The EU’s leadership team must renew pressure on Libyan authorities to come up with an alternative to this system of arbitrary detention
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/ 23 January 2008
Kimani Nganga sat in a classroom for the first time when he was 84. Four years later, the world’s oldest person to date to start school is stranded in one of Kenya’s camps for the displaced, with no classes to go to. Surrounded by about 300 other people displaced by post-election violence Nganga lives in a large tent packed with mattresses, white metal basins teeming with ants and bundles of clothes.
Margaret Waigumo cuddles her baby in a squalid house in the teeming "Soweto" slum, east of Nairobi, joining a growing number on the list of Kenya’s teen parents, victims of taboos that inhibit sex education. Waigumo became pregnant two years ago after being forced into prostitution to help her family when they were evicted from their hovel for non-payment of the monthly rent.
Islamist candidate Ahmed Abdalla Sambi won a landslide victory in weekend presidential elections in the coup-plagued Comoro islands, according to provisional results announced on Tuesday. The national election board said Sambi took 58,27% of the vote in Sunday’s polls, which it is hoped will bring stability to the volatile Indian Ocean archipelago.
On the banks of Africa’s largest lake, a deadly cocktail of poverty, prostitution and tribal widow inheritance practices is fuelling a surge in HIV/Aids even as progress is made in other areas. Here in Western Kenya where the water and fish from Lake Victoria are lifelines, communities are struggling against an alarming new rise in HIV/Aids cases that has plunged residents into despair.
With a huge amount of detergent, a young man washes a bus on the shores of Lake Victoria while a woman nearby cleans dishes seemingly oblivious to the chemical contamination. It’s an ordinary day here in Western Kenya where Africa’s largest lake is under siege, its life-sustaining waters and fish increasingly polluted by sewage, industrial waste and chemicals.