The food insecure population in Southern Sudan has increased significantly since January, following escalated inter-tribal/clan and cattle–raiding conflicts during 2009, combined with poor rainfall that led to reduced crop and off-farm production. Areas affected by conflict include Jonglei, Warrap, Unity, and Lakes states, as well as Mvolo and Mundri East counties in Western Equatoria.

At least 400 children, mostly pedestrians, die in road accidents in Uganda every year, the Minister of Works and Transport has announced. 46% of those injured road accidents are urban children and it is twice the percent of falls and burns added together, according to the Injury Control Centre of Uganda report.

Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans living in South Africa are still living in desperate squalor, in a country that offers them no official sanctuary. This is according to a new report released by the Solidarity Peace Trust, titled: “Desperate lives, twilight worlds - how a million Zimbabweans live without sanction or sanctuary in South Africa.” The report released on Wednesday details the dire reality facing Zimbabwean immigrants who fled their country seeking safety and work in South Africa, a trend that is still continuing.

Use of cotrimoxazole, a cheap and widely available antibiotic, cut the death rate by half in the first 72 weeks on antiretroviral therapy in over 3,000 HIV-infected, symptomatic and severely immunosuppressed patients in Uganda and Zimbabwe, Sarah Walker and colleagues reported in an analysis of the DART trial published on March 29 in the online edition of The Lancet.

After months of varying views on the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), member states of the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) have finally taken a “harmonised” position on the matter when the next round of negotiations with the European Commission (EC) begins.

President Robert Mugabe swore in members of electoral and human rights commissions on Wednesday, a step toward fully implementing his power-sharing agreement with rival Morgan Tsvangirai. "I think what is important is that we are able to fulfill some of the agreements," Tsvangirai said after the swearing-in ceremony, according to state news agency New Ziana.

A network of community knowledge workers (CKWs) in Uganda uses a suite of mobile applications to give farmers a broad range of information. The CKWs can provide farming advice, market data, pest- and disease-control training, plus weather forecasts. Working with GPS, they have also collected survey data to supply agricultural researchers with detailed, location-specific information on diseases affecting local crops.

The world's 49 least developed countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the poor, could feel the effects of the global economic crisis for decades, a senior U.N. official warned this week. Under-Secretary-General Cheick Sidi Diarra told IPS that if the international community does not live up to pledges made under Brussels Programme of Action nearly a decade ago, even the small gains made during 2000-2008 could be reversed.

Experts from around the world are trying to attract attention to deadly but little-known illnesses, such as Chagas disease, visceral leishmaniasis and sleeping sickness, that have been neglected by the pharmaceutical industry. So-called neglected tropical diseases, which also include malaria, dengue fever and schistosomiasis, in conjunction with tuberculosis are responsible for 11.4 percent of the global burden of illness, but only 1.3 percent of the 1,556 new drugs registered between 1975 and 2004 were specifically developed for these diseases.

The second continental congress of the Federation of African Journalists (FAJ), the African regional organisation of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), has been concluded Sunday in Harare, Zimbabwe, on a call for a stronger and more united journalist movement in the Africa.

Sierra Leoneans have woken up for the first time after ten years without the United Nations radio. The UN radio which was set up in 2000 played a significant role in consolidating peace in the West Africa nation. Until last night it was the 'most trusted' independent broadcaster with a country wide transmission.

Thousands of construction workers are being laid off in Angola because the government has failed to settle over $2 billion in arrears to foreign firms rebuilding the African nation, a union leader said on Thursday. Francisco Jacinto, leader of the country's largest union CGSILA, said the arrears and a slowdown in the construction sector were the two main reasons behind the lay-offs.

Mumia Abu Jamal’s birthday is on April 24 and ‘we would like to celebrate the whole month of April with a gigantic Freedom Birthday Remembrance for him’, write his friends and family. Please join all who love and admire Mumia by avalanching him through the month of April with birthday wishes. ‘Mumia has already done 32 years and is still on death row because of prosecutorial misconduct. Yet he is innocent! Act now before it is too late.’

A group of army officers in Guinea-Bissau is reported to have detained the chief of staff and the prime minister. Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior was set free after several hours. The whereabouts of President Malam Bacai Sanha are unknown. Heavily armed troops attempted to gain access to the UN headquarters, where a former head of the navy had fled.

The rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others, including at least 80 children, during a previously unreported four-day rampage in the Makombo area of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo in December 2009, Human Rights Watch said in a report.

Human rights organisations have been demanding an independent inquiry into the death of a Nigerian asylum seeker died while being deported and a stop to all forced repatriations. Switzerland's sixth deportation flight of 2010, scheduled for the evening of Mar. 17 with 16 Nigerians on board, never took off. Among the prisoners was Alex Uzowulu, 29, whose asylum claim had been previously rejected.

When Mbuyiselo Botha decided to take the African National Congress League President, Julius Malema, to court for hate speech against women, he was confident from the start that the case had merit. But he also knew that this would be the most challenging test of his 15 years of gender activism.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on Ethiopia to lift all restrictions on Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts after the government summarily jammed the network's broadcasts in Amharic, amid accusations of peddling "destabilising propaganda".

A Nigerian civil rights group said Wednesday it would appeal an Islamic court order to shut down its chat forums on Facebook and Twitter which criticize the practice of Islamic law in northern states.

Uganda expects to stop importing fuel in five years when the east African nation anticipates to start fully producing petroleum products from a planned refinery, a senior government official said on Thursday.