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.

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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 government has denied reports that public hospitals are experiencing drug shortages. On Tuesday 27 March, doctors took to the streets to demonstrate against drug shortage and lack of adequate medical personnel in public hospitals. The doctors marched from the University of Nairobi to Treasury to demand that the government clearly states when it intends to post medical personnel to public health institutions.

Post-election violence victims living in Uganda want the government to help them return home. The more than 1,500 Kenyans at Kiryandogo camp, about 300km from Kampala, however, want assurances of safety and that they will be given land. 'We have been in Uganda for four years and we believe there can never be peace and reconciliation when some of the affected people are languishing in poverty outside Kenya,' the group said in a memorandum to Special Programmes minister Esther Murugi.

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.

IRIN's freelance journalist Moulid Iftin Hujale, in this third installment of his account of life in the Dadaab refugee complex in eastern Kenya, describes how since November 2011 there have been a a series of abductions and road-side bombs, which the Kenyan police attribute to people linked to Somalia's insurgent Al-Shabab group. '...the past four months have been quite tough and very scary with unprecedented grenade explosions, killings and rigorous police operations; Dadaab has never been the same again.'

Kenyan authorities should hold responsible police officers who assaulted three reporters last week and drop a baseless legal case against one of them, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. At least 10 police officers in plainclothes surrounded Suleiman Mbatiah, a reporter for the Daily Nation, after he took photographs of an undercover traffic operation in the western town of Nakuru on 13 March, according to news reports.

A parliamentary team scrutinising a dossier claiming that President Kibaki is being investigated by the International Criminal Court will start hearings on Monday. The dossier claimed that Britain was working to have two ICC suspects, Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and Eldoret North MP William Ruto, jailed to pave the way for Prime Minister Raila Odinga to ascend to the presidency.

Lack of adherence to the full course of Artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) treatment is threatening the effectiveness of the drug recommended as first-line treatment for uncomplicated malaria in countries where the disease is endemic, according to recent studies. In Siaya district of western Kenya, where malaria is particularly prevalent (38 per cent incidence in 2010), a study revealed that only 47 per cent of participants reported completing the given doses.

More than 25,000 striking health workers on Friday (09 March) started receiving dismissal letters as retired nurses and interns applied for their jobs. This happened as some nurses in Western Kenya resumed work but their counterparts in other parts of the country vowed to continue with the strike or were split on the way forward.

A strike by health workers entered its 10th day on Sunday as private and referral hospitals struggled to cope. 'I am concerned about the anxiety, including psychological torture, Kenyans have gone through in the last few days due to the industrial action,' Health minister Anyang’ Nyong’o said in a notice. 'We are working around the clock to address the issues and reach an amicable solution,' read the statement, dated March 9.

Kenyans on the micro-blogging sites Twitter and Facebook on Sunday heavily criticised global television network CNN for depicting grenade blasts in Nairobi as an eruption of 'violence' in the country. The news channel was forced to pull down a video seen as misrepresenting events by depicting Saturday’s grenade attacks that killed six and injured 63 as being widespread.

A series of explosions at a bus station in the Kenyan capital Nairobi have killed at least four people and wounded 40 others, the Kenyan Red Cross has said. The Red Cross reported on its official Twitter account that eight out of the 40 injured people admitted to hospital on Saturday are in a critical condition. Kenyan police immediately blamed al-Shabab, the Somali Islamist armed group, that Kenyan troops are currently fighting in neighbouring Somalia.

On the 50th anniversary of Kenya’s independence, many minority and indigenous communities feel that despite some constitutional gains, increased ethnicization of politics has deepened their exclusion, making their situation worse today than it was in 2005, a new Minority Rights Group International (MRG) report shows. The report titled 'Kenya at 50', reviews the current status of minority and indigenous groups in Kenya, particularly how legal and policy changes over the last five years have responded to the social, economic and political challenges confronting them. ‘Despite the adoption of the new Constitution in 2010, very little has changed in the way the Kenyan state approaches the question of minorities,’ says Marusca Perazzi, MRG’s Governance Programme Coordinator.

Freelance photographer Abdalla Bargash had accompanied Kenya's permanent secretary for transport, Cyrus Njiru, to cover a meeting with Lamu community members over the newly constructed Lamu port. The Kililana Farmers' Association are concerned that the major construction on the once-sleepy island of Lamu off Kenya's coast could encroach on their farmland. Covering the viewpoints of those who do not support the Lamu project, however, can be challenging. When Bargash tried to take photos of the meeting between the transport official and the Kililiana Farmer's Association, officials confiscated his memory card and notebook and Njiru refused to provide Bargash a lift home, forcing him to trek two hours by foot.

A key message the marchers wanted to pass across was the problem of stigma and discrimination they face in their lives and work. These include challenges in accessing health, legal, medical and social services.

Public universities in Kenya have become ethnic bastions, reveals a report by the National Cohesion and Integration Commission presented to Parliament on Tuesday. The Big Five ethnic groups in Kenya dominate the work forces of the centres of higher education, the report shows. Although the Kikuyu, Luhya, Kalenjin, Luo and Kamba, make up 66 per cent of the country’s population, they take up 93 per cent of the jobs at Masinde Muliro University, 89.8 per cent at Moi University, 87.3 per cent at Egerton University, 86 per cent at Jomo Kenyatta University, 82.3 per cent at the University of Nairobi and 81.7 per cent at Kenyatta University.