Countries tackling food insecurity and climate change adaptation can greatly benefit from agroforestry - integrating fleshy plants and trees into their farming systems, environmental specialists say. Sub-Saharan Africa has a history of food insecurity brought on by meagre rains, land degradation, declining soil fertility and bad management of resources, among other factors.

Africa's neglected tropical diseases (NTD) burden is more than double the burden of tuberculosis and almost half that of malaria, a new analysis has found — raising questions about funding priorities. More than 500 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa suffer from seven key neglected infections, according to researchers writing in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases last week (25 August).

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Comic Relief is tackling a wide variety of problems that poor, disadvantaged and vulnerable people face across Africa and in developing countries around the world. One of our key priorities for our work in Africa is to improve the quality of life of people living with HIV and to strengthen their engagement in the response to the epidemic. Join us to manage and develop our grant making programme for people affected by HIV and AIDS.

Your experience of working in international development and project management skills will help you to implement and shape our grant making strategy in this area as you manage grants, develop policy and promote improved practice and learning among grantees. Ideally you’ll have a good understanding of the issues facing people affected by HIV and AIDS, but what is certain is that you have the ability to think strategically about our impact, build effective relationships within the sector, measure the effectiveness of our grants and identify opportunities for us to add value in this area.

Apply online at or send a large SAE, quoting ref: CR0962, to Recruitment, Comic Relief, 5th Floor, 89 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7TP. Closing date: Monday 14th September 2009.

(Comic Relief positively welcomes, and seeks to ensure we achieve, diversity in our workforce and that all job applicants and employees receive equal and fair treatment, regardless of age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or nationality. We encourage applications from disabled people as they are currently under-represented in the organisation and guarantee an interview to all disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for the job. Registered charity 326568.)

This document looks at the involvement of children, including young children, in responses to HIV and AIDS and examines issues around children's participation. It explores the challenges of enabling children to express their views and priorities effectively and suggests how they can best be supported through a range of appropriate media and communication approaches.

A national committee against high food prices during Ramadan has called for protests and sit-ins in a number of Moroccan regions, starting with one in Berchid on September 11th, and another in front of the parliamentary building, said committee member Muhammed Ghafri. "A public protest organised by the campaign committee seems appropriate at this time of year, which coincides with summer, Ramadan, the start of the school year and the economic crisis, as we're faced with constant price rises," said Abdessalam Adib, the co-ordinator for the campaign against the rising cost of living.

House screening can reduce the amount of mosquitoes and prevent malaria related anaemia in children, a Lancet study has shown. Every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria and by 2006 over 247 million cases of malaria were reported resulting in a million deaths of mostly African children. It remains one of the world’s greatest childhood killers and accounts for close to 40% of public health funding.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic may have contributed to the high incidence of cervical cancer in Zambia, where the number of cases is the second highest in sub-Saharan Africa, and HIV prevalence is one of the highest in the world. Women infected with HIV are thought to be three to five times more likely to develop cervical lesions that can become cancerous. "In a suppressed immunity due to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS makes women more at risk from infection," said Prof Groesbeck Parham, co-director of the Cervical Cancer Prevention Programme in Zambia.

Former Ivorian Minister of Justice, Mrs. Jaqueline Lohoues-Oble, on Thursday announced her intention to run for the country's presidency, whose first round is scheduled for 29 November. Associate Professor of Law and Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cocody, Oble, who was also a parliamentarian and senior adviser to Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny, is the first woman to run for a Presidential election in Cote d'Ivoire.

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The government is investigating whether a nationwide shortage of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs led to the reported deaths of HIV-positive people in northern Uganda this month. Health workers in Apac district reported that at least 17 people known to have been HIV-positive died over the past month after failing to receive their life-prolonging medication due to supply shortfalls.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, and the country's second city, Beira this week, to protest the government's closure of day care hospitals for HIV-positive patients. In Maputo, activists handed Health Minister Paulo Ivo Garrido a memorandum slamming the decision, which they said was a setback in the national response to the epidemic. An estimated 16 percent of Mozambique's 21 million people are living with the virus.

While a number of countries in southern Africa have made great strides in improving access to antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for HIV-infected adults, progress in rolling out treatment for HIV-positive infants and children has lagged behind. Namibia is a notable exception. Over 7,600 children are receiving ARV treatment - 100 percent of those estimated to be in need of the life-prolonging medicine - according to Dr Angela Mushavi of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a technical advisor to Namibia's prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) programme.

Laboratories from 13 African countries have joined a scheme to improve diagnostic capacity on the continent. The scheme, to be overseen by the WHO Regional Office for Africa and the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was announced in Kigali, Rwanda on 27 July.

Campaigners against HIV/AIDS in Mauritania face an uphill task to put their messages across, especially those that deal with safer sex and condom use. Campaigners have to cut corners in order to avoid angering the country's powerful religious clerics. "With a predominantly Muslim population that seeks guidance from the Quran, any advocacy outside the main parameters of religion is more often than not frowned upon, derided and scorned," says John Sadeed head OF NADOA, an advocacy NGO in Mauritania that promotes attitudinal changes and positive living for those people with HIV.

Access to food for the people of Madagascar remains unreliable because of the impact of natural disasters, which routinely strike the island State, and continuing political tensions, a United Nations report has warned. The joint Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) mission tasked with assessing crop and food security in Madagascar underscored the effect a run of cyclones on the east coast in 2008-2009 and several years of drought in the south has had on the country’s crops.

Health care practitioners are now performing Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in a process known as medicalization, which tends to reinforce and legitimize FGM, hence hindering the global effort towards its abandonment, a recent study claims. The joint research study by United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and United Nations Children's Fund {UNICEF} has however elicited diverse reactions from Kenyan medical professionals, with some stating that they were yet to catch any medical personnel carrying out FGM.

From 13 to 17 November 2009 hundreds of representatives from civil society, nongovernmental and people’s movements of small scale food providers, Indigenous
Peoples, food and rural workers, youth, women and food insecure city dwellers will meet in Rome to share and articulate their findings, proposals and actions at local, regional and global levels. The timing and location are designed to facilitate interaction with the 2009 FAO World Food Summit and to bring the voices and the lessons of people’s organizations to the ears of the Heads of State and Governments and to the international institutions gathered to discuss how to deal with an increasingly hungry world.

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.

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.

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.