There is growing alarm among Kenyan farmers about a government announcement that 2.3m bags of maize were unfit for human consumption. Health experts say the maize contained high levels of lethal aflatoxins, which have killed at least one child. The government has pledged to buy and destroy the contaminated maize.

The voter education on the referendum has received a shot in the arm after the government announced the release of Sh553 million to the Committee of Experts, ending weeks of bickering between the two parties. The money is not in the budget, but has had to be reallocated from other ministries and will be regularised in next week’s budget, which will cater for all constitution review needs.

The issues of Kadhi’s courts and abortion are being presented as issues central to the debate on Kenya’s Proposed Constitution, writes Cyprian Nyamwamu, but in reality there are several others. Nyamwamu compiles a list of 36 reasons why Kenyans supported the draft of a new constitution.

Kenya should encourage the use of bamboo in building affordable shelters, especially for 60 percent of the population who live in poorly constructed dwellings in rural areas, says a specialist. "Poor construction means they [houses] serve as breeding grounds for diseases including malaria, amoebic dysentery and respiratory conditions, which commonly claim the lives of many of their inhabitants,” Jacob Kibwange, project director of an initiative at Maseno University that aims to encourage bamboo exploitation, told IRIN.

The introduction of a seamless mobile bank account product by Equity Bank and Safaricom on Tuesday promises to open up electronic commerce -- and mobile commerce in particular -- to the mass market. The service, dubbed M-Kesho, will allow users to perform basic banking transactions like deposits, withdrawals, loan applications, processing and reception right from their handsets.

Large-scale farming of the biodiesel jatropha tree should be stopped since it creates a food shortage. It will harm the environment and is of little commercial value, according to a national research institution. This comes as the country gears up for what could be the biggest jatropha biodiesel project in the region. An Italian company, Nouve Iniziative Industriali sri, is clearing 55,000 hectares leased from the Malindi County Council for the jatropha plantations.

Organic foods aren’t only the preference of countries in the so-called developed North. Forty thousand tons of genetically engineered maize was recently rejected in Kenya. Protesters are making sure it remains stuck in the port city of Mombassa. Jos Ngonyo, with Kenya’s Biodiversity Coalition, spoke to Green Acre Radio in a recent visit to Seattle. Ngonyo talked about why small-scale farmers reject the Green Revolution in Africa and “dysfunctional aid.” The Gates Foundation helped launch the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa four years ago.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into Kenya's post-2007–08 election atrocities is being dubbed the country’s ‘last hope’ for justice due to a lack of domestic initiatives to deal with suspects, writes Dana Wagner. Amidst high Kenyan and international expectations, can the ICC deliver this justice as a lone and external judicial body?

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/483/reading_draft_constitution… this , a team from the grassroots organisation

Rural Kenyans affected by the post-election violence in 2008 are among thousands of beneficiaries of a programme that aims to improve food security and incomes and reduce women's vulnerability to gender-based violence by teaching better farming techniques. "Food insecurity and malnutrition are key issues in the spread of HIV and it is also common knowledge that when people are food-insecure, and mostly women and children, they become susceptible to sexual, gender-based violence," according to Godrick Khisa, the national coordinator of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) project

The Kenyan government has won praise for a national door-to-door HIV testing drive that aims to test 80 percent of the population for HIV/AIDS by the end of 2010, but once-enthusiastic counsellors are beginning to show signs of burnout.

Mxit is a massive mobile social network that was started in South Africa a couple years ago. Today, Safaricom announced a partnership with them, using their marketing muscle (7 pages of ads in today’s newspaper) to import Mxit into Kenya.

The Johannesburg-based World Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICUS) has warned that the operating environment for civil society in Kenya remains fraught with danger. It said that as the spotlight is focused on impunity in Kenya by the international community, including the International Criminal Court (ICC) and special representatives of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), civil society activists are facing grave risks.

Kenya's Water Minister Charity Ngilu said the country had signed the controversial Nile Basin Agreement, allowing it to effectively put the Nile Waters into use for irrigation and other national development priorities. Kenya, with a small share of Lake Victoria, the source of the world's longest river, running some 6,695 kilometres across nine countries with a combined population of 400 million, said it signed the Nile Basin agreement because an earlier one signed in 1929 was obsolete.

The Kenya government Thursday placed its veterinary department on high alert over a possible outbreak of a Rift Valley fever epidemic in the North Eastern, Upper Eastern and Rift Valley provinces. Livestock Minister Mohamed Kuti, while issuing the alert, announced that a massive vaccination campaign was due to begin in the affected regions to prevent an outbreak of the disease.

The date for Kenya's referendum on whether to adopt the proposed constitution is set for August 4th. Interim Independent Electoral commission Chairman (IIEC), Ahmed Issack, announced the date during a breakfast meeting organized by UNDP on Friday.

The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor has said his case against perpetrators of Kenya's post-election violence is "unstoppable". Luis Moreno Ocampo said his investigation would last about six months and he intended to prosecute up to six suspects in two separate trials.

A fresh controversy is brewing ahead of a 4 August referendum on a proposed new constitution for Kenya, following the illegal alteration of the draft document to empower the country’s spy agency to curtail person freedoms. Kenya’s Attorney-General Amos Wako has admitted that the country’s spy body, the National Security Intelligence Services (NSIS), had approached his office to insert a new clause, empowering the agency to curtail personal freedoms on national security interests.

As a huge cloud-whitening experiment goes public, with funding from the Gates Foundation, a global coalition of civil society groups and individuals is urging an immediate halt to geoengineering, at the first UN talks on the issue in 30 years, which are taking place in Nairobi from 10–21 May.

Grateful for Beth Maina and Cenya Ciyendi’s ‘words of wisdom’, Zawadi Nyong'o writes that if the Kenyan government ‘would only spend all the resources it does on post-abortion care, on sex education and safe abortions, we would actually begin to start saving the lives of thousands of women, and indeed unborn children in Kenya.’