Kofi Annan, Chair of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), has announced the appointment of a renowned African business leader from Kenya, Ms Jane Karuku, as the new president of the organization. Ms Karuku was selected after an exhaustive international search process. She joins AGRA from Telkom Kenya a subsidiary of France Telecom-Orange where she has been Deputy Chief Executive. She takes over from Dr Namanga Ngongi who is retiring after five years as the first president of AGRA.

Ikal Angelei, the founder of Friends of Lake Turkana in Kenya, receives the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in San Francisco today (16 April). The award will honor an activist who is defending the interests of 500,000 poor indigenous people against a destructive hydropower dam, and has successfully taken on many of the world’s biggest dam builders and financiers.

The key issues around past historical injustices and gender perspectives must be at the center of the land question for it to make meaning in Kenya’s national development discourse.

Between 1-4 April, hundreds of Sierra Leonean small land owners and community members from all over the country will come together in Freetown to organize against land grabs. Join the Oakland Institute in our pledge to raise $10,000 to fund travel, food, and lodging for 100 participants.

Oil transparency activists have vowed to continue a legal battle to require the government of Uganda to publish Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) that it has reached with international oil companies. This comes after a court rejected an application from the African Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO) and three other civil society organisations for permission to present evidence at an appeal by two journalists against a separate ruling which denied them access to the PSAs.

There has been a development and shift away from privatisation as the dominant strategy towards the so-called corporatisation and commercialisation of public water services. The main purpose of this report is to analyse the strategic development in policy that has taken place, the World Bank's neoliberal strategy on corporatisation of urban water services and concrete case studies of corporatisation projects in Sub-Saharan Africa as examples of this strategy.

Join the BDS Global Day of Action on 30 March 2012!

A declaration at the end of the forum included commitments to speed up access to safe drinking water and sanitation for all, boosting efforts to cut water pollution, reusing wastewater and enhancing the coherence between water, food and energy policies.

Kenya is gearing up for a revision of its energy policy to establish a regulatory system for overseeing the potential opening of the country's first private-sector nuclear power plant. Despite warnings that the world's nuclear waste is growing at alarming rates and with most of the current facilities having outlived their usefulness, a director of a government board said several Kenyan scientists were already receiving training.

A company associated with a Cabinet minister sold the block, where oil was found in Turkana, for a fortune. In 2010, Turkana Drilling Company, associated with a cabinet minister who was affected in Monday’s reshuffle, sold Block 10BB for $10 million (Sh840 million) to Africa Oil. Turkana Drilling’s case is just an example of how small firms might be using influence in government to make hundreds of millions of shillings by trading in oil prospecting licences.

The South African agriculture economy has little or no room for emerging farmers; with no strong support system, being an emerging farmer in South Africa can be a hopeless adventure, writes Davison Chikazunga on the blog Another Countryside. 'Introducing market liberalisation in 1992 has aggravated the difficulties; it was naïve for the country to introduce such measures at the dawn of democracy when the state presence needed to do much to establish new black farmers. South Africa’s agriculture economy under apartheid blossomed because of state subsidies, and similar support programs in America and Europe helped their agricultural economies to thrive.'

Landmines planted about a decade ago in parts of Kabalo territory in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) southeastern Katanga Province are adversely affecting farming livelihoods, and an important World Food Programme (WFP) project. 'In our area, there are villages where we get much harvest but the road leading to those villages [has] landmines,' a food trader from Kabalo said. Lorries often get blown up by the landmines, Birindwa Murhula, a leader of one of the local food traders’ associations, told IRIN.

The construction of what is to become Africa's biggest wind farm will start by June in an arid region of northern Kenya, the project's officials said. A total of 365 wind turbines will be erected near Lake Turkana, where winds blow predictably and regularly, averaging speeds of 11 metres per second, reports AFP.

Tullow Oil, the British multinational, has struck oil in northern Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, the country’s president, announced on Tuesday 27 March at an oil, gas and energy conference in Nairobi. At the conference in the Kenyan capital, some of the world’s biggest oil companies discussed their exploration plans for East Africa, which has attracted significant interest from energy multinationals as well as national and independent oil and gas companies.

The global population of farm animals increased 23 per cent between 1980 and 2010, from 3.5 billion to 4.3 billion, according to research by the Worldwatch Institute for its Vital Signs Online publication. These figures continue a trend of rising farm animal populations, with harmful effects on the environment, public health, and global development. Both production and consumption of animal products are increasingly concentrated in developing countries. In contrast, due in part to a growing awareness of the health consequences of high meat consumption, the appetite for animal products is stagnating or declining in many industrial countries.

The Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell has been hit by a swarm of 11,000 villagers seeking compensation for oil spills which they said have polluted their waters and devastated farmlands. The villagers from Bodo community, a network of 35 villages in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta are set to square off against the oil company in a London Courtroom with Martyn Day of law firm Leigh Day & Co. saying the spills devastated a once-thriving fishing community.

Social justice and environmental protection are equally urgent and intrinsically linked universal goals, with coordinated global action needed on both fronts at the UN’s ‘Rio+20’ Conference on Sustainable Development in June, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message to an audience of development experts, civil society leaders and government officials at the first Global Human Development Forum in Instanbul.

The European Union has agreed to expand its mission against Somali pirates by allowing military forces to attack land targets as well as those at sea. In a two-year extension of its mission, EU defence ministers agreed warships could target boats and fuel dumps. Up to 10 EU naval ships are currently on patrol off the Horn of Africa.

Much of the energy expended by official ‘world-savers’ – governments, policy wonks, multilateral institutions and the like – is devoted to devising news ways to cash in on the next ‘development’ era.

Efforts are being made to remove the human right to water and sanitation from the Rio+20 negotiating text.