Aid workers struggled on Tuesday to help thousands of people left stranded, wounded or sick by fighting in Liberia's capital as the United States resisted any firm commitment to lead a peacekeeping force. Pressure has been mounting on the United States, already stretched by deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, to take a lead role in ending nearly 14 years of conflict in a West African nation founded by freed American slaves more than 150 years ago.

1 July 2003 marked the entry into force of the International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (the Migrants Rights Convention). This is the first international human rights treaty to come into force since 1990 when the Convention on the Rights of the Child came into force. Amnesty International has welcomed the coming into force of this Convention since it is an important human rights tool for the protection of the human rights of the around 175 million migrants in the world. The organisation has urged all states to accede to the instrument.

Globalisation is one of the most controversial development issues of the day. ‘Globaphobes’ attribute most of the ills of the world to globalisation. The anti-globalisation movement has focused attention on the extent to which decisions affecting the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people are made in international fora – at which the poor have no voice. Globalisation is seen as marginalising a large part of the world’s population and contributing to increased international inequality. On the other hand, ‘globaphiles’ see extending globalisation as the key to eliminating world poverty. But despite the heated debate on globalisation, there is still a lack of empirical research examining the links between globalisation and poverty in detail.

Nigeria is set to benefit from a recently signed Global AIDS Fund grant agreement, local newspaper This Day reported last Thursday. The Fund has made US $28 million of the $150 million grant immediately available for the expansion of existing programmes for antiretroviral drugs and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the government of Cote d'Ivoire on Monday failed to sign a $91 million dollar grant agreement because of a dispute about how the money would be disbursed and monitored.

Ten million children under the age of five die every year around the globe and six-million of those deaths are easily preventable, a leading medical journal reveals. Five articles in the Lancet indict the poor leadership that has let good initiatives to improve children's health go by the wayside as other priorities have come along.

The Nobel Prize winning Organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and four eminent public research institutes from around the world have joined forces to address the lack of research and development in drugs for neglected diseases. A mere 10% of global health research is devoted to diseases that account for 90% of the global disease burden.

What are the real economic, environmental and social costs of dams? Do the benefits of irrigation, electricity, flood control and water supply outweigh the damage they do to livelihoods, ecosystems and fisheries? How can the diverse groups of stakeholders affected by dams work together to identify risks and assess alternatives to dams?

Do global warming and bad development suggest a historical reversal of human progress? Is the development community failing to grasp the links between global warming, natural disasters and unsustainable development? Is conventional economic development undermining the markets of developing countries and reducing their capacities to cope with climate change?

Switzerland has given 1.2 million Swiss francs (US $903,478) to its partner organisations in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation reported on Tuesday. In a statement, the agency said part of the funds would be used to build and operate an emergency clinic in Bunia, the main town in Ituri District where recent inter-militia fighting had resulted in hundreds of deaths and the displacement of thousands of civilians.

This report from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) gives an analysis of poverty in developing countries from the perspective of the lack of opportunities for decent work and social inclusion. It highlights the barriers people living and working in poverty face in finding and keeping income generating activities that would allow them to earn a decent living and sets out a strategy for ensuring that employment is accorded higher priority in national and international efforts to realise the Millennium Development Goals.

A new report, published Monday, exposes the arguments for a new free trade agreement on foreign investment at the World Trade Organisation as groundless myths. The report, jointly produced by Friends of the Earth and the World Development Movement, shows that an investment agreement will primarily benefit large multinational companies, who will gain greater `rights to roam' in the global economy.

The world's leading pharmaceutical companies are set to unveil proposals to ease the supply of essential medicines to poor countries, in an attempt to break a World Trade Organisation deadlock that is jeopardising the Doha global trade round.

Apartheid, it seems, works. Nearly 10 years since racial segregation was abolished in South Africa, identity is still rooted in race. Or so it would appear from the case of Happy Sindane, the blond Ndebele-speaking boy who walked into a police station last month saying he had been abducted from his white family by their black cleaner at the age of six and brought up among blacks.

The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission wound up last week with the 51 member organisation more deeply divided than ever.

Two new reports on genetically modified crops paint a convincing picture of their relevance to the needs of the developing world. But neither is likely, on its own, to convince the sceptics, says this editorial on the website SciDev.net.

A new international law covering the conditions under which genetically modified (GM) organisms can be traded between countries is to come into force later this year, after the Pacific island of Palau last week became the 50th state to ratify the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Palau's move triggered a 90-day countdown before the protocol – which will regulate the impact on the environment and human health from trade in GM organisms – comes into legal force on 11 September.

Why is the entire African continental economy no larger than Spain's, at $580 billion? Why is the combined GDP of the 40-plus countries that lie between South Africa and Egypt scarcely bigger than the annual turnover of ExxonMobil? There's a weary consensus that blames low prices for Africa's agricultural exports, corruption, cash-starved infrastructure and, increasingly, the devastating economic impact of AIDS. But less explored is the perverse logic of dividing Africa's small economic space into fifty sovereign entities. Regional economic integration is an absolute prerequisite for poverty reduction: expanding markets, attracting investment, and increasing savings. Unfortunately, there are powerful interests that stand in its way – mainly the politicians and bureaucrats who extract rent from their possession of sovereign privileges to tax and regulate.

Take Djibouti in northeast Africa. It has about half a million people and virtually no domestic economy. It depends wholly on three things: a port and railway link that serve the much larger economy of landlocked Ethiopia, a French military base (recently augmented by a U.S. command centre, used for keeping watch on Yemen and monitoring al Qa'ida's attempts to infiltrate the Horn of Africa), and lastly the fact that tiny Djibouti, by virtue of its sovereign independence, has a seat at the United Nations, the African Union and the Arab League, and therefore also has representation at the World Bank, United Nations specialised agencies and bilateral donors. A simple survey will show that across Africa, the smaller the country, the more aid it receives per capita. Partly this is simply because most nations have a desk officer in every large aid bureaucracy and thus a champion in the system. And partly it is because every now and then, the vote of that country may become important in some critical international forum. (The U.S. suddenly became much more conciliatory towards Angola last summer, coinciding with Angola taking one of Africa's seats on the U.N. Security Council.) Small countries are also more attractive as sites for military bases: their domestic problems are more manageable and their loyalty is more easily obtained than larger ones.

Five years ago, there was some discussion that Djibouti might merge with its neighbour Ethiopia. The rents that Djibouti's rulers can extract from the international system have put paid to that. On the other side of the continent, tiny Gambia broke up its sensible confederation with its sole and much larger neighbour, Senegal, because its leading officials were profiting too little from the arrangement.

The executives of international oil corporations, avowed globalisers in theory, are in practice the friends of regressive political economies. Oil companies prefer to negotiate deals with small countries rather than large ones: in a country with a million people, political stability can simply be bought, whereas there is a sad history of oil fuelling conflict in larger countries like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan. Oil wealth is a top-down resource: it's easy to distribute as largesse, and the smaller the constituency, the more effective it can be.

NGOs certainly have no intention to impede the continent's growth, but their operations may, at times, do exactly that. Aid agencies control substantial parts of the transport sector in Mozambique, but their contracts are not awarded through competitive bidding, but instead on opaque criteria developed by bureaucrats behind closed doors in Washington or Brussels. The domestic entrepreneurial class cannot compete.

Forty years ago, Africa's independence leaders came together to form the Organisation of African Unity - a minimum framework for organising the continent during the turmoils of the Cold War. Ordinary Africans longed for something more: true political unity. Last year in Durban, Africa's heads of state finally agreed to establish an African Union, a big step along this road. The new institution promises to build an ambitious array of institutions including a Pan African Parliament, but it is likely to be hampered by financial weakness and the vested interests of governing elites. Regional economic integration has historically been driven by a powerful manufacturing sector seeking to expand its markets. This is the case for Europe, the Far East and North America, and is manifestly the case for economic globalisation. By contrast, regional integration among non-industrialised countries has had more modest achievements – from the Mercusur economic cooperation pact in Latin America to the historic alliance of independent frontline African states against Apartheid South Africa.

As the least developed continent, Africa faces the greatest challenges to integration. With the exception of South Africa, it is largely dependent on agrarian produce, minerals and aid. The African Union's member states have long been used to seeing their continental organisation as a forum to defend their sovereign interests, and a bureaucracy in which to place 'their men'. The current and incoming chairs - South Africa and Mozambique -are both democracies, but there are fears as to the standing of the Union if a less respected country were to become its head.

However, there have been encouraging steps. In its last years the Organisation for African Unity refused to recognise the putschists in Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, and insisting on only accepting rulers who come to power through constitutional means. But only when a Pan-African parliament is established that can set continental standards for democracy, mineral companies forced to become more transparent about payments to countries, and aid distributed in ways that promote economic integration, will Africa begin to escape its structural paralysis. That will require African leaders to sacrifice the spoils of sovereignty for the long-term promise of continental development.

* Alex de Waal is Programme Director for the Commission for HIV / AIDS and Governance in Africa, and a director of Justice Africa. This editorial is a shortened version of an essay from the book 'Unbinding Africa: Making globalisation work for good governance', edited by Phoebe Griffith. More information: id=15803

* Please send comments on this editorial to editor@pambazuka.org

Promoting good governance is high on the list of priorities of Northern and African policymakers. But before we can build strong institutions, democracy and the rule of law we need to tackle the double bind facing Africans today. On the one hand, African states often do not have the capacity to institute much needed reforms. Yet the solution – giving Northern Governments, companies and NGOs overwhelming influence over how African countries are run – is only making their governments weaker over the long-term. Unbinding Africa explores how globalisation in its current form is affecting the continent.

Former President Daniel arap Moi has been asked by the anti-corruption police to record a statement over the Euro Bank scandal, it has been revealed. Investigators want to know if he ever ordered any of the former parastatal chiefs facing graft charges to pump millions of taxpayers' money into the bank before it collapsed.