The Clinton Foundation has given Kenya a blank medical cheque with a pledge to pay for the treatment of all HIV-infected children, easing the financial burden on their families. Direct costs of buying medicine is estimated to be more than Sh2 billion annually. This excludes costs associated with awareness campaigns and nutrition.

China Development Bank will provide $20 million in development credit to build low-cost housing and improve education and health care in Kenya, the bank's top official in Africa has said. More than half the money will go towards construction of low- and medium-income houses in the east African country, which has a government target of building 150,000 new units each year.

Access to education, security, smooth roads, free media and affordable health are among the demands Kenyan voters have of their political candidates. Other demands are respect and protection of peoples' rights to actively participate in governance, the right to vote in members to local committees and determine which projects are prioritised. All these and more constitute the manifesto launched by the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) dubbed, "National People's Manifesto, From Party Promises to People's Demands".

The Government of Kenya is in the concluding stages of privatizing Telkom Kenya. The winning bidders France Telecom will take Board control by December 21, 2007.
The government is also planning to offload shares of Safaricom through an Initial Public Offer (IPO) before the end of this year. However there are reasons to be wary of this privatization exercise.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki fell further behind his main challenger, Raila Odinga, in opinion polls on Friday, just three weeks before elections that are expected to be the East African country's closest. The latest Steadman poll gave opposition leader Odinga 46% to Kibaki's 42%. Its last poll two weeks ago had the 76-year-old incumbent running neck-and-neck with Odinga, with both on 43,3%.

Kenya Data Networks (KDN)- a leading ICT infrastructure provider in the country has embarked on an ambitious program to provide all Kenya's schools from distant mountain villages to those in the swelling urban slum areas, with Internet connectivity.

A baseline study into e-waste in Kenya has been launched at a meeting held in Nairobi recently. The meeting, on November 21 at the Jacaranda Hotel, was organised by the Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANeT), and attended by over 30 representatives of business, government, the non-profit sector and the media. The study will be conducted over the next three months, and is being supported by a partnership between Hewlett Packard (HP), the Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF) and the Swiss Institute for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA).

A US$13 million pan-African initiative to increase the role of women scientists in agriculture was launched this week (5 December) in Kenya. The Nairobi-based African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) intends to increase the number of women scientists on the continent. It also seeks to provide role models and address the institutional biases that have limited women in agricultural research.

ARTICLE 19, Global Campaign for Free Expression, with the Kenya Section of the
International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the Kenya Correspondents
Association (KCA) has launched a Guidebook on Election Coverage for Media
Correspondents in Kenya.

The Kenya Domestic Observers Forum was recently launched at an event at KICC in Nairobi. The co-chairs for the organization say they hope to have monitors at all of Kenya’s 35,000 polling stations on election day. The forum will also monitor the political process running up to the elections. “Our strategy is to undertake election day and thematic observations,” says Oliver Kisaka, one of three co-chairs of the forum. “Kenya remains in transition. Each election year we could check whether the country is moving forward in its democratic culture.”

This year’s 16 days of Activism Against gender based violence will go down in the Kenyan history as the year where women aspirants have suffered violence without any concrete action being taken either by the law enforcement officers or the various political party’s in Kenya. Narrating her ordeal, Alice Wahome, an aspirant said, "I was attacked by ten men in broad daylight, my attackers kicked and railed blows on me and it is an experience I have never been through before. They even pulled my breasts and I could feel them pinching my buttocks."

For a year that began with great promise for diva power, the diminishing presence of women in the run-up to this year’s elections is a disturbing reminder of the uphill task women face in making their presence felt on Kenya's political scene. Earlier in the year, women candidates coalesced around Charity Ngilu and other bigwigs to root for their increased representation at the civic and parliamentary levels.

The film submission period for Lola Kenya Screen—eastern Africa’s first and only audiovisual media festival, production workshop and market exclusively designed for children and youth—opened on December 1, 2007. Lola Kenya Screen, therefore, is calling for film entries in all genres, lengths, and formats from all over the world for the 3rd Lola Kenya Screen that runs August 4-9, 2008 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Used electronic equipment poses health risks to people who might want to recycle them. Mr Martin Muteti, a consultancy manager with Practical Action, an NGO, points out that the country is sitting on a time bomb if no legislation is enacted against irresponsible disposals of electronic equipment.

The three latest Kenya opinion polls showed mixed results on Friday, with the main opposition candidate Raila Odinga leading President Mwai Kibaki in two of them. With less than a month to go before the December 27 election, surveys by Infotrak Harris and Strategic Research had Odinga leading with 43.9 and 43.2 percent, while Kibaki stood at 38.4 percent in both.

he UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, will repatriate at least 3,000 Sudanese from the Kakuma camp in northern Kenya by end-December, an official told IRIN. "Two flights are scheduled to leave Kakuma today [29 November]; in fact, one has already left with 39 passengers for Rumbek [Southern Sudan]; the second one will leave later in the day with 42 passengers, also for Rumbek," Emmanuel Nyabera, the UNHCR spokesman, said.

A recent crack-down on piracy in Kenya has driven a number of internet cafes to open source. The Business Daily in Nairobi reported that the raids on the internet cafes came after the expiry of the October 30 deadline set by the Kenya Copyright Board. Interestingly, the estimated value of the pirate software found on confiscated machines was just short of the value of the machines themselves.

Kuona Trust is seeking applications for an East African artist for the 11th international artist’s residency program to be held from the 21st of March to the 28th of March 2008. Interested artists are requested to send their applications to Michael Soi on [email][email protected] before the 10th of December 2007. You are all invited to the opening of the end of year Kuona Trust Exhibition on Wed the 28th at 6.30p.m. The exhibition will run until the 15th of December.

On 26 November 2007, the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) addressed the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at the Committee’s Pre-Sessional Working Group at the UN Office of the High Commissioner in Geneva. In its presentation, OMCT drew particular attention to the fact that disrespect for economic, social and cultural rights is frequently the cause of other serious human rights abuses, including executions, torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Wangari Maathai, a Nobel laureate, and Chris Murungaru, a former interior minister, have been surprise losers in parliamentary primaries in Kenya. Maathai and Murungaru were competing to represent the ruling party, the Party of National Unity (PNU). After the losing the vote to run for the Tetu ticket in central Kenya, Maathai said on Sunday that she would defect to a smaller party.