance of soil fertility and pollination of crops, among others, says Charity Irungu.

While aiming at its unity, Africa has attempted a number of initiatives to search for a collective development strategy. Such a search included the Lagos Plan of Action, the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes, and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)