Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has called on Kenyans to rise above individual and partisan interests and approach the constitution - making exercise with a sense of sobriety in order to deliver the much-awaited new constitution to Kenyans.

DiasporaKenyan reports on renewed attacks by police and security forces on communities in Kenya’s Samburu East. ‘Thousands of residents have been displaced as they now flee in terror, remembering the February 21 attack on Lerata and Kalama communities', in which innocent villagers were beaten, raped and terrorised, DiasporaKenyan writes.

Carole Ageng’o takes a closer look at the interplay between gender relations and conflict in the three phases of Kenya’s electoral process – pre-election, election and post-election. Highlighting the barriers women face to participating in each phase despite international standards and regional instruments for protection of the rights of women, Ageng’o argues that entrenched social roles have ‘made it difficult for men and women to share power, privilege and status on the basis of equality'. A change in prevailing gender relations, Ageng’o suggests, is key to ‘empowering communities torn apart by war to build peace from below’.

Three years after the Kenyan government began to promote emergency contraception as part of its family planning strategy, the “morning-after pill” remains as controversial as ever: critics argue that unless the public is better educated about its purpose, it risks undermining the messages of abstinence and protected sex, putting impressionable young people at risk of HIV.

Kenya hopes to eliminate malaria by 2017, a malaria conference heard last week. The disease has been in decline in the country in recent years and scientists say they are optimistic that it can be eliminated by then.

The Partnership for Change has urged President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga to cooperate with the ICC and ensure The Special Tribunal Bill is passed and enacted into law within two weeks, failing which, Kenyans resolve to "starve the government of money".

As social inequalites in Kenya continue to widen, Samuel Abonyo argues in this week’s Pambazuka News that policies that encourage the redistribution of wealth are what the country needs if it is to achieve economic growth and reduce poverty.

Referring to the misunderstandings, discrimination and at times outright hostility faced by Kenya's transsexuals, Audrey Mbugua discusses the day-to-day hardships faced by transsexual people in the country.

Isaac Newton Kinity stresses that arguments around election rigging are no excuse for Kenya's 2007–08 post-election violence.

Two Kenyan lesbians have been released on bail after being allegedly arrested for lesbianism, and later being charged with stealing, an offence which the women refuted suggesting it was blackmail. According to the co-ordinator from the Solidarity with Communities in Distress (SOLCODI) Program which advocates for the gay and lesbian community, the women are being blackmailed because they are lesbians.

The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor says he will request ICC judges to open an investigation into Kenya's post-election violence. Luis Moreno-Ocampo made the comments after meeting Kenya's president and prime minister, who said they would co-operate with the ICC probe.

One hundred thousand poor people in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, will benefit from a Kshs. 600 million pilot programme to be undertaken b y the government and development partners to transfer cash to the vulnerable poor, the Prime Minister's Office has said in a statement.

Kenyan Attorney General Amos Wako confirmed Wednesday November 4th 2009 that he is banned from travelling to the United States and announced his intention to sue for defamation.

The spokesman of Kenya Youth Alliance, Njuguna Gitau, has been shot dead. Mr Gitau was shot in the head on Nairobi's Luthuli Avenue, according to witnesses at the scene. They said he had been walking on the street with four men when an argument broke out. Two of them drew pistols and shot him before the attackers fled the scene.

In this week’s Pambazuka News, Phanice Shamalia reports on ‘Sexually Speaking’, a lively discussion among 30 Kenyan women hosted by Storymoja as part of its monthly Women in Leadership forum. After ‘an afternoon of candid conversation’ on how various issues of our lives affect our sexuality’, Shamalia writes, participants concluded that it ‘is possible to have a healthier sex life, a confident sex life, and an educated sex life. One step is by attending sessions such as this one, with informed, opinionated women who are willing to share their knowledge.’

On November 2, 2009, grassroots leaders drawn from the countrywide networks of Bunge la Mwananchi met and developed a position on the debate of holding to account post election violence (PEV) perpetrators in Kenya on the eve of ICC sepcial prosecutor Ocampo's visit.

In light of the Kenyan ruling class's clear vested interest in autocracy, Samuel Abonyo makes the case for a federalist system of government to achieve better representation and prosperity for all across the country.

The International Budget Partnership has released “It's Our Money. Where's It Gone?”—a new documentary film on the work one of its partners, MUHURI (Muslims for Human Rights), is doing to involve communities directly in monitoring the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) in Mombasa, Kenya. The CDF allocates approximately one million dollars annually to each member of parliament to spend on development projects in his or her constituency but provides for no meaningful independent oversight. This is the story of ordinary Kenyans stepping in to do something about it.

Start local, then Africa, then the world. That’s the mantra app developers in Africa should be repeating to themselves as they build their game changing tools. That’s what Agosta Liko and his team at Verviant are doing with their new web and mobile payment platform: PesaPal.

The Institute for Human Security (IHS) will be hosting a multi-disciplinary and multi-genre colloquium on Cultures of Violence /War and Identity on the 3-4 November 2009. The title of the event this year is "Violent Cartographies: Mapping Colonial and Postcolonial Identities and Cultures of War"- a project that seeks to "unmap" the familiar world by raising questions and employing genres of expression that interrogate dominant ways of thinking about violence/ war , identities and the spaces of their occurrence.