A court in Libya has freed a dissident who faced 15 years in jail for complaining he was tortured in prison.
Jamal al-Haggi was acquitted of charges that he insulted judicial officials, Human Rights Watch said.

Burundian police and administrative officials must take stronger measures to prevent and punish pre-election violence, Human Rights Watch said today. Members of various political parties, especially their affiliated youth movements, have clashed on a number of occasions since November 2009. In most cases, police have not conducted thorough investigations and no one has been held accountable.

UNHCR is shocked by the further loss of civilian lives we've seen from fighting in Mogadishu earlier this week. More than 30 people are reported killed, many of them civilians including children. From local sources we understand that medical facilities are having difficulties coping with the many wounded. Residents have described this week's shelling as among the worst in months.

Malawi and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has signed a formulation phase project document for managing climate change in the country to be implemented to a tune of $4.2 million

Activists have cautioned that the Gates Foundation funded study, released today in The Lancet and showing welcome progress on reducing maternal mortality globally, also reveals one catastrophic exception. They said that current global AIDS programmes were reminiscent of the Victorian era, casting pregnant women as potential vectors of disease, and ignoring their health in the single-minded rush to achieve a 2010 goal of preventing the transmission of HIV to their babies.

2010 is not shaping up to be a good year for satellite operators and resellers in Africa. There have been rumours that for the first time one operators’ sales in the continent have slipped down several percentage points. This year sees the arrival of four more international fibre cables: Glo One, Main One, EASSy and LION. Balancing Act’s latest report – African Fibre and Satellite Markets – takes the temperature of the current market and seeks to predict where things will be in three years time.

"Estimates [for the period 1970-2008] show that over the 39-year period Africa lost an astonishing US$854 billion in cumulative capital flight--enough to not only wipe out the region's total external debt outstanding of around US$250 billion (at end-December, 2008) but potentially leave US$600 billion for poverty alleviation and economic growth. Instead, cumulative illicit flows from the continent increased from about US$57 billion in the decade of the 1970s to US$437 billion over the nine years 2000-2008." - report by Global Financial Integrity.

The Oxfam International Liaison office with the African Union (OIAU) would like to put a call for civil society actors or staff of locally constituted NGOs, and coalitions of organizations who have the mandate and plan to engage the African Union, to be present in Addis Ababa and conduct their work. This secondment call is to enable committed and often disenfranchised communities’ representative to get the opportunity to meet the policy and decision makers at the AU Commission.

Women's civil society groups were noticeable by their absence from the landmark Haiti donor conference on 31 March, which secured pledges of US$5.3 billion over the next two years to support the country’s post-quake recovery. Their lack of a presence at the meeting was indicative of a broader missing voice in Haiti’s long-term reconstruction prospects, gender activists argued.

The corruption money would have constructed over 5,400 classrooms, paid 315,000 teachers, provided over 7.4million families with treated anti malaria mosquito nets’. The Tanzania corrupt Radar scandal appears to be taking a new twist as the notorious British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) now faces a potential legal suit over the manner in which it handled the corruption case involving the British Aero Space (BAE)

The African Research and Resource Forum (ARRF) is a research, data resource, reflection and policy debate institution devoted to the resolution of the governance and development issues confronting policy-makers and societies in the East African Community (EAC) and the Great Lakes Region. It links scholars, researchers, opinion leaders and public service functionaries to interact and share ideas. The Forum also facilitates the evolution of a regional community of scholars, activists and institutions, with a shared interest in resolving inter-African development problems.

First Lady Thandiwe Banda has said Zambia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world and that safe motherhood is still far from being assured. Ms Banda was speaking in Lusaka when she officiated at the opening of a media capacity building workshop on the campaign for accelerated reduction of maternal mortality in Africa (CARMMA).

Applications are now open for the RVI’s first Great Lakes field course, to be held from Saturday 17 to Friday 23 July 2010 in Bujumbura, Burundi. The course is a fast-track, graduate-level introduction to the history, political economy and culture of Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Taught in English and French by a distinguished faculty of international and regional specialists, the course follows in the tracks of the acclaimed annual RVI courses on Sudan and the Horn of Africa. For more information please see Courses or download a prospectus here. The application deadline is 7 May 2010.

The ambassador of the Republic of Congo to Cuba, Pascal Onguemby, rejected the lies included in an anti-Cuba resolution recently approved by the European Parliament. Addressing participants in the inauguration of the Eleventh International Conference on African Culture in the Americas that began today in Santiago de Cuba, the African diplomat spoke on behalf of the ambassadors from Burkina Faso, Cape Verde and Mozambique, as well as the cultural attaché from Angola.

TechSoup Global, the U.S.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides technology resources and knowledge to NGOs around the world, and GuideStar International, a U.K.-registered charity that promotes transparency and civil society organization (CSO) reporting, have announced that they will combine operations in order to strengthen their respective capacity-building programs for civil society. The two organizations share a mission to benefit global civil society through the provision of technology, information, and resources.

In January, 2010, a team from Cultural Survival's Global Response program went to Kenya to document a year-long pattern of brutal police assaults on the Samburu people of northern Kenya. These assaults, which include killing, raping, beating, and wholesale robbery, take place in an atmosphere of racial prejudice and discrimination against pastoralist tribes that resist assimilation and westernization in order to maintain their unique cultures. Kenyan police forces operate with impunity throughout the country, but in northern Kenya their brutality targets a specific ethnic community in violation of their rights as Indigenous Peoples.

KONI – The Panafrican Alliance of Colombia is a non-governmental organization based in Bogota. In the spirit of pan African solidarity and cooperation, Koni has designed and availed a platform of technologies and tools for the exchange of ideas, methodologies and strategies of development on the African continent, and its Diaspora in Colombia

The public outcry of alleged entrenched corruption in Tanzania’s National Housing Corporation (NHC) appears to have reached catastrophic proportions with helpless victims alleging that the vice is so extensive and deeply rooted to the marrow of this giant state corporation

Civil society organisations in Angola gave a lesson of citizenship, courageously marching to say “Don’t Push Down My House”.The demonstration finally and peacefully took place in the coastal city of Benguela. Despite of the ban announced by the provincial government, the march managed to break the silence and voice the protest against the brutal house demolitions and forced land evictions that have become a regular occurrence in Angola in the last years.

The proposed media law is a monster, says Dr George Lugalambi, chair of a coalition fighting to preserve press freedom in Uganda. Publishers and journalists would have to apply annually for a licence, which could be revoked at will in the interests of "national security, stability and unity," or if coverage was deemed to be "economic sabotage."?