Thetha – a Nguni word for debate – bring together a wide range of national, regional and international stakeholders on the expected ICT challenges and opportunities that the Southern African region will face in the next ten years are being organised by APC member SANGONeT. Pre-Thetha reports on Zimbabwe and Mozambique make useful contextual reading.

Less than 7 percent of HIV-positive children in Mozambique are receiving antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, according to a new study. A 2009 HIV/AIDS Demographic Impact Study by the National Statistics Institute (with the Portuguese acronym INE), found that about 150,000 children between 0 and 14 were living with the virus, but only 10,477 were on medication.

61 families living in the settlement of Tumbleweed, Howick, have been threatened with imminent, unlawful eviction by the municipality and the local Inkosi. Three armed police officers and a representative of the municipality told the community that they had 24 hours to vacate the area, or an eviction team would return tomorrow and on Friday with bulldozers to demolish their homes. All will be left homeless.

The Moroccan government reshuffled its cabinet on Wednesday (July 29th) to restore its parliamentary majority. King Mohammed VI appointed one minister of state and three junior ministers.

Cairo's airport has been unusually busy the past month as Egypt's security apparatus steps up its campaign against online political activists. Several prominent Egyptian bloggers have "disappeared" from the airport's arrivals hall, while others report suspiciously long delays that they claim were cover for state security officers to search their laptops and luggage.

The Community Education Computer Society (CECS), an ICT training NGO established in 1985 in South Africa, is conducting two-day workshops on free and open source software (FOSS) in five Southern African countries. Workshops will build awareness of FOSS and build capacities to conduct OpenOffice Writer courses in Lesotho, Malawi, and Namibia; and build partnerships with organisations and individuals in Angola and the Democractic Republic of Congo, to translate the FOSS portal to Portuguese and French.

ITU’s African Region Preparatory Meeting for the World Telecommunication Development Conference 2010 (WTDC) concluded last week in Kampala, Uganda with delegates reaching consensus on regional strategies to foster the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) throughout Africa. The agreed strategies and priorities will serve as inputs to next year’s WTDC.

Facebook and Twitter, the latest Web 2.0 tools to captivate Moroccans, are winning new users among everyone from chatty teens to dedicated cyberactivists. The growing popularity of the two tools indicates that Morocco's Web users, who now number 9 million, are moving beyond blogging to share information with each other and the world.

"Why is it not possible to allocate sufficient money for every aspect of global health, of which AIDS is but a part, and in so doing, meet the Millennium Development Goals - money which is but a fraction, a miniscule fraction of all the public dollars that have found their way, in one short year, into the bottomless pits of greed and avarice?" - Stephen Lewis, speaking at the opening of the International AIDS Society conference in Cape Town. This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains, among other things, excerpts from that speech.

The President of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina has reportedly boycotted the consultative meeting with SADC mediators. The meeting convened by the Special envoys from SADC), the United Nations and the African Union amongst others, is to seek a lasting solution in the Madagascar political crisis.

A meta-analysis of data on vaginal practices and HIV infection from ten African cohorts has found that both vaginal washing with soap and wiping the vagina with cloths, tissues or paper were associated with an increased risk of acquiring HIV, researchers reported at the Fifth International AIDS Society conference in Cape Town last week. The use of products to dry or tighten the vagina, often referred to as ‘dry sex’, did not however have a statistically significant association with HIV infection.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) could further raise its growth forecast for Africa next year to reflect an elevation in demand in China and some industrialised nations where signs of recovery are beginning to show. According to Antoinette Sayeh, Director of the IMF’s African Department, the end of the global recession is still some way off and African economies are feeling the dramatic decline in demand, investment, and commodity prices.

Reporters Without Borders deplores physical attacks on journalists by supporters of the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) at Lusaka international airport. The facts of incident were not disputed by President Ruphia Banda, who condemned the assault. “The president’s comments are reassuring, but apologies are not enough and concrete measures are now needed,” Reporters Without Borders said.

At the community centre in Mukuru, a slum in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, teenagers spend hours engrossed in a video game, but they are not battling other-worldly forces with super-human weapons; instead, they are finding their way through a familiar-looking city, trying to negotiate real-life situations and learn how to avoid HIV infection.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) claims that its "stress breeding", high-yield seed program and its emphasis on grassroots farmer input will boost agricultural production among poor, small scale farmers. But NGOs and environmentalists say AGRA’s Programme for Africa’s Seed System (PASS) is essentially a top-down, corporate driven approach that further threatens food security on the continent.

One of the underlying principles of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the European Union (EU) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is that it should complement and support regional integration initiatives. However, the signing of the Interim EPA (I-EPA) by some member states, and not by others, has generated uncertainty within the region.

The Vice Chancellor of the Dakar-based Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD), Abdou Salam Sall, said Thursday in Dakar that African universities might set up a Master's degree programme on the theme of the United States of Africa in a bid to contribute to the continent's political integration.

If violence is not natural, and not ingrained in our genetic makeup then the question is, what the root of violence is (violence, which is gender based). Gary Barker has done lot of research in this area and he has an answer. He is associated with International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) as Director, Gender, Violence and Rights. He strongly advocates for the engagement of men in ending gender-based violence (GBV).

Two months after a new round of devastating violence broke out in the Niger Delta, the Nigerian government has offered amnesty if all militants turn over all their weapons and renounce violence by October, and the militants have offered a 60-day cease fire after a key militant leader - Henry Okah - was released from prison earlier this month. These actions should be good signs that the region is taking its first tenuous step toward peace, however most experts believe that the region is not close to any such reality.

More than 130 civil society and human rights groups from across Africa have issued a statement calling upon African states that are parties to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to reaffirm their commitment and their obligation to cooperate with the court. The statement follows a decision by the African Union (AU) at its summit meeting on July 1-3, 2009 that its member states "shall not cooperate" with the ICC in the arrest of President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan.