The Nairobi City Council will soon launch a garbage recycling policy to deal with the 1,600 tonnes of waste generated by residents daily. Town Clerk Jack Mbugua at the same time said the council was concerned over the heavy pollution of Nairobi rivers.

The Japanese Government has given Kenya over Sh7 million to finance health projects across the country. The funds were granted to St John's Ambulance and Irigiro Community Self Help Group (ICSHG) to establish and construct proposed health projects.

Kiambu small-scale farmer Benson Kinuthia wants to sell his four cows. The reason is that he has found a new love in dairy goats that are easier to feed and earn him more income.
Kinuthia is one of 30 residents of Central Kenya's Kamuchege village in Lari, Kiambu district, whose experiment with dairy goats has earned them accolades. They've won trophies at the national agricultural show and the success of their dairy goat experiment has caused a small rural community to focus on a hitherto unknown source of nutrient - goat milk -
also said to have medicinal value.

The state-controlled Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) has come under severe censure from the democracy monitors from the Electoral Commission Of Kenya (ECK) and the Kenya Domestic Observation Programme (K-DOP). K-DOP Chairman, Archbishop John Njenga, accused the State-owned media giant of denying Kenyans a chance to make informed decisions on which candidate to support and vote for.

ACORD is searching for an exceptional individual to become our next Executive Director. The person appointed will continue the process of change we have been undergoing which involves changing the focus of our programming to working with the excluded in Africa and social movements in both the North and South and using advocacy and research as tools for change. The Executive Director is responsible for the strategic leadership and overall organisational management of all areas of ACORD's work. We have started relocating the Head Office from the UK to Africa and will be completed by end 2003 whilst increasing the status, skills and responsibility of our Programme Managers to strategically manage their programmes.

With help from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a small but influential Kenyan women's group is helping researchers preserve bottle gourds, one of Africa's earliest domesticated plants and one of its most endangered. Located 160 kilometers west of Nairobi in the village of Kitui, the group has established a Gourd Museum that houses a growing community genebank, as well as an informal library of songs, stories, and indigenous knowledge.

Unplanned pregnancies account for a substantial proportion of births in Kenya and can have a variety of negative consequences on individual women, their families, and the society as a whole, says a paper from the Department of Social Statistics, University of Southampton. The paper shows that unplanned childbearing in Kenya is associated with a number of factors, including urban/rural residence, region, ethnicity, maternal education, maternal age, marital status, birth order, length of preceding birth interval, family planning practice, fertility preference and unmet need for family planning.

A wave of pre-election violence and protests which have rocked Kenya's political party nomination process over the past week is raising serious concerns ahead of the country's presidential, parliamentary and civic polls slated for 27 December.

The victims of Sunday night's Kiambu dam floods have received Sh1million, food and building materials from two Presidential candidates. Kanu candidate Uhuru Kenyatta donated Sh500,000, which was presented to the chairman of the Kiambu Disaster Committee and District Commissioner, Chelimo Cheboi by former Kiambaa legislator Njenga Karume.

A presidential hopeful was denied clearance this week while another withdrew, leaving only five candidates in the final battle for the State House. Two candidates, Mr Simeon Nyachae of Ford People and Mr James Orengo of the Social Democratic Party were among those cleared by the Electoral Commission. The two will battle it out with National Rainbow Coalition's Mwai Kibaki, Kanu's Mr Uhuru Kenyatta and Mr Waweru Ng'ethe of the Chama Cha Umma, who were all cleared on Monday.

As the dust settles over the celebrations of the new Children Act, which came into operation in March this year, it is emerging that Kenya's Juvenile Justice System has for a long time been based on an adversarial and punitive model that does not appropriately deal with child offenders.

Keeping pure grade cattle is not an option 60-year-old North Sakwa farmer, Odiengi Nyaugu, would still prefer. His North Sakwa counterparts in western Kenya wouldn't either. "Pure grade cattle is very expensive to keep. They also fall easily to disease thus discouraging us from keeping them. Again, very few of us can afford the cost of buying one," he says as we take a walk in his shamba. Ever since the Kenya government decided to privatise Artificial Insemination (AI) services and withdrew subsidies for the running of village cattle dips - mainly due to pressure from donor institutions - the main extension challenge for rural areas has been to come up with rural cooperatives that can fill in the gap.

An unofficial audit of Kenya's electoral roll shows that nearly 16% of registered voters are dead. The study by the Institute of Education in Democracy (IED) found that an estimated 1.5 million people on the electoral roll of 10.4 million had died.

Thirty-something Beatrice Atieno [not her real name] speaks with conviction when she remembers her family's eviction from their land in 1992, around the time of Kenya's first multi-party elections for nearly thirty years. Some 3,000 people were thus forced off their land in the Rift Valley Province. Many were able to resettle in neighbouring Nyanza Province, populated predominantly by their Luo kinsmen. The rest, however, had not retained close links with their neighbours in Nyanza, and stayed at Thessalia, where they remain today.

Three Kenyan airports will receive equipment from the United States.The high-tech detection equipment, valued at over $750,000 (Sh60 million), will be used to improve security services at Jomo Kenyatta International and Wilson Airports in Nairobi; and the Moi International Airport, Mombasa.It includes modern baggage x-ray machines, walk-through metal detectors, hand wands and explosive trace detectors.

Office of the President minister Joseph Nyaga has resigned from the Cabinet and defected from Kanu, rocking the party as it prepares for crucial nominations. He announced the move as former presidential trouble-shooter Mark Too also declared he was joining the opposition to contest the Eldoret South seat.

Dramatic evidence has been unearthed of such systematic British brutality in the former colony of Kenya that it may require the rewriting of imperial history. Hitherto secret files show that the then colonial secretary, Alan Lennox Boyd, sanctioned a policy of violence towards interned guerrilla suspects. A former colonial official, Terence Gavaghan, now living in London, was, according to a memo written by the governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, authorised to use force. Some detainees allegedly had their mouths stuffed with mud and were beaten unconscious by his men.

The secrecy surrounding budget allocations encourages corruption, a former Kisauni MP has said. Mr Karisa Maitha said people were unable to question ministries for failing to implement certain projects because they did not know their budgetary allocations.

Beehives could help to protect African farms from damage caused by elephants by stopping them from eating crops, according to new research. Elephants can destroy whole fields of crops, especially where farmland borders reserves in countries such as Kenya. But they avoid beehives, and researchers have found that even empty hives are enough to reduce elephant damage, probably due to their odour.

The conversion of East African rangelands to cultivation is giving rise to conflicts over different land uses. How can tensions be resolved? This study explores the impact of such changes on different groups and asks questions about the implications for their livelihoods and the environment. It also seeks pathways to limit conflict in the buffer zones around the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem.