Ten months after the West African country started to emerge from a presidential election crisis during which almost all hospitals and clinics had to shut down for a good six months because they had been vandalised, looted and occupied, the new government under President Alassane Ouattara is trying to make public health care a priority. But in a country recovering from 12 years of political instability since a military coup in December 1999 that was followed by 10 years of Gbagbo’s autocratic rule, rebuilding a crumbling public health care system takes time.

Strategies that worked well to drive up men's willingness to participate included the use of peer educators, community events and incentives tied to project phases. Less popular were the use of mobile-phone messaging due to frequent phone number changes, and treatment buddies, which sparked privacy concerns among actual trial participants. This was one of the things researchers found out in the world's largest study of preventative tuberculosis therapy.

On 9 March, the Committee on Word Food Security (CFS) completed the intergovernmental negotiations of the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Tenure of Land Fisheries and Forests in the context of national food security. The guidelines contain valuable points that will provide backing to organizations in their long struggle to ensure the care and use of resources and natural goods in order to produce more nourishing food, so helping to eliminate hunger from the world by addressing its root causes, says this press release from a coalition of civil society organisations.

More than 25,000 striking health workers on Friday (09 March) started receiving dismissal letters as retired nurses and interns applied for their jobs. This happened as some nurses in Western Kenya resumed work but their counterparts in other parts of the country vowed to continue with the strike or were split on the way forward.

Tanzanian doctors have suspended a nationwide strike after the country's president met union representatives to defuse a row with government, the doctors association said. The more than 1,000-strong Medical Association of Tanzania (MAT) is demanding better pay and conditions and the sacking of Health Minister Hadji Mponda and his deputy, whom they accuse of being 'enemies of doctors and the health sector as a whole'.

A strike by health workers entered its 10th day on Sunday as private and referral hospitals struggled to cope. 'I am concerned about the anxiety, including psychological torture, Kenyans have gone through in the last few days due to the industrial action,' Health minister Anyang’ Nyong’o said in a notice. 'We are working around the clock to address the issues and reach an amicable solution,' read the statement, dated March 9.

Gambia has appealed for food aid after it said that 70 percent of its crops failed during the last growing season, extending the reach of a food crisis already hitting millions of people across Africa's Sahel strip. Gambia's agriculture ministry said the impact of poor rains last year had been exacerbated by high world food prices, crippling household incomes in the West African state, which has ridden out previous food crises.

Gold miners in Southern Africa are probably the group worst affected by tuberculosis (TB) in the world. This is according to Dr David Mametja of South Africa’s National TB Programme. In a recent interview, Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi compared the country’s TB burden to a snake, and said that TB among mineworkers the fangs of the snake. Speaking at a briefing earlier this week, Mametja also emphasised government’s concern about the high prevalence of the disease among miners, and said that it is holding an entire region back in the fight against TB.

Millions of newborns, children and mothers continue to die needlessly, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where rates of child mortality are the highest in the world. In this region one out of every eight children die before their fifth birthday, twenty times the rate of industrialised countries. Speaking at a Healthcare in Africa conference yesterday (WED) Carolyn Miles, President and CEO of Save the Children, said although there has been a reduction in the under five mortality rate, the death of newborns was still the 'stubborn piece of the problem'.

A total of 27 people have died as a result of a cholera outbreak, the Health Ministry in Sierra Leone has declared. Over 1,000 cases have been recorded in three districts in the northern region of the country - Port Loko, Kambia and Pujenhun. Health ministry officials confirmed that those who have contracted the disease did so from drinking contaminated water.

The Kenyan government's recent failure to adequately treat a patient with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) has some civil society organizations questioning whether the country's TB programme is equipped to diagnose and treat such patients. In October 2011, an HIV-positive Nairobi woman was diagnosed with XDR-TB while receiving her treatment at the Kenyatta National Hospital for multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB). Treatment was provided by the hospital; however, she was prescribed three additional medicines that she had to buy herself, to supplement the regimen.

Last year alone, 376,000 people with HIV started antiretroviral medication - over 100 000 more than the previous year. Sadly, during that same year up to 450 000 people were infected with HIV, mostly due to 'the lack of a co-ordinated and effective prevention response'. These are some of the issues raised by the Health Systems Trust’s SA Health Review 2011, which was launched recently in Pretoria.

Sala Aminata, a housewife from Logone and Shari Division in Cameroon’s Far North Region, looks at her six kids with apprehension as she tries to figure out how to feed them with her meagre salary. Rising food prices come after a drought late last year destroyed the majority of the harvest in the Sahel – the arid zone between the Sahara desert in North Africa and Sudan’s Savannas in the south. Rural populations throughout the region have started to run out of food since early February, six months before the next harvest is expected. And all governments in the Sahel, except for Senegal, have appealed for international assistance as 12 million people in the region are threatened by hunger.

Farmers’ organisations in the Democratic Republic of Congo say the country’s new Agriculture Law - enacted last December - could lead to many smallholder farmers losing their land. 'We have launched a major appeal to the government to modify the law,' Paluku Mivimba, president of FOPAC, the Congo Federation of Smallholder Farmer Organisations, told IPS. 'Several articles of this law create insecurity of tenure for peasant farmers because they eliminate the possibility of peasant farmers becoming owners of land they have been cultivating for many years,' said Mivimba, who is also the head of the federation’s lobbying unit.

Mothers, babies and newly diagnosed HIV patients are receiving more of the services they need but progress comes at a cost, according to a new report that predicts a funding shortfall for HIV treatment in South Africa. On 23 February, the Health Systems Trust released the latest versions of its annual District Health Barometer and South African Health Review. Although in its sixth year of publication, this year's barometer is the first to include data on early infant HIV testing for babies born to HIV-positive mothers and shows that about half of all babies born to HIV-positive mothers are now being tested for the virus at six weeks of age, an important step to ensuring they access the early HIV treatment recommended for all children younger than one under national guidelines.

A lawyer for an opponent of Malawi's president says his client is no longer being watched by police at the hospital where he is being treated for heart problems. Opposition and church leaders in Malawi had joined international human rights organisations in criticizing Ralph Kasambara's treatment. Kasambara was arrested 13 February, accused of kidnapping and torturing three men he told reporters had confessed they had been sent by the government to firebomb his office. The government denies Kasambara's accusations. Kasambara denies the charges against him.

While welcoming aspects of South Africa's new budget announced on 22 February, civil society grouping SECTION 27 says it remains concerned about aspects of the health budget. Even though the health budget has increased, SECTION 27 fears this could be undone by mismanagement, corruption, wasteful expenditure and a lack of capacity for implementation. Amongst other concerns, it notes that increases in allocations for HIV and AIDS programmes will not result in the expected expansion of these programmes unless problems relating to staffing, infrastructure and the payment of service providers are resolved.

Government has moved one step further towards the establishment of the massive National Health Insurance scheme for South Africa, with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan today announcing an allocation of R1 billion to the scheme's pilot projects. The money comes from the R121 billion health budget which aims to improve hospital infrastructure and strengthen the public health system ahead of the introduction of the NHI, which will be phased in over a period of 14 years, starting this year.

A cholera epidemic has spread to nine out of 11 provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations has said. The UN said the spread was 'worrisome' as the epidemic had so far killed 644 people and infected 26,000 since January 2011.

By systematically refusing to answer questions about abuses and dispossession in Sudan and Ethiopia the oil giant Lundin Petroleum and Sweden's minister for foreign affairs Carl Bildt have found a winning strategy, writes Kerstin Lundell, author of the award winning 'Business in Blood and Oil: Lundin Petroleum in Africa'. 'Based on earlier experiences, we find it's not of a constructive nature to comment on unsubstantiated claims about Lundin Petroleum and the corporation's business.' That's all the answer I've received for all the questions I've asked for the past four years about the company's knowledge of or involvement with all the events - the murders, the burning of entire villages - in Sudan and Ethiopia that I've encountered as I collected material for my book 'Business in Blood and Oil' and for articles in Process Nordic magazine.