A mass free distribution of mosquito nets in Kenya that has nearly halved child deaths from malaria in high-risk areas has led the World Health Organisation to recommend for the first time that nets should be given away, rather than sold, in the developing world. In a project that is being hailed as a model for other African countries, Kenya’s ministry of health has distributed 13,5-million insecticide-treated nets across the country since 2003.
In celebration of Women’s Month, Absa Private Bank has launched a private equity fund for women only. According to research conducted by Momentum, private equity funds have outperformed the FTSE/JSE Africa All Share Index by 18% per annum over the past 13 years.
A high-stakes diplomatic poker game is unfolding between South Africa and France. Last month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Senegal and Gabon, two former French colonies, where some of the 11 000 troops France has garrisoned across the continent are still visible almost 50 years after independence.
One of the most inequitable and amoral acts in modern times is happening in front of our eyes and there is hardly a murmur of protest. The multibillion-dollar bail-out of global finance after one of the most reckless periods of lending and deal-making since the late 1920s is extraordinarily one-sided.
The findings contained in the 260-page report by Kader Asmal’s ad hoc committee on the review of Chapter 9 and related institutions makes far-reaching recommendations that might require the amendment of the Constitution, the retrenchment of up to 40 commissioners and will test the political will of the executive.
I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. ”This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”
Here comes the No 1 gruesome invention of the century: the bra you wear 1cm under your skin, called Cup&Up. Dr Eyal Gur, head of microsurgery at the Sourasky medical centre in Tel Aviv, has thought up this ghastly procedure, and claims that droves of women are clamouring to have it done for a few thousand dollars.
I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. ”This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”
Presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga wants evidence of dereliction of duty by the health minister. But the Aids-drug lobby offers only Wikipedia constitutionalism, asserting that Thabo Mbeki has fired the true architect of the country’s widely admired HIV/Aids policies, former deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, writes Ronald Suresh Roberts.
The recent Southern African Development Community summit in Lusaka was clouded by a seven-year-old face-off between Africa and the West over Zimbabwe. And the continuing brinkmanship promises to haunt the Euro-Africa summit in Portugal and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Uganda, both of which take place later this year, writes Peter Kagwanja.