International Monetary Fund (IMF) investigators are arriving in Angola on Wednesday on the trail of almost $1bn which the IMF believes vanished from state coffers in 2001 alone. The money, an internal report alleged late last year, came from oil sales, the cornerstone of Angola's foreign trade.

Angola on Monday launched the biggest health campaign in the country’s history, aiming to inoculate seven million children against measles. Spearheaded by the Ministry of Health, with key financial, logistical and training support from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the campaign seeks to vaccinate every child aged between nine months and 15 years, a UNICEF statement said.

Child soldiers who fought in the Angolan civil war have been excluded from demobilization programs, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. April marks the one-year anniversary of the agreement that brought peace to mainland Angola in 2002. Both the largest opposition group, National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and the government used child soldiers in the war. Children’s rights groups have estimated that as many as 11,000 children were involved in the last years of the fighting. Some children received weapons and arms training and fought in the conflict. Many others acted as porters, cooks, spies and laborers.

UNICEF has urged the Angolan government to support the nation's nascent peace process with increased spending on health and education for children.

We are seeking a person with 3 years development/relief experience to work with Christian Aid partner organisations in Angola. Your experience should include field-based emergency response work and provision of training/accompaniment in relief and rehabilitation project management, preferably with local organisations. Experience of food security work and agricultural rehabilitation in a developing country context will be an advantage.

Rafael Marques, an Angolan journalist currently working for the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa in Angola, presented a paper at a Conference on Conflict and External Interferences in Barcelona last year. In the paper, Marques explores the causes of the Angolan conflict by observing that numerous failed peace agreements perpetuated and nurtured the conflict instead of helping to resolve it. He further states that the illegitimacy of power, internal contests for power, ethnic divisions, corrupt elites, social fragmentations, and colonial and Cold War legacies contribute to the continued conflict.

The Angolan judicial system should be deeply reformed in the sense that it should be able to fight corruption in terms of the abuse of power and nepotism to guarantee the establishment of a State where no one is above the law. This was one of the recommendations of a colloquium on “The Role of the Citizens in the Management of the Country's Resources”, held in Luanda in March.

For the first time since independence, economic and political reform has become a strategic imperative for the government of Angola. Elections and the desire to enhance its image after four decades of war are important motivations. But reform will not come quickly and requires a long-term strategy of international engagement. This report from the International Crisis Group sets out policies to encourage a democratic post-war transition and fiscal transparency - especially in the oil sector.

On the first anniversary of Angola's peace accord that ended 27-years of war, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has pleaded with the international community not to forget the southern African nation. "As the world focuses on Iraq, now is not the time to overlook Angola," UNICEF Angola Representative Mario Ferrari said in a statement.

It has been just over a year since the end of decades of brutal war in Angola, the second richest country in Africa. What are the current challenges facing Angola and how does this country factor into Africa’s future? The All About Angola series is an effort to provide the general public with information concerning the exigencies of Angola and to serve as a unique networking opportunity for people of African descent, and all peace and justice loving people who wish to foster the development of progressive issues and agendas related to Africa.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to, planning and supervising the expansion of social marketing activities nation-wide, including overseeing program sites in the interior, hiring and training PSI field staff, and coordinating with local NGOs.

More than 1.7 million internally displaced persons (IDP) have returned home since peace was achieved in the country in April last year. This was announced on Tuesday in Luanda by social welfare Minister Joao Baptista Kussumua, who pointed out the provinces of Bie, Huambo, Huila, Kwanza-Sul and Malange as the largest recipients.

While the team works with the children at Chissindo camp I have a chance to talk to some of their mothers, who have come to watch the activities. Many of the women we meet are widows, and all have several children to care for. They survive by growing food, and supplementing this with a small income from trading charcoal or traditional maize beer. Read the latest instalment in the diary of an Oxfam worker in Angola.

"I came here to the quartering area to try and find my husband, the father of my children," Celita Vasco says. "But when I arrived here I heard that my husband had died in the war. My children have no father." Her story is typical of women who found themselves caught up amid the ever-changing front lines of the Angolan civil war.

After waiting so long for peace and stability, there is something almost vindictive in the timing. A plague potentially more deadly than any battle is seeping across Angola just when people had reasons to hope. Open borders, family reunions, trucks of food and goods have been granted, but with them travels HIV/Aids, a killer that scythed through sub-Saharan Africa but spared Angola.

Emerging slowly from decades of civil war, Angola stands at a crossroads between a spectacular recovery or further cycles of instability and crisis. The government that won the fighting must now move on a number of fronts – with international support – to win the peace. Although there are critical longer term political and economic issues, several immediate security and humanitarian challenges must be addressed to avoid laying the foundations for a return to conflict, says a new report from the International Crisis Group.

Angola, a hoped-for oil ally of the United States and with a seat on the United Nations Security Council this year, should be doing well. Its civil war ended last April after the death of Jonas Savimbi. The price of its growing oil exports has been boosted by the Iraq crisis. Yet the nation's foreign reserves have sunk to less than US$200 million, raising again major questions about government accountability. The government is not saying where up to $900m of export earnings have been spent since last July.

A Geneva-based NGO has called on Angolan authorities to step up protection for the vast number of displaced people returning to their areas of origin since the end of the civil war last year. In a new report, the Global IDP Project, which monitors war and displacement, said many returning Angolans faced ongoing human rights abuses and grim humanitarian conditions.

Humanitarian operations in Angola are to receive a Euro 8 million (about 8.5 U S million dollars) boost from the European Commission. The EC Humanitarian Aid Office would channel the aid package through partner organisations and international agencies operating in the country, the European Commission said in a statement.

Humanitarian operations in Angola are to receive a Euro 8 million (about US 8.5 million dollars) boost from the European Commission. The EC Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO) would channel the aid package though partner organisations and international agencies operating in the country, the EC said in a statement.