'My name is Sali Samaké and I live in Tamala, one of the villages in the region of Djitoumou, in Mali. We’re proud of our past. We always refer to Djitoumou, an ancient land name, to indicate our village’s position to outsiders. I was born in Defara, a neighbouring village, but my parents no longer live there. I was 15 when I got married. Now I am 56 years old.' - This is one story from a Panos project called Voices from the Ground, which follows five people in the developing world and reveals how progress towards the Millennium Development Goals is affecting them.

For women living in rural areas, access to ICTs means first overcoming multiple barriers relating not only to their location, but also their gender. In a new publication, 'GenARDIS 2002 - 2010: Small grants that made big changes for women in agriculture', Jenny Radloff explores how seed grants were disbursed to innovative initiatives.

A project launched in 2009 in Uganda's Bushenyi and Mbale districts enlists trusted local residents, such as farmers, agriculture extension workers, shopkeepers and school teachers, to disseminate and gather information about agriculture using mobile phones. The workers help the Ugandan farmers treat not only sick goats, but also blighted bananas, coffee berry bacterial infections, discolored tomatoes and other plant and livestock problems.

Despite Nottingham University’s Professor Oliver Morrissey’s claim that Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) will accrue only 0.01 per cent of Ghana’s GDP to consumers, and imports from the European Union will go up by six per cent, he is emphatic that Ghana should “not fear the EPA.”

External donors contributed some US$1.6 billion in aid to the government of Mozambique in 2009. These donors have all committed to making aid more effective by adhering to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and to the Accra Agenda for Action. However information about how much money is available, how it is being spent and what are the results of that aid are still poor, says this study.

After being diagnosed HIV-positive Margaret Bikyele could not even manage the simplest of household chores, let alone being able to work to generate an income for her and her two sons. Since her diagnosis in 2005 and in the years that followed, the Bikyele family’s prospects in life had looked bleak. That is until Bikyele became the recipient of a social cash transfer scheme in 2007 and began receiving 10 dollars a month.

Despite the Southern Africa region sustaining an annual growth rate of six percent, the U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals will hear that the majority of Southern Africans remain among the poorest people in the world. While economies in the region are growing, inequalities between citizens of the same countries have also increased. "In South Africa, for instance, there is a growth in inequalities on the basis of provinces, gender, classes and races," said Dr Agostinho Zacarias, the United Nations Development Programme resident representative in South Africa.

Two prominent human rights workers, one of them a lawyer, were arrested this week in Uganda as part of a US-sponsored local 'security response' to bombings in Kampala over the summer. 'As an investigator for Reprieve, I work closely with one of them: Al-Amin Kimathi, director of the Kenyan organisation, Muslim Human Rights Forum, who has assisted hundreds of rendition victims and now represents those charged with the Kampala bombings. He is one of the most tireless human rights activists in Africa, and is now at grave risk of torture himself,' writes a colleague.

African nations lack the political will to provide access to primary education to all children, according to the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), a coalition of organisations in 100 countries. In most countries on the continent, achieving basic education remains a far-off dream, the coalition stated in a report titled, "Back to School? The worst places in the world to be a school child in 2010", which was launched during the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Summit in New York, where world leaders are gathering to evaluate their countries’ progress five years ahead of the 2015 deadline.

If you had any doubts about where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is really placing its bets, AGRA Watch’s recent announcement of the Foundation’s investment of $23.1million in 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock should put them to rest. Genetic engineering: full speed ahead.

Research published in 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' finds virtually no correlation between climate-change indicators such as temperature and rainfall variability and the frequency of civil wars over the past 50 years in sub-Saharan Africa, reports Nature News. The analysis challenges a study published last year.

Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights have confirmed that 83 WOZA (Women of Zimbabwe Arise) members are being held at Harare Central Police Station.

Technology blog White African reviews Motribe, a simple community building platform for the mobile web that was launched recently. "You can easily get a site up and going in an hour that allows chat, photo sharing, private messaging and mobile blogs," says the blog.

Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke, Somalia's prime minister, has resigned after a prolonged dispute with Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the country's president. Sharmarke said on Tuesday he "resigned as the prime minister of the transitional federal government of Somalia after being unable to work with the president". The federal government has failed to end a three-year insurgency by hardline Muslim fighters who now control much of the capital and huge chunks of south and central Somalia.

As world leaders meet this week to review a UN bid to cut poverty and hunger by 2015, the Global Campaign for Education warned that the financial crisis had halted improvements in education for children in impoverished countries. There are 69 million children out of school around the world, said a report on the world's 60 poorest nations by the campaign, a coalition of more than 100 organisations.

The latest estimates, which will soon be published in its annual State of Food and Agriculture report, show that there are 925 million hungry people on our planet – that’s roughly one in our six of us. '...there is a fundamental structural problem with our food system that goes beyond temporary increases and decreases in food prices. That the food problem is rooted in poverty and radically unequal distributions of income and assets, within and across countries, which influence both food production systems and food consumption patterns.'

The visit by South African President Jacob Zuma to Beijing from August 24 to 26, heading a delegation of 400 business representatives and 11 government ministers, was another indication of intensifying international rivalry within the African continent.

With five years left till the Millennium Development Goals' 2015 deadline, civil society groups say South Africa has made progress on some goals but regressed on others. Pal Mfunzana’s sole source of income is a couple of corrugated tin shacks, indistinguishable from many others in Diepsloot, a deeply impoverished slum on the northern edge of Johannesburg.

Equal parts video postcard and revolutionary workbook, the film utilizes memory, artistic expression and group analysis to reveal a process of personal healing and collective empowerment. “Taking Freedom Home” celebrates the creativity and vibrance of diverse LGBTGNC movements and particularly the historical initiatives of trans and gender nonconforming people of color in New York and throughout the US from the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 to the Critical Resistance (CR10) conference in 2008.

The potential of mobile telephony to transform Africa will only be achieved if the development of other infrastructure keeps pace, says a study. The number of mobile phone subscribers in Africa soared from 16 million in 2000 to 376 million in 2008, with 60 per cent of the population using them in 2008 compared with 10 per cent in 1999.