News stories by Kristin Palitza

MASVINGO, Zimbabwe, Jun 19 (IPS) - A newborn baby lets out a feeble cry as midwife Anna Mungara tends to a small wound on its head, at the provincial hospital in Masvingo, a town in southeast Zimbabwe.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Feb 23 (IPS) - In his new book, "The Great African Society – A Plan for a Nation Gone Astray", Hlumelo Biko, the son of late Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, says that if nothing changes in South Africa, the country will become engulfed by corruption, crime, social decay, hopelessness and anger.

DAR ES SALAAM, Dic 22 (IPS) - A nurse working in a remote clinic in Mueda, a small town in northern Mozambique's Makonde Plateau, receives a shipment of vaccines from the national health department. Using special software on her mobile phone, she sends out a mass text message to alert mothers in the area about the availability of immunisations.

DAR ES SALAAM, Dic 13 (IPS) - Half asleep, Anuary lies exhausted on his bed in Amana Hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's capital. His mother, Mariam Saidi, sits on the edge of his mattress, staring blankly out of the window. Every now and then, she turns to wipe her 18-month-old son's forehead.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Aug 28 (IPS) - The protection of children remains critical in the Central African Republic, where parents willingly give their children to armed groups in exchange for protection and services.

The reality of Indian and Chinese investment in Africa is much more complex than the good cop, bad cop image of Asia’s two emerging economic giants.

Africa needs to reduce its dependency on foreign aid and get to the point of financing its own development, some of the continent’s key development experts say. Timing is optimal now that Africa is experiencing an economic boom with annual growth rates of up to eight percent.

African countries need more support from the private sector in order to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015, which include important development targets like poverty reduction, and improved health and education.

In an almost ceremonial manner, Selinah Mncwango opens her big plastic bag and pulls out several smaller packets, each filled with different types of seeds: sorghum, bean, pumpkin, and maize. They are her pride, her wealth, the 'pillar of my family,' says the farmer from a village in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province.

Nokwanda Sotyantya sits among heaps of garbage and patiently sorts through it, separating cardboard, plastic, glass, paper and metal, piece by piece. The recycled piles of trash are then weighed and sold to packaging manufacturers in South Africa that reuse the materials to create new products.