The African Union commission chairman Jean Ping has been unhappy about Sudan’s lack of progress on handing justice for victims of alleged war crimes committed in Darfur, according to a classified U.S. document obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. Ping’s views came at a meeting he held in January 2009 with representatives of the P-3 group (United States, United Kingdom and France) in London.

Without access to sanitary towels, a girl child in the SADC region may be excluded from her right to education. The Commonwealth Education Fund (CEF) and the Girl Child Network (GCN) have discovered that despite the provision of free schooling by the Kenyan government, more than 800,000 children (mostly girls) continue to forgo the opportunity of education. The CGE and the GCN found that during menstruation, some girls refused to go to school because they cannot access sanitary towels and the school toilets are unsafe or unusable. The high cost of sanitary towels also results in the use of unhygienic sponges, tissue paper and even foliage during menstruation.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said on 7 February that it was concerned about the well-being of two Ivorian journalists who have been detained without charge for 10 days amid reports that they have been tortured in custody. Aboubacar Sanogo and Yayoro Charles Lopez Kangbé have been held by the Ivorian military police in Abidjan since 28 January, according to local journalists and news reports. The journalists have been described as 'rebels' by newspapers supporting Laurent Gbagbo.

The Tanzanian government has embarked on a large-scale voluntary male circumcision programme aimed at reducing the HIV risk of men and boys in areas of the country with low levels of male circumcision. 'We have already completed a pilot project and we are now scaling up male circumcision,' said Bennet Fimbo, HIV/AIDS adviser to the Tanzania Ministry of Health. 'The target group in the campaign will be men and boys aged 10-34.'

Egypt's new vice-president, Omar Suleiman, has long sought to demonise the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in his contacts with skeptical US officials, leaked diplomatic cables show, raising questions whether he can act as an honest broker in the country's political crisis. US Embassy messages from the anti-secrecy WikiLeaks cache of 250 000 State Department documents, which Reuters independently reviewed, also report that the former intelligence chief accused the Brotherhood of spawning armed extremists and warned in 2008 that if Iran ever backed the banned Islamist group, Tehran would become 'our enemy'.

Six people were remanded at Buwama police prison in the outskirts of Ugandan capital Kampala for booing President Yoweri Museveni, police spokesperson Judith Nabakooba said. Speaking to the local Daily Monitor Monday (07 February), Ms Nabakooba said the matter was before court. Early reports, however, published by allege that 20 people were arrested for booing the President while on a campaign trail at Buwama market.

The Black Sash has accepted a settlement offer after taking the government to court on behalf of tens of thousands of people waiting to have their social grant appeals heard. The human rights organisation and 24 disabled people from the Eastern Cape launched a legal application in June last year following persistent attempts to persuade the Department of Social Development to clear the huge appeals backlog and deal with excessive delays. According to the Department's own figures, more than 65,000 people across the country are trapped in a systemic appeals backlog in the office of its Minister and at the tribunal appointed to hear the appeals of those who've had their grant applications rejected.

Compiled on the Towards Freedom website is a collection of recommended reports and resources on current events unfolding in Egypt and across the region.

The regional agencies of eight non-governmental organisations under a platform Inter-Agency for Education on Friday decided to take advantage of the World Social Forum (FSM) to be hosted in Senegal from 6 to 11 February 2011 to join their forces to attain the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the domain of education. The Inter-Agency for Education, which brings together ActionAid, Ancefa, Fawe, Oneworld UK, Oxfam, Plan, UNICEF and Word Vision, is a framework of synergy and knowledge sharing aimed at strengthening the voice of the civil society for quality and free public education.

Burundi's decision to restore legal status to a prominent activist group banned in 2009 is a positive step and should prompt further government actions to engage with civil society, Human Rights Watch has said. On 28 January, Interior Minister Edouard Nduwimana reversed a November 2009 order that had banned the Forum for the Strengthening of Civil Society (Forum pour le Renforcement de la Société Civile, FORSC). FORSC is an umbrella organisation that coordinates initiatives by Burundian civil society groups and has often criticised human rights violations by the government.

Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Dakar on Sunday to mark the start of the annual World Social Forum. Activists carried colorful banners denouncing land grabs, restrictive immigration laws, agricultural subsidies in Europe and the US and many other issues. Others sang freedom songs and played drums whilst marching peacefully through the streets along a route that began near the offices of Senegal's public broadcaster, RTS, and ended at the Cheikh Anta Diop University, the main venue for the weeklong gathering.

This paper outlines the World Bank’s involvement in the carbon market and reviews concerns about its impacts on greenhouse gas emission reductions and development. First, it introduces the role and aims of the Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit and the various funds and facilities that it manages. The Bank has worked to shape the carbon market by reducing risk for other investors, setting social and environmental standards, and developing new types of projects. It is now focusing on promoting national programmes', reducing emissions from deforestation; and large-scale, long-term carbon finance.

The effort by three of Africa’s economic communities to form a combined free trade area from Cape to Cairo involving up to 700 million people will gather momentum next month when their representatives meet in South Africa for their second tripartite summit. The combined free trade area is envisaged to unlock large cross-border infrastructure for communications, roads, rail, marine ports and air development to facilitate trade, while citizens will be able to travel freely and their skills shared by member countries.

Zimbabwe's defence minister has said the army will crush any Egyptian-style uprising led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. The latter said last week that there is nothing wrong with people demanding their rights, including in Zimbabwe. 'We in Zanu PF (Mugabe’s party, ed.) are determined to make sure that there is peace,' defence minister Emmerson Mnangagwa said to military commanders in the weekend. 'Those who may want to emulate what happened in Tunisia or what is happening in Egypt will regret it because we will not allow any chaos in this country,' Mnangagwa said.

Days after the global elite's jamboree at the Swiss resort of Davos, a week-long carnival of the oppressed and the marginalised, and those speaking for them, has begun in the capital of this western African nation, with thousands of left-leaning activists declaiming against globalisation and its discontents. The debates will revolve around resistance and struggles of the peoples of Africa for sustainable development as the continent zooms back into global focus, with some of African economies doing better than the developed world. 'The marginalisation of Africa is an important theme at the forum. Land grabs have put the focus back on issues of social justice,' Sanusha Naidu, a South African of Indian origin, who heads Emerging Powers in Africa programme at Fahamu, a global NGO, told IANS.

A low-cost maternal ultrasound system that began as a class project by a group of college students at the University of Washington in Seattle is to be tested by midwives in Uganda, a country with one of the world's highest maternal mortality rates. Around 10 Ugandan midwives will be selected to participate in the field test project. The experiment will evaluate whether the device matches the midwives' needs and skills. The device is designed to enable midwives to detect conditions that can complicate pregnancies and birth.

In parts of Madagascar's drought-prone south people have resorted to eating cattle-feed, as successive years of crop failures and the current lean season give food insecurity a firmer grip on the region. 'For some time now people have been changing their eating habits, with many eating red cactus that is usually given to cattle, or tamarind mixed with water and earth,' said Harinesy Rajeriharineranio, southern Madagascar coordinator for Actions Socio-Sanitaire et Organisation Secours (ASOS), an NGO focused on health and sanitation, based in the southeastern city of Fort Dauphin.

A radical Muslim sect responsible for killings across northeastern Nigeria demanded on Monday (6 February) that troops withdraw from the troubled region and that the government rebuild destroyed mosques. A spokesperson for the sect, known locally as Boko Haram, issued the demand after the group recently claimed responsibility for killing seven people, including the dominant gubernatorial candidate in Borno state.

The US has followed Germany's footsteps to withhold about $350 million that was supposed to be disbursed to Malawi this month through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Last month, US Government announced that Malawi had qualified for the $350 million grant to improve the energy sector. The signing of the same was supposed to take place mid February in Washington. However, Washington has put a plug to the whole process citing Malawi’s failure to observe governance and human rights issues.

Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba has publicly expressed frustration at the slow pace of the country's land redistribution programme, a process which he urged government to swiftly address. Pohamba told the country's first cabinet session in 2011 that the largely discredited willing buyer willing seller principle had been a failure and implored the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement to speedily finalise the Consolidated Draft Land Bill and the implementation of small scale farming projects.