New vaccination programmes against rotavirus are starting to have a positive impact, and could eventually prevent hundreds of thousands of child deaths a year, according to a new report.

South Sudan's former rebels have chosen a northern Muslim as their candidate in April's presidential election, the country's first multiparty poll since 1986. The candidacy of Yassir Arman was announced by the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, which leads the government in the semi-autonomous south, on Friday after lengthy talks among party officials.

Malili – a 5,000 acre East African technopolis – is a city built up for technology firms and it’s the Kenyan government’s way of creating a regional ICT brand. The Malili project is modeled off of other large technology and research parks around the world. One often cited in comparison is Smart Village Cairo, which currently hosts 120 companies and 20,000 professionals and they’re expecting that to increase to 500 companies and 100,000 professionals by 2012.

The announcement in late 2009 that the government had approved a new HIV/AIDS policy in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) was widely welcomed by AIDS and human rights lobbyists as long overdue. A November 2009 statement by the SANDF noted that the new policy made provision for the "recruitment and selective deployment of HIV-positive members" of the military and complied with a High Court ruling in May 2008, which found the previous policy of excluding HIV-positive people from recruitment and foreign deployment unconstitutional.

Nigeria's Senate and cabinet are at loggerheads over President Umaru Yar'Adua, who has spent two months in hospital in Saudi Arabia. The cabinet has declared that he is still capable of governing the country.

Integrated, comprehensive and inclusive armed violence reduction (AVR) programmes are an emerging and growing area of development practice around the world. This paper, published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, discusses the components of a multi-level AVR approach.

Members of the Anglican Church are planning to hold a prayer meeting this Sunday in protest against ongoing persecution from an ousted bishop who is using the police to disrupt their services.

The Security Council on Thursday sought to nudge Ivory Coast into holding much-delayed elections soon by extending the mandate of U.N. peacekeepers there by four months instead of the usual six. The West African nation that is the world's top cocoa producer has missed a series of deadlines for a presidential poll originally due in 2005 to resolve divisions that fueled a 2002-03 civil war that split the country in two.

An echo that turns itself into many voices, into a network of voices that, before the deafness of power, opts to speak to itself, knowing itself to be one and many, acknowledging itself to be equal in its desire to listen and be listened to, recognizing itself as different in the tonalities and levels of voices forming it. A network of voices that resist the war that power wages on them. – Words of the Zapatistas at the “First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism.”

Ethiopia has become a market for owners of high bandwidth fibre optic cable systems; at least four foreign companies are aiming to get all or a slice of this vast potential market, reliable sources disclosed.

Regional radio professionals and an international organisation promoting cross-cultural dialogue joined together to launch a Mediterranean-wide radio station from Tunis on Tuesday (January 19th).

The lack of a coherent and committed international approach to tackling the role of natural resources in conflict is costing lives in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and heightening the risk of further unrest in other fragile states such as Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea, according to a new report from Global Witness.

Ten-year-old Tembuso Magagula sat outside her classroom with her shoulders hunched against the cold today, tears streaming from her eyes. Her long-awaited first day of school had turned into a nightmare. Magagula expected to start grade one this year - four years late - as a beneficiary of the Free Primary Education programme which started on Jan. 26 in all public schools.

"The April 6, 1994 assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana was the work of Hutu extremists who calculated that killing their own leader would torpedo a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords. The landmark deal would have ended years of conflict by creating a broad-based transitional government and an integrated Rwandan army.

As business, government and private sector leaders gather in the Swiss town of Davos this week for the World Economic Forum, global food security and poverty will be among the key challenges they will need to tackle.

Mixed reactions have marred Liberia following the recent announcement by President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf that she will run for re-election in 2011. Ms Sirleaf has said that she had not realised before the 2005 polls how much rebuilding work needed to be done in Liberia. She became Africa's first elected female head of state after winning 53 percent of the vote.

Media and communication activists and organizations in South Africa have united into the strongest since the collapse of formal apartheid: the SOS Support Public Broadcasting coalition. The coalition formed first in response to the governance and financial crisis at the SABC and then broadened to engage the Department of Communication's (DOC) bold steps to review Broadcasting legislation.

UNICEF and the Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) at The New School will host an international conference on adolescent girls in April 2010. With an emphasis on reviewing existing evidence and policies, the conference will focus on the role and potential agency of adolescent girls in meeting emerging global challenges.

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Zambia Chapter has observed that Zambia is running out of time to prepare for the mandatory migration of broadcasting services from analogue to a digital platform.

One year after President Obama was sworn in to office, and less than a week before his State of the Union address, Africa Action has released its Africa Policy Outlook 2010, also published by Foreign Policy in Focus. The Outlook is an annual publication forecasts the key issues and developments in Africa policy, such as climate change, the global economic crisis, HIV/AIDS, foreign aid and other country topics, and it analyzes trends in U.S. relations with Africa under the current administration.