News headlines in June 2012

It is midmorning at the Kanungu Health Centre IV and the queue of patients grows as more people start to arrive for treatment at this rural facility more than 400 kilometres outside the Ugandan capital of Kampala.

On a Wednesday morning in Mutitu-Andei township in Makueni County, one of Kenya’s driest areas, smallholder farmer Josephine Mutiso tunes into Radio Mang’elete 89.1 FM and listens as meteorological experts discuss the changes in rainfall patterns in the county.

As Lysette Mendum listens to the sound of bulldozers crashing through the forest clearing a road to a mining site near her small village of Assoumdele in the Ngoyla-Mintom forest block in Cameroon’s East Region, she has never been more fearful in her life.

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo is enjoying success with the remedial education centres set up to give children from underprivileged backgrounds a free education and vocational training.

When Junior Mayema boarded a plane to South Africa from his native Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010, he cried tears of joy because he was finally heading to a country where he could live openly as a gay man.

As soon as Sanyu Nagia sits down in Barbara Namirimu’s home, she asks to see her patient’s bag of medicine. It is too heavy for the ill Namirimu to carry, so her mother, Efrance Namakula, brings it out and hands it over.

As social movements blasted the 'new green economy' proposed at Rio+20 this week, environmental activists in Zambia worried about the role that poor people, especially those in rural areas, are going to play in it.

Four figures bend intently over their work in one corner of the large vegetable garden near the western Niger village of Dioga. Months after the village's main harvest has been brought in — and eaten up — the irrigated green of the garden is welcome relief in a part of the country where hunger never seems far away.

In finding a way to survive a 36 percent cut in sugar prices, Mauritian farmers are not only exporting a variety of fruit and vegetables to the European Union, but they have also begun farming in a more environmentally sustainable way.

Fourteen years ago, unemployed and discouraged by a failed business venture, Mohamed Ould Abderrahmane turned to farming. Today the cooperative he set up to grow vegetables on the outskirts of the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, employs several dozen people and provides its members with a handsome income.