The Council of Ministers of Mali has approved last Wednesday June 9th the ratification of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR) on the Rights of Women in Africa which was adopted in Maputo, Mozambique, on July 2003. The ratification has been submitted to the National Assembly to be adopted. Mali will then have to deposit its instrument of ratification at the African Union. This is according to a press release from Women in Law and Development in Africa.

“The relevance and the urgency of ratifying the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa no longer needs to be proven. Women in Africa continue to suffer all forms of violence and are circumcised daily in Mali. This raises the question of whether women are human beings. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a health issue. How many homes are broken up because couples do not know how to talk about a problem linked to their sexuality? Have we made the link between maternal and infant mortality, and FGM in Africa? Thousands of women and girls suffer each day as a result of this traditional practice. FGM remains a health problem, a problem of sexual and reproductive rights of women and their male sexual partners. It has untold economic, medical and social consequences. We urge African Union heads of states to turn their attention to the need for the urgent and immediate ratification of the Protocol at the Summit. Counting on your sensitivity to women’s empowerment and well being, we hope that you will ratify the Protocol on Women’s rights in Africa.”

La ratification urgente du Protocole à la Charte africaine relatif aux droits des femmes: un sauvegarde des droits des femmes au Mali

“Voici ma petite contribution sur les raisons de la necessité d'une ratification immediate La pertinence et l'urgence de ratifier le protocole additif à la charte africaine des droits de l'homme et des peuples relatifs aux droits de la femme en Afrique n'est plus à démontrer. Les femmes continuent à subir toutes les formes de violence en Afrique et sont excisées chaque jour au Mamli. On doit se demander si la femme est elle un être humain. Les MGF se posent en terme de santé, combien de ménages sont disloqués suite au silence d'un couple qui ne sait comment parler d'un problème lié à la sexualité ? Avons nous établi le rapport entre le taux de mortalité maternelle et néonatale et les mutilations génitales féminines en Afrique ? Bref, des milliers de femmes et de filles souffrent tous les jours à cause d'une pratique soutenue par la tradition. Les MGF demeurent un problème de santé, de droit sexuel et reproductif pour la femme, partenaire sexuel de l'homme. les conséquences économiques, médicales et sociales restent inestimables. Nous exhortons les chefs d'état à se pencher sur la necessité d'une ratification immédiate par les états membres de l'union Africaine lors du sommet. Espérant sur votre sensibilité à l'égard des femmes pour les épanouissement et le bien, nous pouvons compter sur vous pour une ratification du protocole additionnel sur les droits des femmes en Afrique.”

- Kadidia Sidibe Aoudou Maiga, Chair of AMSOPT (l'Association Malienne pour le suivi et l'Orientation des Pratiques Traditionnelles), Mali ([email protected])

The overwhelming majority of women in Mali still undergo female circumcision in their youth, but attitudes are changing, and now a US$2 million public awareness campaign by Plan International is set to change them even faster. The children's charity held a meeting at this lakeside resort town in southern Mali last week to explain how the new money would be used to fight female circumcision.

A programme that provides a meal in schools is boosting enrolment in Mali, especially of girls. Thanks to the UNESCO/World Food Programme (WFP) School Feeding Programme pupils in Gao, Kidal, Tombouctou and Mopti in northern Mali receive a meal a day in school. “These regions are particularly poverty-stricken and many parents struggle to give their families a daily meal,” says Edouard Matoko, Director of UNESCO Bamako.

Somalia’s break-up in the early 1990s led to some 120 000 Somalis living in three refugee camps around the remote north-eastern Kenyan town of Dadaab. Many survive the harsh conditions due to money they receive from relatives across the globe. The strength of these remittance networks, and refugees’ traditional strategies for dealing with instability, suggests the need to rethink stereotypes of refugees as passive or keen to return to a single home locality.

Fears are mounting for the welfare of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in eastern Ethiopia, the United Nations warned on Friday. Disease, lack of food and dwindling water supplies are hitting the IDPs, the UN said in a special alert. "There is a need to respond with timely assistance in order to prevent the situation from deteriorating further," said the joint statement issued by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the government of the Somali National Regional State (SNRS). "It is necessary to speed up reintegration efforts from these areas and to secure the return of the IDPs to their areas of origin."

Mali is promoting solar power and modern, clean energy such as butane to reduce poverty and improve the lives of rural women and safeguard the environment. The Ministry of Mines, Energy and Water is encouraging such new and renewable energy alternatives to wood through a project that aims to reach 250 villages in the southern regions of Koulikoro, Ségou, Sikasso and Mopti. Other partners are the Ministry of Environment; the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Children and the Family; and UNDP.

"Our country has an enormous potential when it comes to water resources. If we develop these resources properly, they should allow us to try and get beyond food self-sufficiency," says Mali’s President, Amadou Toumani Toure. He was speaking at an international water conference that took place in the capital, Bamako, towards the end of last month. But despite this optimism, the difficulties of meeting Mali’s water needs should not be underestimated. Mali has 10 million inhabitants, 65 percent of whom fall under the poverty line threshold.

It's a common sight in the Malian capital: large groups of young people queuing in front of the French and American consulates with one objective in mind - to obtain an immigration visa. "I have worked many small jobs (in Mali)...I've taken the...exam for the civil service many times, but without success. The time has come for me to try my luck somewhere else," says 30-year-old Cheikh Keita, a graduate of the National Business School of Bamako, while standing before the French embassy.

Mothers in some parts of rural Mali are being given free mosquito nets impregnated with insecticide if they take their children for full series of vaccinations against preventable diseases such as measles and polio. Health workers told IRIN that this programme had significantly reduced infant mortality and malnutrition in a region where child deaths amongst the highest in the world.

The African Social Forum has grown in stature and can now meet IC criteria required for an entity to be seriously considered to play a leading role in the convening of the annual global meeting that parallels the Davos World Economic Forum. In my opinion, the main one was the ASF role in strengthening and mobilising social movements in Africa to participate in WSF as part of the process leading to consolidation of the world social movement. Its processes saw the building of an African space for the formulation of concerted alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation, based on a diagnosis of the latter's social, economic and political effects. The Forum helped define social, economic and political reconstruction strategies, including a redefinition of the role of the State, the market and citizens' organisations.

Armed with two basic documents crafted in Bamako (Mali) in 2002, and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) in 2003, those pursuing anti-capitalist struggles within the framework of WSF will acknowledge that ASF has opened new avenues to define citizen control procedures to ensure that political change promotes the expression and implementation of alternative, credible and viable responses to corporate-led globalisation. The Mumbai Africa meeting failed to consolidate this foundation and found itself bogged down in process issues that should have been addressed before all proceedings. In my reading of the programme, some of the concerns should have been captured in the first session. We would have been briefed of developments in the IC and what issues Africa was chasing in the context of Mumbai.

This would have been the moment to emphasise that after Addis, the ASF recommendations, placed emphasis on the following working themes and strategies: promoting national, sub-regional and thematic forums and making sure that these spaces, initiated in a decentralised and autonomous way, are organised by national and sub-regional social and grassroots movements. Secondly, it would have been prudent to reiterate that emphasis was now being placed on promoting the participation of organisations of the African social movement in the World Social Forum through activities, alliances and a marked presence, and finally, encouraging alliances between components of the African social movement and international social movements, especially those in the south. Thirdly, we should also have been told that the African social forum activities being held in the context of Mumbai 2004 have resulted from a number of processes on the continent and scenarios had emerged after organising two Forums in Africa, that our context (distance, local priorities of the movements, multiplicity of agendas both at continental and international levels, poverty) compels us to define a more appropriate pace to link up with the global movement without competing with continental and regional priorities. Fourthly, the organising committee of the African Social Forum should have outlined how it had come to the conclusion that it was preferable for the global forum to serve as a space for the convergence of decentralised and autonomous initiatives rather than a repetition of continental events.

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The world's biggest agrochemical companies and the US government are rushing to introduce genetically modified (GM) crops into West Africa, starting with cotton. A new report from GRAIN shows that Monsanto, Syngenta and Dow AgroSciences, supported by USAID, are finalising plans with the Malian government to convert the West African country’s cotton crop to transgenic varieties over the next five years. Cotton is Mali’s number one export. Yet local farmers and the general public are in the dark about this.

The cholera epidemic in Mali has been brought under control in most of the country, but continues unabated in the Mopti region, where a further 11 people died of the water-borne disease in January, Health Ministry sources said. The sources told IRIN last Thursday that 156 new cases of cholera were reported in the Niger river valley in and around the city of Mopti, 450 km northeast of the capital Bamako, between 1 and 26 January.

You will have at least 2 years experience working in a management or coordination role at the level of primary health care and a minimum of 2 years relevant work experience in a third world context, preferably Africa. Proven experience in health policy formation, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, experience in formal training and theoretical and practical experience of community-based health care delivery system are essential.

The point of departure for the 9th conference of SSIA is the dispersal of Somali speaking people beyond the boundaries of the Republic of Somalia that collapsed as a state in 1991. Somali people have always lived beyond the territory of the Republic of Somalia, especially in the neighbouring states of Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. Additionally, the Ogaden war (1977-1979), and the Civil Wars from 1988 and up till today caused millions of Somalis to flee and migrate throughout the region of the Horn of Africa - and further abroad to Europe, North America and other destinations. This dispersal of Somalis and the migrations of people originating from the former Republic of Somalia have been intimately linked to the still ongoing conflicts in the Horn of Africa, and are related to the complex processes of reconciliation and state formation. The scope of the Conference will therefore include all of the Horn of Africa as well as Somalis in the wider Diaspora. It will encourage papers that, from various perspectives, approach cross-cutting issues, relate to the linkages between migration, development and processes of state-formation and identity, and which take a regional (Horn of Africa) view on the emergence of transboundary political formations. Complete program and registration information will be available April 2004. The event organiser can be contacted by e-mail: [email protected]

Public school teachers in Mali began a two-day strike on Tuesday to press for better working conditions and higher salaries, paralysing the school system from nursery to university level, officials of the teacher's union said. Teachers in higher institutions of learning, including Mali's sole university, joined the strike barely two months after staging a similar strike.

Djibouti is one of the key players in the ongoing Somali peace talks and they led the Arta Peace Conference in 2002 that resulted in the formation of the Transitional National Government (TNG) – one of the groups who have withdrawn from the current peace talks. Djibouti was a member of the IGAD Technical Committee as a Frontline State but they differed with management of the conference and withdrew from the Technical Committee and any structure within the Frontline States on 18 October 2003. The IGAD Heads of States Summit held in Kampala in October of this year then expanded the management of the conference. They agreed to bring on board the rest of the IGAD member states and renamed the IGAD Facilitation Committee. The Kampala Summit also recommended that a retreat be held for the Somali leaders to provide them with an opportunity to mend their differences. Djibouti's Foreign Minister, Ali Abdi Farah, took part in the IGAD Ministerial Committee meeting. The link below will take readers to the transcript of an interview with Farah conducted by Novib Somalia.

We are seeking a consultant who will work together with the National HIV/AIDS Steering Committee comprising six ministers (health, education, cultural, religion, information and family development & social affairs), the National HIV/AIDS Technical Committee, local NGOs, religious leaders and community leaders, to assist in developing a national HIV/AIDS policy for Somaliland as a major strategy towards HIV/AIDS prevention and control.

Local leaders in Mali, meeting at a recent workshop in Bamako, have agreed to set up committees to intensify the campaign against HIV/AIDS, improve networking among communities and promote prevention activities.

Have we neglected the gender dimensions of conflict over natural resources (NR)? Are women's capacities to analyse and resolve NR disputes sufficiently recognised? Can women's rights to participate in NR management be affirmed in a way that is not confrontational? How could women be integrated into peace-making and reconciliation initiatives?