Follow @{0}Razed IDP camp in Côte d’Ivoire’s west. Activist worry that politics is overshadowing justice ABIDJAN, 29 January 2014 (IRIN) – With just a single trial concluded out of the 86 cases arising from Côte d’Ivoire’s 2010-2011 post-poll violence, concerns are emerging that justice is being undermined by political compromises. This week, 24 suspects were temporarily released after being detained for more than two years. President Alassane Ouattara had instructed the justice minister to grant freedom to some of the suspects in a bid to shore up reconciliation efforts. About a dozen other detainees were freed provisionally between November 2011…
Author: ARIN News
Follow @{0}Liberian authorities are cracking down on the sale of fake drugsMONROVIA, 29 January 2014 (IRIN) – Liberia’s Ministry of Health is launching a major crackdown on counterfeit drug sellers throughout the country, but Liberians say they have no choice but to buy such drugs, given their low cost and availability even in rural areas.In late 2013, the health ministry and the Pharmaceutical Board of Liberia intensified a campaign that began in July that year cracking down on peddlers of fake drugs. The campaign involved teams of monitors touring the country to ensure counterfeit drugs are not being sold, and…
Your views are important to us. IRIN is currently reviewing its work and we need to understand your views and priorities. Follow @{0}More than 1.6 million Guinean children to be vaccinated against measles following an outbreakDAKAR, 27 January 2014 (IRIN) – Health authorities in Guinea are scrambling to contain a measles outbreak that has killed one child, infected 37 others and spread to half of the country’s 33 districts.More than 400 suspected cases, nearly all of them in children under 10 years old, have been registered. A vaccination campaign targeting over 1.6 million children is to be launched in the…
Follow @{0}Discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS in Cameroon is widespread YAOUNDE, 23 January 2014 (IRIN) – People living with HIV/AIDS in Cameroon, which has the highest prevalence of the disease in West and Central Africa, endure widespread stigma, with some facing difficulties obtaining bank loans or suffering mistreatment at hospitals, patients and observers say.“Many HIV/AIDS carriers in Cameroon are victims of a common practice of discrimination in professional circles and in service institutions such as banks, insurance companies and in hospitals,” said Isaac Bissala, the head of Cameroon Workers’ Union.“HIV is still considered a terminal disease despite the fact…
Follow @{0}Cameroon has embarked on a four-month crackdown of illegal clinicsYAOUNDE, 21 January 2014 (IRIN) – Cameroon is cracking down on more than a thousand illegal clinics and medical training institutions that have sprung up mainly in the capital, Yaoundé, and the coastal city of Douala.Some clinics simply operate without a licence; others are run illegally from private homes. Some owners clandestinely use licences obtained under a so-called Common Initiative Group (CIG) – a government scheme to ease the establishment of not-for-profit self-help groups, which are exempt from taxation and need no proof of initial capital – to run clinics.More…
MEZEIN TERCHITT/NOUAKCHOTT, 16 January 2014 (IRIN) – For decades in the Sahel, working-age men have left their rural villages to find work in regional towns or capital cities, returning to plant or harvest crops when possible. Mauritania is no exception, but the phenomenon is particularly pronounced here, say several aid agencies, with village after village devoid of working-age men, a dynamic that is starting to have other social implications. NGOs Caritas and Action Against Hunger (ACF) estimate over 75 percent of working-age men in villages across Guidimakha and Gorgol regions have left for towns in the region or for Nouakchott,…
NOMBORI, 16 January 2014 (IRIN) – The region around Bandiagara, in central Mali’s Mopti Region, is struggling to cope with the dual crises of successive poor harvests and the near-total collapse of its once-thriving tourist industry. Nestled among giant boulders at the base of the Bandiagara Escarpment is the mud-built village of Nombori, home to around 1,200 ethnic Dogon people. There, Pilif Guindo’s small clinic is struggling to cope with a steady increase in child malnutrition. The clinic sees 15 new cases of malnutrition per week, a threefold increase in as many years, explains Guindo, a doctor who practices both…
Follow @{0}Bissau-Guineans will go to the polls in March to end yet another post-coup regimeDAKAR, 16 January 2014 (IRIN) – Guinea-Bissau will hold elections on 16 March to end yet another post-coup regime, with many hoping the polls will help calm an internecine and drawn-out instability. Observers believe that a political coalition and deeper commitment by the international community after the polls can shore up the country’s recovery. Multiple coups and assassinations have marred the West African country’s political history since the first free polls in 1994. Corruption and misrule have bogged down governance and public services, and over the…
Critics say Côte d’Ivoire’s truth panel has failed to reconcile the country after past conflicts ABIDJAN, 13 January 2014 (IRIN) – Côte d’Ivoire’s Dialogue, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CDVR) recently concluded its two-year mandate with a report detailing rights violations and the causes of past conflicts, but observers lambasted the panel for failing to help heal divisions and said that some of its findings were already well known. Established in September 2011, the CDVR was tasked with investigating past human rights violations. However, the scope was not clearly defined. In November last year, it handed President Alassane Ouattara its report…
Follow @{0}About a century after she says she was born in CAR, Rame Higa is heading for Chad after her home was torched and two sons killed.BANGUI, 9 January 2014 (IRIN) – Almost 20,000 people of Chadian origin have left violence in the Central African Republic (CAR) in recent weeks, and many more are expected to join the exodus, which is straining humanitarian capacity in Chad, a country many of those fleeing have never lived in.“Those of us who were born here are Central Africans, but we are treated like foreigners. We have never seen Chad but have to go…
Follow @{0}Meeting with government officials. Dozo hunters deny committing atrocities ABIDJAN, 3 January 2014 (IRIN) – Since fighting for Côte d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara during the election violence in 2010-2011, armed traditional hunters known as “dozo” appear to have increasingly taken on the role of regular forces, mounting roadblocks, patrolling, and arresting civilians. They have also been accused of committing atrocities. “Their use by certain politicians drew them to the country’s political scene, but now that we are in a lawful state, more than two years since the post-election crisis, we think it’s high time they resumed their [traditional] activities,” said…
Follow @{0}More West African countries were seen to be highly corrupt in 2013DAKAR, 3 January 2014 (IRIN) – Poor public services in many West African countries, with already dire human development indicators, are under constant pressure from pervasive corruption. Observers say graft is corroding proper governance and causing growing numbers of people to sink into poverty.“If you want to put a human face to corruption… then see how we have kids who walk miles to school because there are no public transport systems,” said Harold Aidoo, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Democratic Development in Monrovia, the…
MAROUA, 27 December 2013 (IRIN) – The authorities in Yaoundé, the Cameroonian capital, have set up tighter border controls in the Far North region to guard against infiltration by jihadist Boko Haram fighters from neighbouring Nigeria as civilians flee insurgent attacks and a Nigerian military offensive, seeking safety across the border in Cameroon. A rapid response military unit has also been deployed and beefed up in the northern regions and some tourist hotels now have armed guards. “We have revised our security strategy. We have registered all expatriates and established police posts in areas where they work. There are security…
MINAWAO CAMP, 24 December 2013 (IRIN) – Only around 1,800 of the thousands of Nigerians forced to find refuge from the fighting in the northeast between the jihadist Boko Haram and the Nigerian military have settled in a camp in neighbouring Cameroon. Others are living with relatives in villages along the border, complicating their identification and raising concern by the Cameroonian authorities that insurgents could infiltrate local communities. The border separating Cameroon and Nigeria often divides villages of similar ethnicity, and local authorities say the Nigerians who have sought safety with their relatives in Cameroon often do not consider themselves…
Follow @{0}Life-saving: the sofosbuvir molecule has been approved in the US and Europe for the treatment of hepatitis CNew York, 23 December 2013 (IRIN) – Following approvals in the US and Europe this month of a new drug to treat hepatitis C, activists are pushing for the medication to be made available in poor countries, a development reminiscent of the activism that forced down HIV/AIDS drug prices a decade ago in Brazil, South Africa and Thailand. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that as many as 185 million people are infected with hepatitis C, which is often called a “viral…
Follow @{0}Medical consultation. Local and international NGOs underscore need for collaboration to tackle humanitarian crisesDAKAR, 20 December 2013 (IRIN) – UN agencies and international NGOs (INGOs) are increasingly stressing the need to reach out to new partners, including local NGOs, to build their capacity to respond to humanitarian crises. Yet agencies are still said to “arrive, set the agenda, do their activities and leave,” said Sayadi Sani, head of the local Nigerien nutrition NGO Befen. How can aid agencies better empower local NGOs?A recent study by the accountability and learning non-profit ALNAP concluded that partnerships between INGOs and local NGOs…
Follow @{0} Ivoirian refugees being repatriated home from Liberia ABIDJAN, 19 December 2013 (IRIN) – Fear of reprisal is preventing thousands of Ivoirians from returning to Cote d’Ivoire from Ghana and Togo, where they sought refuge following the violently disputed 2010-2011 presidential elections.Of the 12,500 Ivoirians who fled to the two countries, only 710 have returned home, according to the state-run Service for the Assistance of Refugees and Stateless People (SAARA).By contrast, increasing numbers of Ivoirians who fled to Liberia during the violence have been returning in recent months.Many of those who fled to Ghana are from Côte d’Ivoire’s commercial…
Follow @{0} Some 58,000 children have suffered severe malnutrition in northern Cameroon this year MAROUA, 18 December 2013 (IRIN) – Mairam Umaru’s year-old son had suffered vomiting and fever on and off for a month before she sought medical help.“I thought it was my milk affecting him, or that he was teething,” said the 17-year-old mother at the referral hospital in Maroua, the capital of Cameroon’s Far North Region, where her son was being treated for severe acute malnutrition and other complications.Around a dozen mothers watched over their sick children in the ward. Some 58,000 children under the age of…
Follow @{0} A mother and her malnourished twins at Mopti reference hospital in central Mali DAKAR, 13 December 2013 (IRIN) – The mortality rate among children under age five living in Yirimadjo, Mali, southeast of the capital, Bamako, decreased by nearly tenfold over three years after the Malian Ministry of Health and NGOs Tostan and Muso introduced a new healthcare model: proactively seeking out patients and treating them early.A study on the programme, by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), published this week in PLoS ONE, found under-five mortality dropped from 155 deaths…
Follow @{0} A house despite in a previous bout of inter-communal violence in the north (file photo) DAKAR, 13 December 2013 (IRIN) – The deaths of more than 3,000 victims of sectarian violence in central Nigeria since 2010 have largely been ignored by the government, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released on 12 December, Turning a Blind Eye to Mass Killings.HRW documented “horrific” acts of inter-communal violence between Muslims and Christians in Plateau and Kaduna states – two of the worst-affected areas. More than 10,000 people have been killed in these states since 1992 in ongoing periods…