A budget crunch in Swaziland, Africa's last absolute monarchy, has reached a 'critical stage' with the government struggling to maintain spending on HIV/AIDS, education and the elderly, the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday. In a damning assessment of the landlocked southern African nation, the IMF said proposed spending cuts had been undermined by 'overruns' in defence outlays, leading to a 2011/12 budget deficit projection of 10 percent of GDP.

Evaggelos Vallianatos shows how cash-crop colonialism has undermined African agriculture. Now is the time for a return to indigenous food plants.

The prisoners were taken from a group of more than 200 activists arrested by Moroccan authorities a year ago. And as Malainin Lakhal reports, Morocco has over 60 Saharawi prisoners of conscience, including eminent human rights defender Naama Asfari.

Malawi is experiencing a drug shortage as the country’s international donors remain reluctant to release aid meant for the health sector. About 60 million dollars in funding has been withheld amid allegations of pilfering and corruption in the procurement of drugs at government’s Central Medical Stores. The Central Medical Stores procures and distributes drugs to government health facilities.

Health authorities say 207 cases of typhoid are being treated in Zimbabwe’s capital after a prolonged spell of unusually hot weather amid acute water shortages. Harare city council health director Dr. Prosper Chonzi says no deaths have occurred so far in the monthlong outbreak. He said the disease will be difficult to contain in impoverished townships relying on water from shallow, makeshift wells and marshlands.

A pre-conference on men who have sex with men (MSM) in Africa and HIV is planned to take place in Ethiopia ahead of the 16th International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA). The full-day event will feature presentations from more than 15 of the continent’s top experts on the health and human rights of sexual minorities. The pre-conference will offer a opportunity for experts as well as developing practitioners to cultivate new partnerships, network, build skills, share best practices and conduct hands-on learning.

At double the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, the 40 GW Grand Inga hydropower project, to be built on the Congo River under an agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa, will be the world's largest by a wide margin. It will increase Africa's electricity generating capacity by one-third. But as IPS News reports, as is unfortunately typical with many big-push style projects in the developing world, the local people will likely get little of the electricity produced by the Grand Inga. Instead, the power transmission lines are expected to go towards mining and industrial facilities, towards the big cities in South Africa and Egypt, as well as possibly being exported to Europe.

Thanks to the US’s 2009 Global Food Security Act, food aid policy for the first time mandates the use of genetic modification technologies. Nidhi Tandon looks at how this legislation helps biotechnology companies monopolise the seed industry at the expense of farmers, and explores some of the dubious links between these corporations, the Gates Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

South African scientists are at the coalface of understanding whether HIV can be eradicated from an HIV-positive individual, essentially curing the person. A complex field of study, Professor Caroline Tiemessen is attempting to understand why some individuals – referred to as elite controllers – are able to be HIV infected, but successfully suppress virus replication to undetectable levels. This is achieved in the absence of antiretroviral treatment and the immune system response is maintained at an optimal level for many years.

A new policy brief faults prominent institutions and drug companies like Pfizer, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and Population Council, for their involvement in unethical and illegal human experimentation in Africa. The report is titled 'Non-Consensual Research in Africa: The Outsourcing of Tuskegee' in reference to the illegal human experiment conducted in Tuskegee, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972 by the US Public Health Service. In that experiment, some 600 impoverished African-American men were observed in a study on the progression of untreated syphilis. Some of the men were intentionally infected with the disease and all of them were denied the cure.

Some 21,000 Kenyan women are hospitalised every year because of complications from unsafe abortions. According to Kenya’s Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society, 2,600 die from procedures carried out by untrained 'professionals' in back alleys and people’s homes, well away from proper health facilities where women can be reported to the police and jailed for up to 14 years if convicted of terminating a pregnancy.

Pretrial holding facilities in countries with developing and transitional economies often force detainees to live in filthy, over-crowded conditions, where they lack adequate health services. In the worst cases, detainees die; some centres are so bad that innocent people plead guilty just to be transferred to prisons where the conditions might be better. For many pretrial detainees, being locked away in detention centers where tuberculosis, hepatitis C, and HIV are easily contracted can be a death sentence. This paper, aimed at health professionals, presents a review of literature on health conditions and health services in pretrial detention in developing and transitional countries.

An Italian worker at a restaurant in Ghana under investigation for allegedly operating a 'whites only' policy has told the BBC it was a misunderstanding. Marco Ranaldi said he made 'a joke' about the racial profile of members of the Atlantic Lobsters and Dolphins. A Ghanaian woman started an online protest after visiting the restaurant a week ago and allegedly being told that it was 'only for white people'.

'We call on all farmers, workers and the landless and all social movements to join us in Durban and everywhere in the world on the 5th of December 2011 to demand a change of the entire capitalist system. The fight against climate change is a fight against neoliberal capitalism, landlessness, dispossession, hunger, poverty and inequality. The crisis of the planet requires that we take direct action. During the agro-ecology and food sovereignty day we will have public protest marches to the conference of the polluters, actions against multinational corporations like Monsanto undermining our seed sovereignty, which will cuminate in a massive Assembly of the Oppressed to discuss ways of ending this unjust system.'

A bunch of the world’s leading impact investors have joined forces with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to invest $25m in a new growth fund to support African agriculture. Over the next five years, Pearl Capital Partners (PCP), a specialised African agricultural investment fund manager based in Kampala, Uganda, will invest the AACF’s $25 million in at least 20 agriculture-related businesses in East Africa. The fund is supported by $17 million in equity investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Swaziland’s economic crisis has forced the government to put on ice the agricultural input scheme that has made the survival of many subsistence farmers and their families less precarious on communal Swazi Nation Land, where 70 per cent of the 1.1 million population live. 'There is no seed subsidizing now. We used to do it, and we are talking about reviving the programme,' Xoxile Nxumalo, of the agriculture ministry, told IRIN. Under the Swazi Agricultural Development Programme, seeds were sold at a discount or provided free of charge to subsistence farmers working on communal land.

This paper from the Governance and Aids Programme at Idasa examines the role that local government might play in promoting food security for people living with HIV in a democratic governance context. It examines local government's role in food security through interviews with local councillors in the Tshwane area.

The number of people living with HIV in Egypt is estimated to be 11,000 people, but some say the number must be much higher. 'The stigma around the disease causes fear and mistrust, so people don’t end up getting proper info or receiving already available services such as testing and counseling,' writes Ahmed Awadalla on the blog He refers to a report that shows stigma and discrimination is rife in different sectors. 'It comes from healthcare providers, the government, the media, the workplace, religious leaders, and sadly family and friends.'

A $430-million fund which will give Zimbabwean children and pregnant women free medical care at public hospitals was launched on Monday with the help of the European Union and Unicef. 'The issue of user fees is one of the biggest barriers to poor women and children's access to life-saving and critical health care in Zimbabwe,' said Peter Salama, the Unicef country representative. The Zimbabwe health care system, which has collapsed from years of economic crisis, requires $436-million over the next five years to improve capacity, particularly the delivery of maternal care, according to Unicef.

African Speakers of Parliaments and Presidents of Senate have unanimously adopted a landmark resolution on a Declaration of Commitment to prioritise parliamentary support for increased policy and budget action on maternal, newborn and child health in African countries. The milestone Declaration of Commitment was adopted at the 3rd Pan African Speakers Conference 17 - 18 October, which was convened by the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) in Midrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.