A new project called Africa Express, being carried out by Frenchmen Jeremy Debreu and Claire Guibert with support from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), is bringing attention to a different breed of alternative energy on the continent, one where Africans who lack access to energy are the main beneficiaries. For a period of ten months, the pair are traveling 20,000 km through 23 countries using trains and buses to survey a range of alternative energy projects. From a community refrigeration project in northern Senegal to a massive hydroelectric dam in Morocco, the size and nature of the projects differ.

The leader of the opposition party Gambia Moral Congress (GMC) has urged the director general of the National Intelligence Agency to resign over torture allegations. Mr Mai Fatty made these remarks in an open letter addressed to Mr Numo Kujabi, the head of the spy agency. Mr Fatty said over 90 per cent of NIA detainees had alleged some form of torture, and some of the worst brutalities were alleged to have taken place inside Bambadinka.

The New York-based press freedom body, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), has said that two unidentified gunmen shot a Somali journalist, Abdulkadir Omar Abdulle, PANA reports. The CPJ said in a communique that Abdulkadir, who works for Universal TV as a reporter and anchor, was shot on Saturday evening near his home in the southern Wadajir district of the capital, Mogadishu, but he survived the attack.

In this article about the state of South Africa's public health system, a doctor relates her experience of working on a trauma ward. 'We shouldn’t, however, allow our feelings about how perfect we expect nurses and doctors to be to blind us to the real problem, which is the shambles in which the Department of Health has left our healthcare system,' she writes. 'It is not clinicians on the ground who decide how many hospitals there should be, how many beds those hospitals should contain, what services those hospitals should offer, and how well those hospitals should be staffed. Those things are decided by administrators, as they should be. Those administrators are appointed by the Department of Health, also as it should be. And the Department of Health is run by a bunch of politicians, who are doing the most terrible job of representing the interests of the people who put them there.'

Renewed fighting over the last week in Democratic Republic of the Congo's North Kivu province has caused more than 5,000 people to flee across the border into south-west Uganda and left an unknown number internally displaced. As of Monday 9 July, Uganda Red Cross staff in the crowded Nyakabande Transit Centre in Uganda's Kisoro District had registered 5,075 new Congolese arrivals from North Kivu's neighbouring Rutshuru territory since the latest fighting between government troops and the rebel March 23 movement exploded. The defectors on Friday captured the border town of Bunagana followed by the important town of Rutshuru, causing thousands to flee.

The time has come for social activists to campaign for a Global Constitution on the Right to Health ending the current status quo where 'our ill health is politically constructed by those above us', activist Mark Heywood told the 3rd People’s Health Assembly (PHA). He said that across the world there was a growing recognition of the right to health, but that there was no definition of the duties that flow from this right. 'This means that there has really been no change in the approach to health, which means we need a global campaign for a Global Constitution on the Right to Health,' said Heywood.

Southern Africa’s long-awaited regional infrastructure development master plan is now ready for approval by the SADC Heads of State and Government Summit set for Maputo, Mozambique in August. This follows the finalisation of the master plan by ministers responsible for infrastructure in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), who met in Luanda, Angola in late June. If endorsed by the southern African leaders, the master plan would guide development in key infrastructure such as road, rail and ports, and would also act as a framework for planning and cooperation with development partners and the private sector.

Survival International says it has received disturbing reports from members of several tribes in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, which describe how the government is destroying their crops to force them to move off their land into designated resettlement areas. Those most affected by the land grabs are Suri, Bodi and Mursi pastoralists, and the Kwegu hunter-gatherer people.

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is calling for proposals for its new Multinational Working Group (GMT) on the theme of "Africa in the Information Society Era". The MWG is an important CODESRIA program aimed at promoting multinational and multidisciplinary reflections on issues affecting the African community of social science researchers. Each MWG will be led by two or three coordinators and will include a maximum of fifteen researchers. Two to three senior researchers will be selected as independent assessors and will also be resource persons during meetings of each Group. The average length of a MWG is two years during which all phases of the research process should be completed and final results prepared for publication in the CODESRIA Book Series.

South Africa needs to urgently look to countries such as Rwanda, Thailand and Brazil, where they have employed community health workers (CHWs) to deliver a range of primary health care services that dramatically reduced mortality, public health expert Professor David Sanders told the National Health Assembly (NHA). Speaking during a plenary session, Sanders said by extending the scope of what CHWs could do and by supporting properly selected and trained individuals, the country could make a very real impact on maternal and child mortality.

Media watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), has condemned an attack on a Togolese journalist who was covering a demonstration in the West Afrian state and called on authorities to immediately investigate and bring the perpetrators to justice. Atayi Ayi, a reporter for the daily Forum de la Semaine, was taking photographs of a protest in Lomé, the capital, when two groups of unidentified demonstrators beat him and seized his camera, CPJ said in a statement.

This Fact Sheet highlights the involvement of the EU in the global land grab, both directly through the involvement of European capital and corporations in the acquisition of land and indirectly, through the suite of EU policies which are transforming land into a global commodity. It concludes with a number of concrete demands and proposals for the EU to end its collusion in the global land grab and align with international human rights law, especially the Right to Food.

Egypt's President Mohammed Morsy has ordered parliament to reconvene, a month after it was dissolved. Mr Morsy, whose Muslim Brotherhood won most seats, said the chamber should reconvene until a new election is held. The military had enforced a court order last month dissolving parliament because party members had contested seats reserved for independents.

Apartheid will not end and black people will not have real freedom until free and high quality education becomes a reality, says Zwelinzima Vavi. 'Education is certainly not free and equal for all, we have huge inequalities in our education provision,' Cosatu's general secretary said on Sunday. Vavi was speaking at the opening of the Equal Education national summit.

Perched in an isolated spot some 30km (18 miles) outside Angola's capital, Luanda, Nova Cidade de Kilamba is a brand-new mixed residential development of 750 eight-storey apartment buildings, a dozen schools and more than 100 retail units. Despite all the hype, nearly a year since the first batch of 2,800 apartments went on sale, only 220 have been sold. Apartments at Kilamba are being advertised online costing between $120,000 and $200,000 - well out of reach of the estimated two-thirds of Angolans who live on less than $2 a day.

Swaziland police fired tear gas and beat stone-throwing protesters, chasing some down into a hospital, after a demonstration held in support of teachers demanding higher wages. An Associated Press reporter saw the turmoil at the end of the march, in which about 2,000 parents and teachers wound their way from a park and bus station in Mbabane, the capital, to a labor court where judges were considering a demand by the government that leaders of a teachers' strike be arrested for contempt of court and disrupting education. It was unclear when the judges would rule.

Cartoonist Zapiro had social networks abuzz with his latest cartoon which depicts President Jacob Zuma as a large phallus. Most Twitter users felt that the cartoon was distasteful and undermined Jonathan Shapiro's often accurate social commentary. Mail & Guardian editor, Nic Dawes, defended the publication’s decision to publish the cartoon. The ANC as well as its Women’s League condemned the cartoon in strong terms.

In this article from Doron Isaacs writes about the murder of Mnoneleli Ngubo, a friend and a fellow leader in Equal Education and the fifth member of Equal Education to be killed in the past three years. 'What Mylord fought for was something a little different, a decent society based on solidarity. The level of investment and reform that will be needed to achieve this is not even under discussion. The work now to be done will surely be harder without him.'

A new report from Global Witness reveals that Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) appears to have received off budget financing from a Hong Kong-based businessman as the CIO and other security agencies continue to prepare to influence elections due to take place sometime in 2013, reports the latest issue of the AfricaFocus Bulletin, which contains a press release on the report from Global Witness, the Executive Summary of the report, and selected additional excerpts.

HIV care and treatment has come a long way in the past decade, write Brian Honermann and Mark Heywood in this opinion piece marking 10 years since South Africa's Constitutional Court upheld the constitutional right of all HIV positive pregnant women to access health care services to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV (PMTCT). 'In 2002, an HIV positive mother would pass on HIV to her baby about 30% of the time. With access to Nevirapine the transmission rate was cut in half. Now, with better drug regimens being used, transmission of HIV from mothers to babies happens in only about 4% of cases during or shortly after birth.'