South Sudan has three generations of children who have never seen the inside of a classroom. According to Dr. Michael Hussein, the minister for general education, the education sector suffered most during the civil war. 'Teachers were neglected, salaries were not regular, there was no training and many fled the war-torn areas. As a result, three generations lost the opportunity to go to school,' says the minister. The issue of education in South Sudan is so critical that most leaders are calling on the youth to go back to school.

Beji Caid Essebsi, the Tunisian prime minister, has said that a new outbreak of deadly violence in Tunisia is designed to prevent the country holding its first post-revolution elections. 'There were disturbances aimed at preventing elections,' said Essebsi during an address to the nation on Monday. 'These elections will be held on 23 October as scheduled.' Voters will choose a constituent assembly that will write a new constitution that will pave the way for legislative and presidential polls.

As thousands suffer the effects of drought in the Horn of Africa, developing nations are silent on pledges they made to help developing countries cope with climate related change. In 2008, world leaders met to deliberate on climate change under the UN in Copenhagen, Denmark. The developed countries pledged aid to developing countries to help them cope with the impact of the global phenomenon that has caused several droughts and related disasters in Africa. According to the World Resource Institute, which has kept an eye on the Copenhagen Accord, less than four per cent of the pledged cash has been disbursed.

The government of Burkina Faso has responded to long-standing demands of farmers for greater support for small family producers with the launch of 'Operation 100,000 Ploughs'. Smallholder farmers say this will strengthen the country’s food security. The operation, launched in June, will make 20,000 ploughs available to the poorest rural households in each of the next five years, half of them to be given to women. According to Dao, the ploughs will be made affordable thanks to an 80 per cent subsidy from the government.

South Sudan became the world’s newest nation on 9 July 2011, making it Africa’s 54th country. Independence brings enormous opportunities to South Sudan to increase its integration into the regional economy but also substantial challenges to put in place a policy and security regime that facilitates cross-border trade. The 2005 peace accord that ended Africa's longest-running civil war has led to a significant growth in demand in South Sudan, ushering in a new era of increased regional trade, in particular, with Uganda. A new Africa Trade Policy Note highlights the recent patterns of trade between South Sudan and Uganda, and draws attention to significant constraints that are limiting the prospects for enhanced cross-border trade.

The failure of post-apartheid South Africa to address the pressing challenges facing both land reform and the rural economy more generally may be due to inadequate policies and implementation, but essentially it indicates an intense political struggle, writes Obiozo Ukpabi on the blog Another Countryside. 'That the reality is much more complicated than finding compelling ways to get the land may be obvious. But how does South Africa move beyond the stuckness of the land reform process by confronting the key issues head on? A reframing of the issues for a truly progressive public debate requires an understanding of the powerful interests that are vested into the current deadlock.'

Campaign spending will be limited by new election laws in a move aimed at levelling the political playing field. This is among a raft of radical changes that have been introduced in the just published Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission Act.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced recently that Germany was prepared to sell six to eight patrol boats to Angola as part of an international cooperation deal. 'Germany is ready for an energy and raw materials partnership,' Merkel said during a visit to the oil-rich country. Politicians in Berlin are concerned about Angola's human rights record. Claudia Roth, the head of the Greens, described it as a bad move following the controversial decision to sell battle tanks to Saudi Arabia last week, calling Merkel the 'patron saint of the arms lobby'. And Rolf Muetzenich from the SPD parliamentary group alluded to Germany's concern over Angola's human rights record.

'For too long the people of the Amajuba District have been raising their concerns with the office of Land Reform and Rural Development at many levels and at many times, but in vain. It is in our view that such an audience with both senior officials and politicians will ensure accountability which has been lacking thus far within the department.'

While Kenya struggles to cope with the influx of refuges fleeing the drought in Somalia, it is estimated that about 1,300 people arrive daily at the Dadaab refugee camp. It takes on average nine days in 50-degree Celsius heat for those fleeing the drought in Somalia to travel the 80 kilometres of the sandy, expansive desert that separates Dadaab in Northern Kenya from Somalia. The journey to Dadaab is a treacherous one, made even more perilous as it snakes through territories of lawlessness where armed bandits and even police harass the refugees.

Kenya has agreed to open a new camp near its border with Somalia to cope with the influx of refugees fleeing the region's worst drought in 60 years. The lfo II camp in Dabaab will open its doors to 80,000 refugees within 10 days, the Kenyan government said. Prime Minister Raila Odinga agreed to open the new camp after visiting Dadaab's three existing camps where an estimated 380,000 refugees are now living at facilities intended to cope with a population of 90,000 people.

Zimbabwe’s immigration officials say they have instructed their officers at border posts not to accept illegal immigrants and refugees seeking to enter into the country. The ban is targeted at refugees mainly from Somalia and Ethiopia whom Zimbabwe accuses of using the country as a transit point to South Africa. The government-owned Herald newspaper reported that five border posts usually used by the Ethiopian and Somali immigrants had been instructed not to allow refugees into the country.

Gender activists have won a significant battle in their quest for more women representation in government with the final unveiling of President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet. Of the 40 ministers, 13 are women, a major milestone in the campaign for more involvement of women in governance. The number of female appointees in the cabinet represents about 31 per cent of the 42-member cabinet.

Amado Kafando's elation followed news on 7 March that the price of cotton, a crop he plants each summer in rows broken by a cow-tethered plow, hit a record $2.197 a pound, capping a two-year surge of 430 per cent. Finally, he said, cotton could fulfill the promise of its nickname in his homeland of Burkina Faso: white gold. But within weeks, Kafando was clenching his fists. The government and regional cotton monopolies, which Burkinabe farmers must sell to, announced they would charge growers 38 per cent more for fertilizer - and pay them as little as 39 per cent of the world price at the time for their crop.

The Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) has revealed visual evidence of mass graves in South Kordofan, which corroborates new eyewitness reports, obtained by SSP, of systematic killings and mass burials in this conflict-torn region of Sudan. The evidence found by SSP is consistent with allegations that the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and northern militias have engaged in a campaign of killing civilians.

Domestically abused women who are financially dependent on their abusers can now report the crime with the assurance that they will be able to get financial and medical support from the state, thanks to the country’s new law on domestic violence. Women’s campaigners have welcomed the introduction of the new law, which was signed into the statue books on 8 July, and which criminalises domestic violence and offers protection to victims and their families. Until now domestic violence had not been illegal in Angola - and on the rare occasions it reached court, it was prosecuted under rape, assault and battery laws.

South Africa's fuel workers' union has rejected a minimum eight per cent wage increase and is holding out for a double-digit hike, the union's chief negotiator said on Tuesday (19 July).The strike has left petrol stations dry across South Africa for more than a week and will probably cost the continent's top economy billions of rand in lost output.

Zimbabwe is unable to fill 15,000 teaching posts in government schools because school leavers are reluctant to join the profession. The vacant posts are said to be increasing despite reports that thousands of Zimbabwean teachers, who had left the country at the height of the economic problems, were returning home. An official in the Ministry of Education told the state owned Herald newspaper that out of the 111,000 teaching posts in the country, 96,000 were filled by qualified teachers.

Hospitals in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, have been hit by a shortage of drugs following the arrival of large numbers of drought-displaced people in the past two months, with health officials reporting that up to five patients were dying daily due to disease outbreaks. 'Hospitals are experiencing shortages of medicines yet they need to distribute drugs to deal with outbreaks of measles, diarrhoea, malnutrition, malaria and respiratory diseases,' Aden Ibrahim, the Health Minister in Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, told IRIN in Mogadishu.

A senior United Nations humanitarian official says the world body is 'extremely worried' about the situation in Sudan's South Kordofan region after a leaked report said war crimes may have been committed there. The leaked UN report, which emerged on Monday, documents witness accounts of suspected atrocities and called for an inquiry into the allegations. Oil-rich South Kordofan borders the newly created nation of South Sudan. It has seen intense fighting in recent months between the Sudan's army and local armed groups.