The World Bank's private sector lending arm has come under fire in an internal bank report which accuses it of attempting to dilute the environmental and social assessments attached to its lending. The proposed changes include a greater focus on project outcomes and the setting of objectives and monitoring performance, rather than the application of the strict safeguards used across the World Bank with government clients.

African Union mediators have watered down a security blueprint for Sudan's crisis-ridden Darfur province to try to keep rebels and the government at the negotiating table. Delegates at peace talks in Abuja said on Wednesday the mediators had dropped proposals that rebels confine their troops to base, and had not given a timeframe for the key rebel demand of disarming pro-government Janjaweed militia.

The US has presented a new draft UN resolution to pressure Sudan to resolve the conflict in the Darfur region. The draft calls for an enlarged African Union monitoring force in Darfur, and repeats the threat of sanctions if the Sudanese government does not comply. US officials have denied they are "going easy" on Khartoum by allowing it a further 30 days to comply.

The families of 10 civilian political detainees who have been held without trial for the past nine months have submitted a petition to Guinean Justice Minister Mamadou Sylla demanding the prisoners' immediate release. The 10 men, who are mainly civil servants and businessmen with no background of involvement in politics, were arrested in December last year. They were detained following the arrest of dozens of military officers in November in connection with a suspected coup plot against President Lansana Conte.

South African unions for nurses, teachers and police are preparing for a strike on September 16 after rejecting a government wage offer, union leaders said on Tuesday. The strike could involve up to 800,000 public sector employees, making it the largest among civil servants in South Africa since August 1999.

Heads of state from 17 African countries on Wednesday attended the opening of an African Union summit in Burkina Faso to craft a jobs creation plan to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. The summit was addressed by Burkina Faso's President Blaise Compaore, who welcomed his fellow leaders to the two-day meeting aimed at advancing development on the world's poorest continent.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has said that it would close all the three Rwandan refugees camps in southern Uganda, reported The New Vision. UNHCR resident information officer in Uganda Dennis Duncan said that "following the signing of the tripartite agreement between Uganda, Rwanda and the UNHCR last year, we fell the security situation in Rwanda is safe for refugees to return."

According to a collaborative study by the National Development Agency, the Centre for Civil Society and the Southern African Grantmakers' Association, 93 percent of South Africans contribute either time, money or goods to causes which help the poor and the needy. The overall view was that South Africans believe in contributing to the greater good of the society and the country of South Africa.

Installing latrines in a school might not seem to be a significant step for protecting children, but in fact it is. Building latrines in schools will increase the likelihood that children will use the latrines instead of open fields that may be close to drinking water sources – thereby helping preserve drinking water quality. Maintaining clean drinking water is one of the fundamental approaches in UNICEF’s work for reducing child deaths.

African policy-makers must make employment a top priority in order to counter the adverse impact of globalisation, International Labour Organisation head Juan Somavia said on the eve of a two-day African Union summit on poverty alleviation. "Job creation cannot be left to flow as a result of other economic policies, it must be a targeted objective," he said in an interview before flying to Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, for the conference, which starts on Wednesday. "Growth without employment means aggravating inequality; instead of spreading wealth, it concentrates it," Somavia warned.

Ethiopia severely lacks sanitation facilities, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) warned on Tuesday, adding that a mere six percent of the population have access to basic sanitation facilities - fuelling diarrhoea and other water-borne diseases, while less than a quarter has access to clean water.

The swearing-in of Somalia's transitional parliament on 22 August in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and the first meeting of the MPs days later may have gone smoothly, but the real challenges facing the war-ravaged Horn of Africa country have just begun, analysts say. "History is littered with dishonoured Somali peace accords. In fact, no major international peace initiative for Somalia has ever failed to produce one," Matt Bryden, an analyst for the International Crisis Group (ICG) said.

For generations, the islanders of Sao Tome and Principe made a meagre livelihood by cultivating cocoa. The recent discovery of oil in its territorial waters took the tiny west African state somewhat by surprise. Oil exploration and production has left its mark across the African continent over the last three decades. Oil has all too often has provided the catalyst for corruption, economic mismanagement, civil unrest and even attempted coups.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has taken over the investigation of the alleged $180 million bribe paid by a consortium of foreign companies to win contracts for the construction of the Bonny Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant, in Rivers State. In the latest move by the Nigerian government to unravel the bribe case that is also a subject of international inquiry, the House Committee on Public Petition has also recommended that the TSKJ Consortium, the company in the centre of the matter, be barred from working on the expansion of the LNG plant, until the end of the whole inquiry.

Malawi's government is promising to make a statement by Friday about the fate of a key witness in two forthcoming corruption trials. The witness, a government official named Peter Mulamba, disappeared at the weekend. On Tuesday, a newspaper quoted a minister as saying that Mr Mulamba's body had been found, but the police then said they were still searching for him.

With regards Mike Muller's recent article "Getting priorities right is a must" (http://www.bday.co.za/bday/content/direct/1,3523,1686809-6096-0,00.html) We agree with DWAF director-general Mike Muller on Africa's great needs for investment in infrastructure. We also very much agree that Southern countries should not be forced into accepting a Northern development agenda. But Muller's willful mischaracterization of International Rivers Network (IRN)'s position on World Bank involvement in African dams deserves a reply.

Muller states that IRN has "pressed the US to oppose funding of important water projects in Africa because they do not like their effect on natural rivers." Wrong. Our primary work is to amplify the voices of Southern colleagues who wield little influence on Northern-dominated institutions such as the World Bank, which have become so critical in determining Southern policies and projects in the water and energy sectors. Most often our work prioritizes the grave social problems caused by large dams, and does not focus solely on their environmental impacts. Some 40-80 million people worldwide have been displaced by large dams; many were left worse off, and most were left out of discussions about their futures and their role in furthering national development. This is changing because of groups like IRN and our colleagues around the world, and we are surprised that Muller thinks this is a bad thing.

Muller also fails to acknowledge that homegrown opposition to large dams is what brings groups like IRN to the debate. In a globalized world, where water ministries frequently rely on outside consultants, multinational companies and funders such as the World Bank to build and operate national water systems, it is unfair and unrealistic to insist that civil society and dam-affected communities should work without external partners on complex issues such as those surrounding big dams.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), including IRN, have long pressed the World Bank to both address the outstanding social and environmental impacts of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), and to punish the corrupt companies involved in it. NGOs have been key in keeping this issue alive at the Bank. Contrary to what Muller implies, IRN never advocated that the LWHP should not be built, only that it should be planned and executed in ways that benefit local communities and cause the least social, environmental and economic harm. The LHWP as planned did not meet these criteria. As for protecting "natural rivers," Muller must know that local scientific researchers (not IRN) have warned that, if fully built, the LHWP would turn Lesotho's rivers into "something akin to waste-water drains"-a preventable situation we doubt DWAF would like to claim credit for. This is not an issue of preserving natural beauty: downstream communities who depend on healthy ecosystems supported by now-diverted rivers are finding themselves poorer because of the LHWP. South Africa's ongoing work to integrate the guidelines of the World Commission on Dams into national policies could help prevent future tradeoffs from being placed almost entirely on the backs of the poor.

The United Nations mission in Democratic Republic of Congo faces a stiff test when its first disarmament programme in the vast central African country starts in the northeastern Ituri province on Monday. An estimated 50,000 tribal militiamen are due to start laying down their weapons, but their leaders have remained non-committal and a flare-up of violence in the troubled province points to trouble ahead for the scheme.

People in countries where income is protected report high levels of happiness, but about three quarters of the world’s workers live in circumstances of economic insecurity that foster ‘a world full of anxiety and anger,’ according to a new United Nations study. Only 8 per cent of people - fewer than one in 10 - live in countries providing favourable economic security, according to the survey produced by the International Labour Organization (ILO). A socio-economic safety net, rather than income level, not only promotes personal well-being, happiness and tolerance but also benefits growth, development and social stability, it says.

"The Organisation of African Unity (OAU)’s success in achieving the political independence of the continent has not brought with it economic freedom. Thus the continent still faces major challenges of poverty alleviation and development. However, this can be explained by the deficiencies of the post independent African states in achieving economic development for its citizens, a major challenge for the African Union (AU) and its New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) program. Throughout the world, regional integration has gained momentum and is seen as the panacea to dealing with the shortcomings of the state. This paper seeks to examine Africa's efforts and challenges at building coherent regional groupings and offers lessons for the AU."

This report synthesizes the deliberations of a conference organized jointly by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and the Development Policy Management Forum (DPMF) on the theme ‘The African Union and New Strategies for Development in Africa’. The purpose of the conference was to foster dialogue among African policy makers, researchers and development practitioners about strategies for African development within the evolving framework of transformation of the OAU into the AU. As such, the conference offered opportunities for coming to a better understanding of challenges to African development and an identification of appropriate development options in the current era of globalization.