The night before the arrival of the head of the United States aid agency in Sudan, a Sudanese government aircraft bombed a village he was to visit in the rebel-controlled southern area of the country. Nevertheless, USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios says the cease fire in the contested Nuba Mountains appears to be holding.

Jeffery Millington, formerly State Department Director for East African Affairs, has been posted to Sudan as United States charge d'affaires. Millington is the first American diplomat resident in Khartoum since the U.S. closed embassy operations there six years ago.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's coalition of political parties is favored to emerge victorious in the voting that began Thursday to elect 389 members of Algeria's lower house of parliament, but voter apathy, along with boycotts and violence by Islamic rebels, has put the election's credibility in doubt.

"We need a little space to build a critical mass of entrepreneurs," says Lawrencia Adams, Coordinator of the Accra-based Organisation Pan Africaine Pour Le Developpement Durable. And African nations don't get it, she complained at a briefing of leaders of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) hosted by InterAction, a U.S. based international development and humanitarian alliance of NGOs with 160 ...

Two decades of war left Mozambique littered with land mines. One study by the Canadian De-mining Institute estimates that there are approximately two million land mines, covering 70 percent of Mozambique's territory. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies puts the number at three million.

In the second and final part of an interview with allAfrica.com, Ghanaian president John Agyekum Kufuor talks about his hopes for Ghana and the performance of his government after 18 months in office.

In the Mano River region of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, armed insurgency has moved from country to country for years, one country's conflict feeding on another's. Most recently, due to fighting between the Liberian government of Charles Taylor and insurgents of the group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), tens of thousands of Liberian refugees have fled into Guinea ...

It has been a busy week for the President of Ghana, John Agyekum Kufuor. On Monday he welcomed the outgoing president of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konare, on a 3-day state visit - one of Konare’s last official functions before he steps down next month.

The U.S. has apparently decided to throw more of its political and financial weight behind Kenyan-led efforts within the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad) aimed at settling Sudan's 20-year-old civil war. "We have conveyed to the Kenyan government our willingness to contribute financing and personnel," a State Department official speaking on background told allAfrica.com.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill's 10-day visit to Africa is unprecedented. It is being seen as an opportunity for African officials to punch home their view that the continent's debt burden is unsustainable and that trade barriers in Europe and the United States must be dismantled.

As U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill begins a ten-day tour of African countries to see their economies at close quarters, the spotlight is on trade relations between the rich countries of the world and some of the poorest.

"Rigged rules and double standards lock poor people out of the benefits of trade, closing the door to an escape route from poverty," Oxfam charged in a recently released report, arguing that if Africa could achieve just a one per cent increase in exports, this would generate US$70bn - approximately five times what the continent receives in aid. Trade and development issues are at the heart of ...

"By the constitution of Sierra Leone, I do hereby declare Dr Ahmad Tejan Kabbah as duly elected president." With those words Sunday from Walter Nicol, chairman of the national electoral commission, the incumbent leader of Sierra Leone became the official winner of a second five-year term.

As the weeks have passed since Angola’s ceasefire was signed between Unita and the MPLA government on April 4, it has become clear that a grim situation lies behind Unita lines. As people stumble out of the bush into reception centers, they are telling of intense suffering, of people dying of hunger. Olara Otunnu, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict ...

It is hard to walk down a street in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, without hearing crackly radios blaring out election results after Tuesday's presidential and parliamentary poll.

They are an unlikely duo, to say the least: Irish rock star Bono, of U2, and Bush Administration Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill. But the two men are pairing up and between May 20-31st will travel to four sub-Saharan African nations. They will visit schools, HIV/Aids clinics and various development projects. The idea for the tour grew out of an initial meeting in O'Neill's office last year. At ...

"Free and fair and free of fear and violence," appears to be the consensus on the general elections in Sierra Leone, after Tuesday's enthusiastic voting for a new president, a new parliament and peace after more than ten years of civil war.

Lamin is ready to forgive, but not forget. Ishmael will never forget and is not prepared to forgive. Finna appears to have other things on her mind on election day in Sierra Leone.

Almost two and a half million Sierra Leoneans were eligible to vote in Tuesday's elections presidential and parliamentary elections, and it appears that the majority have gone to the polls enthusiastically. Long lines formed early at polling stations in the capital, Freetown, with reports of similar queues elsewhere in a country that is emerging from ten years of civil war.

Lieutenant-General Daniel Ishmael Opande, a Kenyan, is the force commander of the United Nations mission in Sierra Leone, Unamsil. Opande, who served as the UN’s chief military observer in neighbouring Liberia in the 1990s, took up his Freetown posting in 2000.

On the eve of elections, Sierra Leoneans are hoping to put behind them the bitter memories and atrocities of more than a decade of brutal civil war. They want to close a page that has sullied their reputation and tarnished their history.

Dr. Kizza Besigye, a retired colonel who ran against President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda's elections last year, and lost, says the whole exercise was fraudulent. Governments that praise Museveni's Uganda are making a serious error, he says. In voluntary exile now, Besigye, whose former campaign manager launched a democracy advocacy group in Washington, DC last month, is in the United States ...

After a remarkably trouble free run-up to Tuesday's election in Sierra Leone, the last day of campaigning was marred by clashes between rival political parties in the capital, Freetown, Saturday.

Since proclaiming independence from Somalia 11 years ago, just a few months after the ouster of General Siad Barre in June 1991, the former British Protectorate of Somaliland has sought international recognition without success. Nonetheless, it is considered by many observers to be a remarkably stable enclave, somehow managing on the volatile Horn of Africa to have escaped the strife that has ...

As tensions mount in Madagascar the U.S. government is clinging to the hope that new talks in Senegal will break the political impasse on the island nation. An economic blockade is squeezing the capital, Antananarivo, while the governors of four of the island's six provinces who back incumbent president Didier Ratsiraka are threatening secession in protest at the investiture of opposition leader ...