Kenya Political circus in top gear as 2012 general elections draws near

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BIG DAY FOR KENYA: ICC Judges deliver decision on Kenya cases on Monday – the 23rd, January

Kenya situation: Decisions on the confirmation of charges to be issued on 23 January

Situation: The Republic of Kenya
Cases:    The Prosecutor v. William Samoei Ruto, Henry Kiprono Kosgey and Joshua Arap Sang

The Prosecutor v. Francis Kirimi Muthaura, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Mohammed Hussein Ali

On Monday, 23 January 2012, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue its decisions to confirm or decline to confirm the charges in the case of The Prosecutor v. William Samoei Ruto, Henry Kiprono Kosgey and Joshua Arap Sang and in the case of The Prosecutor v. Francis Kirimi Muthaura, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Mohammed Hussein Ali. The confirmation of charges hearings in these two cases were held from 1 to 8 September 2011 and from 21 September to 5 October 2011, respectively.

The decisions will be notified in writing to the parties and participants in both cases. Thereafter, the Judges of Pre-Trial Chamber II will appear publicly in Courtroom I at 11:30 (The Hague time) for the sole purpose of informing the public about the outcome of their decisions. Neither the parties nor the participants will be present in the Courtroom during this public appearance.

Web streaming

The Judges’ public appearance can be followed live on the ICC website at:

Courtroom I :

·                     English:  http://livestream.xs4all.nl/icc1.asx 

·                     French:  http://livestream.xs4all.nl/icc2.asx

AV programmes

Audio and video recordings of the Judges’ public appearance will be available the same day, on the ICC YouTube channel <http://www.youtube.com/IntlCriminalCourt>  for viewing, and for downloading in broadcast quality on the Court’s FTP server.

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Press conference by ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo on the Kenya case

Press conference by ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo at 12:00 on Tuesday, 24 January, related to the Kenyan situation

Situation: The Republic of Kenya
Cases:   The Prosecutor v. William Samoei Ruto, Henry Kiprono Kosgey and Joshua Arap Sang

The Prosecutor v. Francis Kirimi Muthaura, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Mohammed Hussein Ali

On Tuesday, 24 January 2012, at 12:00 (The Hague local time), the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Mr Luis Moreno-Ocampo, will hold a press conference in relation to the situation in Kenya, in the ICC’s Press Briefing Room.

Webstreaming:

The press conference will be broadcast live, with no delay, at 12:00 on the following links:

English: http://livestream.xs4all.nl/icc5.asx <http://livestream.xs4all.nl/icc5.asx>

French: http://livestream.xs4all.nl/icc6.asx <http://livestream.xs4all.nl/icc6.asx>

Satellite broadcast

Satellite feed will be available free of charge; Information on frequencies and updates can be found here <http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/Go?id=b92291ec-07ec-4fee-afcf-194762c128a7&lan=en-GB> .

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Drought and floods have hit education in parts of Ethiopia

ETHIOPIA: Drought, floods hit education

Photo: Dietmar Temps/Flickr

Drought and floods have hit education in parts of Ethiopia

ADDIS ABABA,  – Parts of Ethiopia are still reeling from the effects of recent drought, flooding, conflict or a combination of the three, resulting in increased numbers of children dropping out of school, say officials.

At least 385,000 school-children need “emergency education assistance this school year”, Alexandra Westerbeek, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) communication manager in Ethiopia, told IRIN.

“In addition, 70,000 children among [the] refugee population also need emergency education assistance.” 

Parts of the affected regions of Afar, Amhara, Benishangul-Gumuz, Diredawa, Gambella, Harar, Oromia, Somali Region, Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region (SNNPR) and Tigray are under-developed and suffer chronic emergencies.   

According to Mohamed Abubeker, head of the special support and inclusive education office at the Ministry of Education, the Afar and Somali regions were the most affected.

“Between June and July 2011, the drop-out rate had reached 50 percent in some of these areas, although it is now showing a stabilizing trend,” Abubeker said.

A number of formal and alternative basic education schools have also been damaged by wind storms. 

The alternative schools are non-formal programmes for children aged seven to 14, enabling pupils in pastoral areas to cover the equivalent of the first four grades of primary school in three years before transitioning into formal schools.

“Food for education”

The school-feeding programme is helping to draw pupils back to school, according to Abubeker.

In an e-mail to IRIN, Melese Awoke, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) spokesperson, said WFP and partners were trying to secure additional funding to expand the “food for education” intervention.

At present, WFP is assisting at least 625,000 children in 1,186 schools in six of the regions. But the WFP intervention is under-funded, according to Melese.

Funding for emergency education was also a major gap in the humanitarian response from mid-2011, according to UNICEF, which noted that “the challenge for 2012 is to design more flexible programmes which are able to respond to the changing educational needs, whatever they are”.

Newer approaches are needed to tackle the problem. “The severity of the drought has caused different [types] of migration,” said Arlo Kitchingman, the education cluster coordinator of the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies. 

“The longer students are out of school, research and experience suggests, the more likely they are not to return…” 

Kitchingman recommended “making the school calendar more flexible to accommodate pastoralists and nomadic movement with the intention that the school year doesn’t fall when the drought is most severe”.

If the school year followed such a pattern, he said, “It wouldn’t matter if children are migrating or moving to different areas, it won’t affect their academic calendar.”

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source www.irinnews.org

Funerals became a weekend fixture

BOTSWANA: Saturday is for funerals

Photo: Harvard University Press

Funerals became a weekend fixture

JOHANNESBURG,  – One part novella and two parts textbook, Saturday is for Funerals* pairs the recollections of Unity Dow, five-times author and Botswana’s first female high-court judge, with the analysis of Harvard health sciences professor, virologist and chair of the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute, Max Essex.

As Essex notes, Botswana is typically held up as one of the first African countries to boast early successes in tackling HIV. Although HIV prevalence remains high, with about one in four adults living with HIV, it has been particularly hailed for the early political will shown by leaders, such as former President Festus Mogae, in addressing HIV.

Under Mogae, Botswana introduced prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) services in 1999 and almost six years later was able to boast that these services reached as many as 90 percent of all HIV-positive pregnant women. He also introduced antiretroviral (ARV) treatment by 2002, at a time when former South African president, Thabo Mbeki, was still questioning the link between HIV and AIDS, and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, was describing ARVs as “poisons”.

Botswana’s national PMTCT programme had been under way for four years when South Africa finally launched its PMTCT programme in 2003, after a protracted legal battle with the Treatment Action Campaign, a lobby group.

Changing times, changing lives

Rising HIV prevalence rates in the 1990s meant big changes in Botswana. By 2000, writes Essex, the World Health Organization had issued dire warnings: 85 percent of 15-year-olds in the country would die from AIDS-related illnesses; life expectancy would drop by 44 years.

But Dow recounts the more insidious and poignant changes, the ones that crept into people’s daily lives and culture as deaths mounted before ARVs were available.

“If you have not seen someone for a while and you meet their mother, you are afraid to ask after them. Perhaps they have died and you have not heard,” writes Dow, recounting the words of her mother. “It was never like this before. You must remember people’s children and be sure to ask how they are. How can you ask about people who may be dead?”

The title of the book itself points to the way rising AIDS-related deaths meant funerals became a weekend fixture. So much so that the cultural practice of midnight grave-digging had to change to meet growing demand. Young men could now be seen digging graves in the afternoons as well, Essex notes.

Dow recounts how, as an advocate for women and children, she became an HIV resource for friends, family, strangers and, as a high court judge, those in her courthouse. When most still will not name the virus, her directness in approaching the subject is appreciated, she writes.

In each chapter, Dow’s prose is followed by Essex’s medical review of the issues encapsulated in Dow’s vignettes. Untrained experts will likely benefit from Essex’s scientific explanations, particularly of ARV resistance and side-effects. However, there are gaps. He fails to distinguish between traditional and medical male circumcision: some forms of traditional circumcision may not remove enough of the foreskin to offer protection from HIV infection. In clinical trials, medical male circumcision has been shown to reduce a man’s likelihood of contracting HIV through vaginal intercourse by up to 60 percent.

His explanation of clinical trial procedures is a welcome addition, especially when read against the backdrop of mass media reports that in southern Africa continue to portray participants as “guinea pigs”. However, some would challenge his assertion that it is important to encourage HIV vaccine trial participants to avoid pregnancy not only because potential vaccines have not been tested for safety in pregnant women but because “additionally it seems important to strongly discourage pregnancy for HIV-positive women, whether in trials or not, to prevent the risk that more HIV-positive infants will be born”. Such arguments have resulted in alleged forced sterilizations of HIV-positive women in Namibia and South Africa, despite the fact that PMTCT services are available.

Essex’s wording around migration is also likely to spark some discontent: “Refugees and immigrants from all over southern Africa see Botswana as the place to be. This obviously increases tension, as well as demand on programmes with limited resources.”

Despite the fact that migration has been a facet of southern Africa for centuries, contributing to the region’s high burdens of HIV and tuberculosis, migrants continue to face challenges in securing cross-border healthcare. While the Southern African Development Community has reviewed the idea of health passports to address this, there has been little progress. As recently as August 2011, the Botswana government was reportedly refusing to treat HIV-positive foreign nationals in its prisons.

In addition, the number of migrants remains difficult to estimate and research from South Africa and other countries shows that it is often migrants who wait until it is too late to access care. Many foreign nationals in Botswana are likely to have come from countries such as Zimbabwe and Zambia, which have lower HIV prevalence rates.

Despite such shortcomings, Saturday is for Funerals manages to provide a window into how HIV changed one country that largely seemed to “get it right” when confronting HIV and AIDS while providing readers with the scientific background to understand how and why many of the issues faced by Botswana continue to challenge that country and many others. If nothing else, it is an addition to the ever-evolving story of HIV in which, as its authors note, “understanding how people live and love is the key to understanding how and whether the science breakthroughs will work, and how to redesign them so they will work better”.

*Released as a paperback in 2011

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source www.irinnews.org

An early success story

BOTSWANA: A timeline of HIV action

Photo: Glenna Gordon/IRIN

An early success story

JOHANNESBURG,  – Botswana has marked many “firsts” in Africa’s fight against the HI virus. IRIN/PlusNews details the most important events in its battle:

1984 – Botswana diagnoses its first patient with HIV;

1987 – The country develops the first of many national plans to tackle HIV and AIDS;

1995 – As HIV cases mount, it introduces a national community home-based care programme to complement the over-stretched health system and medical staff shortage compounded by the lack of a national medical school;

1999 – The country establishes the National AIDS Coordinating Agency (NACA). It also introduces prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT), a first in Africa, with initial pilot sites in the capital, Gaborone, and Francistown. In a little less than a decade, about 90 percent of Botswana’s HIV-positive pregnant women and their babies will benefit from PMTCT services;

2000 – The World Health Organization estimates that 85 percent of 15-year-olds in Botswana will eventually die of AIDS-related illnesses.

2001 – The Debswana mining company, a joint venture between mining conglomerate De Beers and the Botswana government, becomes the first business in the world to provide free ARV treatment to its employees, spouses and their children younger than 21. As of November, all health facilities are reportedly providing PMTCT services;

2002 – After making bulk purchases of the three drug combinations needed to treat HIV, the government launches the Masa, or “A New Dawn” in the local Setswana, HIV treatment programme. Training of nurses and what are largely foreign contract doctors in HIV diagnosis and treatment begins. The country also becomes the first in southern Africa, a region hard-hit by HIV, to provide free treatment to its citizens;

2003 – First national strategic plan on HIV, as recommended by UNAIDS. The plan runs until 2009. About 7 percent of adults and children needing HIV treatment are estimated to be on ARVs;

2004 – Voluntary counselling and HIV rapid testing (VCT) is introduced, a major boost to PMTCT efforts in which VCT for expecting mothers is task-shifted away from nurses and midwives to lay counsellors. By 2007, the country has also introduced the dried blood spot HIV testing needed to diagnose babies born to HIV-positive mothers;

2005 – With universal HIV education in schools, about 40 percent of young men and women know how to prevent HIV infection. Meanwhile, about a third of all pregnant women are found to be HIV-positive, according to government surveys;

2006 – Ministry of Finance announces that condoms will be added to the list of tax-exempt items, cutting their cost;

2009 – NACA launches a programme to address multiple concurrent partnerships, thought to be a HIV risk factor, while the Ministry of Health begins rolling out medical male circumcision. After years of lobbying by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and local AIDS and human rights groups, the government agrees in April to relax a policy that explicitly bars non-citizens from accessing HIV treatment;

2010 – At a cost of almost US$350 million, Botswana achieves universal access targets with more than 80 percent of HIV-positive adults and children on ARVs. The second national strategic plan is launched, to run until 2016. The government also passes an amendment to its Employment Act ending workplace dismissal based on an individual’s sexual orientation or HIV status;

2011 – The country attracts criticism after government refuses to provide HIV-positive foreign nationals in its prisons with HIV treatment.

llg/mw source www.irinnews.org