The arrest this week of a 63-year-old woman in Burkina Faso accused of circumcising 16 young girls has brought home to many that genital mutilation is still widespread in the west African state, despite being outlawed eight years ago. Since 1996, when the landlocked state formally declared genital mutilation illegal, the number of excisions practised in Burkina has fallen sharply, from a prevalence rate of 66 percent to 40 percent, according to the national watchdog group, the CNLPE.

Health officials began a drive to vaccinate the population of Bobo Dioulasso against yellow fever at the weekend after four cases of the disease were confirmed in Burkina Faso's second largest city earlier this year. Officials said the vaccination campaign kicked off on Saturday. It was expected to last five days and cover about 840,000 people in and around the city, they added.

Lazing submerged in the river, the hippopotamus may seem a docile creature, but to many rural communities in Burkina Faso it has become a menace - so much so that the government has made hippo hunting legal again. There were fewer than 100 hippos in Burkina Faso just two decades ago and the large pachyderm appeared to be on the verge of extinction in this landlocked and semi-arid West African nation. However, a recent government survey showed numbers have rebounded to around 1,400 following the imposition of a state hunting ban in 1991.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) called for an immediate yellow fever vaccination campaign in the Burkinabe city of Bobo Dioulasso on Wednesday, saying 89 suspected cases of the mosquito-borne disease had been recorded there so far this year and six of those people had died.

An apparent decline in the number of circumcision operations carried out on young women in Burkina Faso masks a growing trend to circumcise younger and younger girls, according to a new survey by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Burkina based National Committee Against the Practice of Circumcision (CNLPE).

Meningitis has killed more than 800 people in the impoverished West African country of Burkina Faso since the start of the year, health officials said on Monday, double the death toll given two months ago. Like its neighbours in Africa's "meningitis belt" stretching from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, the landlocked country is often struck by outbreaks of the disease in the early months of the year.

The government of Burkina Faso said last Thursday that 25 suspected cases of yellow fever had been reported in the southeastern city of Bobo-Dioulasso and the nearby town of Gaoua, which is close to the border with Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana and four of them had been confirmed. A Ministry of Health official told IRIN by telephone from the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou that 16 blood samples had been collected from the suspected victims of the mosquito-borne disease. Laboratory tests carried out by the Pasteur Institute in Dakar Senegal had so far confirmed four cases of yellow fever among them.

The HIV infection rate in Burkina Faso has declined sharply over the past year, according to the country's latest sentinel survey, which is based on the voluntary testing of pregnant women at ante-natal clinics. The 2004 survey, published last Thursday, estimated that 4.2% of Burkinabe were infected with the HIV virus. That represented a sharp fall from the 6.5% HIV prevalence rate registered by the 2003 sentinel survey, and a peak of 7.2 percent in 1997.

Burkina Faso's parliament has voted to change the country's electoral code, which the opposition fears will clear the way for another term in office for President Blaise Compaore in elections scheduled for November 2005. These changes, which were passed through parliament late Tuesday, will see the electoral unit of Burkina Faso changed from the region of which there are 15, to the province, which number 45.

Traditional chiefs travelled more than 1,000 kilometres recently through Burkina Faso's northern Sahel in a caravan, organized in cooperation with UNDP, to help stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, which has spread dramatically in the west African country. The three-day car caravan visited the region's two main provinces, Seno and Soum, holding meetings in six towns and villages to alert residents about the epidemic and encourage local HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention activities.

The government of Burkina Faso has outlined a new strategy for working with NGO’s and local communities to cope with the rising number of orphans and abandoned children in this poor and semi-arid West African country. According to government statistics, there were 2.1 million orphans and abandoned children in Burkina Faso last year. They accounted for nearly 18 percent of the country’s 11.8 million population.

The trial began in a military court in the Burkina Faso capital on Tuesday of 11 soldiers and two civilians accused of plotting to topple President Blaise Compaore. All 13 are charged with plotting to undermine state security, while the alleged mastermind of the putsch, Captain Luther Ouali, also faces charges of treason and of colluding with a foreign power to destabilise the Burkinabe government.

In impoverished Burkina Faso, girls as young as eight are married off to men often older than their own fathers. But the government is now trying to eradicate this practice, alarmed by the continuing emergence of pregnancy complications in very young mothers. Typical of this phenomenon is the case of 22-year-old Christine. When she was 16, Christine ran away from home after realising that her family was preparing to marry her off to a polygamous old man.

It is an article of faith in development circles that assisting girls to complete their education – and postponing the age at which they have children – benefits both the girls and the communities they live in. This truth is proving difficult to entrench in Burkina Faso, however, where early marriages – and, worse still, forced marriages – are often the norm. This is despite a 1990 law that sets the marriage age for girls at 18, and for boys at 22.

Thirteen alleged coup plotters will appear on 6 April before a military court in Burkina Faso, state prosecutor Abdoulaye Barry said on Monday at a press conference. "The investigations were closed on March 12, and the job of the investigating magistrate has ended," Barry said.

A report from Article 19 explores the right to freedom of information, and specifically the right to access information held by public authorities in Burkina Faso. It looks at existing legal and other obstacles to free access to information. It looks into recent human rights violations where "official reluctance to provide information has prevented those responsible from being held accountable, and has denied the victims' relatives the right to truth."

A report UNDP issued in Burkina Faso recently calls for ethical conduct by politicians, adequate resources, audits and other preventative measures, and separation of institutional powers to stem corruption. Entitled "Corruption and Human Development," the report calls the fight against corruption crucial to strengthening government integrity and transparency in the west African country, one of the world's poorest.

The government of Burkina Faso has urged traditional healers in West Africa to collaborate with scientific researchers in the fight against HIV/AIDS by using herbal treatments to address AIDS-related illnesses such as tuberculosis and diarrhoea. Jean Gabriel Wango, the secretary general of the Ministry of Health, made the appeal at the opening of a week-long international exhibition of traditional medicines in the capital Ouagadougou on Monday.

Education has become a global challenge. For instance, Europe, the United States, Japan and even the emerging nations of Asia have all come together in support of Education For All. Education is the big issue of today, says Laya Sawadogo, Burkina Faso’s Minister of Secondary and Higher Education and Scientific Research in an interview published on the Unesco website.
"I’d like to cite you some figures to give you an idea of the situation in Burkina Faso: 42 per cent of our children are in primary school, only 12 per cent are enrolled in secondary school and 1.3 per cent go on to higher education. And we have an illiteracy rate of 76 per cent. We need to improve all these indicators, but that’s not an easy thing to do given our present situation."

Health workers in Burkina Faso have called for a more open discussion of issues related to sexuality and abortion. This follows the release of a report by the Demographic Research and Study Unit, which found that up to 8,000 illegal abortions take place each year in the country's capital, Ouagadougou. "We need to go out into the communities and talk about abortions to increase awareness," says Jean Lankoande, a gynaecologist at the Yalgado Ouedraogo Hospital in Ouagadougou. "Each time there's an induced abortion, it's a family planning failure," he adds.