Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) plans a $ 50 bn project to boost access to modern energy services for the teaming population in the sub region and arrest the energy short fall considered as a major drawback to economic development and regional integration. Towards this end, ECOWAS has set a December 2007 target date for its 15-nation members to set up a national investment programme, after which ECOWAS along with the member states would then begin the mobilisation of the $ 50 bn fund for the implementation of the community investment programme.

The Green Revolution in the 1960s increased food production in many parts of the world. However, the number of malnourished people in sub-Saharan Africa has increased by 20 percent since 1990. Would a green revolution succeed here?

Water is becoming a scarce resource in many places. As access is threatened, communities seek to protect their rights to water. Water rights are negotiated within communities. However, they can also be negotiated between communities and others sharing water in river basins. As competition for water rises, communities of water users become involved in negotiating access to water.

What are the factors underlying current transformation in rural-urban linkages in sub-Saharan Africa? How are livelihood strategies and farming systems changing under the impact of urban expansion? What are the consequences for access to such assets as land and water, education and skills, health, credit, transport and markets?

An audit of Nigeria's oil industry showed on Tuesday discrepancies amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars between what oil companies say they paid the government and what authorities say they received. The auditors stopped short of suggesting what could have happened to the cash, but their report raises questions about accounting standards and corruption in the world's eighth biggest exporter of crude oil.

Egypt has long tapped into the Nile's power for energy and irrigation. Now, the country's southern neighbors want their fair share. Twice a year the monks and priests of the Church of Narga Selassie on Dek Island in northern Ethiopia gather to bless an urn of water scooped from the lake that surrounds them. They pray over the water for three days and ask God to sanctify it in the name of Jesus.

It was the little things: smiles; handshakes; driving from the airport without an armed escort; seeing a traffic warden, a public library, a government ministry building; not seeing a gun or hearing a gunshot. Even the weather seemed pleasantly different: a cool breeze floated over Hargeisa at night. According to the map, this was still Somalia. Yet it felt like another country. "Because it is!" said Abdirahman Awil, a small, balding man who had invited me into his restaurant, suddenly becoming animated. "Somaliland is not Somalia - 100% of us know that, even 120%!"

The government of Zanzibar plans to demolish at least 150 houses to reduce the pollution of water sources on the islands. However, Zanzibar's main opposition party, the Civic United Front, said it opposed the demolition plan. The government's decision would be a violation of human rights and of the island's land laws, spokesman Hamad Masoud said.

A fresh wave of farm takeovers hit the southeastern Lowveld in Zimbabwe this week with Zanu-PF supporters and land officers seizing five plots with a ready-to-harvest sugarcane crop. The farm owners, most of them South Africans, have since appealed to the South African embassy in Harare to intervene, reports the Zimbabwe Independent. In a letter to Willem Geerlings, first secretary at the SA embassy, the farmers alleged that a Chiredzi lands officer, identified only as Mukonyora, another official identified as Guruvheti and a farmer, identified as Jambaya, invaded Hippo Valley Settlement, Holding 16, and gave the owner 30 days to vacate the property, reports the Mail and Guardian.

Militia armed with guns, machetes, and bows and arrows killed about 25 people in three days in a land dispute in the central state of Plateau, authorities and witnesses said. The blackened shells of at least 20 houses could be seen on the outskirts of the deserted town of Namu, 100 km (75 miles) east of the capital Abuja, which has been at the centre of the dispute. Residents said the dispute was over a new state-run development area headquarters, which would create jobs and bring money to the area.

Opposition groups on the semiautonomous Tanzanian island of Zanzibar have criticised new legislation that declares all water on the island the property of the government and introduces fees for water, which had been free. Hamad Masoud, the chief spokesman of the opposition Civic United Front on water matters, said some clauses in the bill were "unfriendly to the poor people of Zanzibar, such as declaring ocean, rain and well water government property." He said water charges would pose a burden to most Zanzibaris, who dwell in “extreme poverty”.

The Namibian government has secured US $12 million in donor support for conservation efforts in four national parks over the next decade, which will have an impact on rural poverty. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) provided US $8.5 million and Germany's development agency, Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, $3.5 million, with the Namibian government adding $27.4 million in cash and kind. The GEF, established in 1991, helps developing countries fund environmental projects and programmes.

One of the world's great lakes is disappearing. Lake Chad - shared by Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, and Niger - has receded to less than 20% of its former volume. Global warming is being blamed, as well as water extraction. The land is parched dry and dusty but the first hint that there is water comes with the growing numbers of Caltropis dotting the landscape. These strange, twisted plants have deep tap roots, and where they grow water is usually not far away. Just 30 years ago, water covered the whole area. Baga was a waterfront town. Now it is stranded many miles from the lake as the land around it becomes desert. The Sahara is moving southwards.

The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited must stop flaring gas in the Iwherekan community in Delta State by April 2007, the Nigerian High Court has ruled. The court has ordered Shell’s managing director in Nigeria and the Nigerian Minister for Petroleum Resources to appear in person before the judge in open court on May 31 in Benin City with detailed plans for putting gas flares out by April 2007.

The loss of wetlands around the world is forcing wild birds that may have avian influenza onto alternative sites like farm ponds and paddy fields, where they come into contact with chickens, ducks, and geese, finds a new report commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Restoring the tens of thousands of lost and degraded wetlands could help reduce the threat of an avian flu pandemic by providing wild birds with their preferred habitat, according to the report authored by Dr. David Rapport of Canada.

The United Nations says almost a quarter of the earth's surface and over a billion people are affected by desertification. In Africa alone 325 million people are said to be living "precariously" in arid zones. Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, says not enough is being done to protect the estimated 250 million victims of ecological destruction worldwide and the millions of environmental refugees being forced off the land and into slums. "These refugees have no protection under international law," he said.

Following allegations of corruption, a local NGO has appealed for an audit of the tenders allocated in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), the world's largest water transfer operation. "Bribery for tenders goes along with compromising of workmanship standards. We can only pray that, despite this, standards for constructing these kind of dams was not compromised, as it would be a double punishment to the people living around the Katse and Mohale dams," said Mabusetsa Lenka of the Transformation Resource Centre (TRC), an NGO fighting for the rights of communities displaced by the multi-dam project.

Opposition groups on the semiautonomous Tanzanian island of Zanzibar have criticised new legislation that declares all water on the island the property of the government and introduces fees for water, which had been free. "Water in whatsoever form, location or state, including fresh, saline, marine, surface, ground flowing or dormant water bodies and any kind of public water is hereby declared to be owned by the government," said the bill, which also included penalties and possible jail terms for those who waste the precious resource.

Many African economies, which largely rely on agricultural revenue, are the least equipped to deal with the devastating impact of regular drought, economists have said. About 43 percent of Africa's land surface is arid and low rainfall is considered a normal fact of life. However, drought, which used to occur on average every five to six years, has been happening more frequently over the last 12 years. It is the single most important natural hazard in terms of shattered livelihoods, starvation, deaths and nutrition-related diseases on the continent.

Accustomed to their age-old freedom to roam, the nomadic pastoralists of Uganda are now having to cope with a law that seeks to settle and ‘modernise’ their communities. Pastoralist societies in Uganda are increasingly facing market-driven demands to ‘settle down’ on a piece of land – pressures that are not only disrupting their centuries-old lifestyle but also taking a toll on the indigenous, long-horned Ankole cows. "Before the idea of owning a box (owning land) came about, our cows used to move freely across boundaries. This was better use of land," says Richard Mugisha from the pastoralist community of Ankole Region in Mbarara District.