Search Results for: Kenya

BY ANDREW GREEN, IN KAMPALA

For publishers working in east Africa, textbooks spell survival, but two major western publishers have found recently that the ethical dilemmas of working in the region can be hard to navigate.

With fierce competition for those contracts and limited local oversight capacity, the industry is dogged by persistent rumors of requests for and payments of bribery, money paid to delay rival’s books and other forms of corruption.…

BY VILLEN ANGANAN, IN BEAU-BASSIN, MAURITIUS

INTERNATIONAL accounting firms are exploring opportunities within Africa, and are using the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius – a regional financial centre – as a stepping stone. All the Big Four: Ernst &Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), KPMG and Deloitte are already successfully offering their services to African clients.…

BY ANDREW GREEN, WANG FANGQING, PAUL COCHRANE, JONATHAN DYSON AND CARMEN PAUN

THE POLITECNO di Milano, one of Italy’s most prestigious universities, will teach and assess most of its degree courses and all its postgraduate ones entirely in English from 2014, UWN reported recently.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE UN agency charged with fighting HIV/AIDS has welcomed a decision by the Kenya high court that an existing national law fighting fake drugs is too loosely worded and could promote the seizure of generic medicines made by legitimate manufacturers.…

BY GEORGE STONE, IN CAPE TOWN

SUSTAINABLE growth in Africa outside South Africa faces the challenges of strong population growth, commodity price volatility, climate change and food insecurity. The continent’s current population of 1 billion people is forecast to almost double by 2050.…

BY BILL CORCORAN, IN CAPE TOWN; MOHAMMED YUSUF, IN NAIROBI; AND KEITH NUTHALL

A BOOK launched at last December’s Durban international climate change conference has focused on the growing potential for sugar to be a biofuel feedstock in Africa. ‘Bioenergy for Sustainable Development and International Competitiveness:

The Role of Sugar Cane in Africa’ was written by 44 authors representing 30 organisations in 16 countries and was published by Routledge.…

BY WANG FANGQING, IN SHANGHAI

WHILE China is desperately in need of nurses – 1.9 million to be exact, according to the nation’s ministry of health – the opportunities for overseas healthcare providers who are not ethnically Chinese are limited, as the government requires all nurses working in China to be able to pass a national test in Mandarin.…

BY PAUL COCHRANE, IN BEIRUT; AND MOHAMMED YUSUF, IN NAIROBI

IN late January, oil production and exports came to a halt in South Sudan over a transit pricing dispute with its former overlord north Sudan. With no compromise in sight, the newly independent Africa country is mulling other transport options, but, even if production were to resume, it will be months – at best – before its oil sector gets back on its feet.…

BY BILL CORCORAN, WACHIRA KIGOTHO, PAUL COCHRANE; and KEITH NUTHALL

SUB-SAHARAN Africa has always been regarded as a problem zone for air traffic control, with weak states struggling to provide the sophisticated and flexible communications required for state of the art ATC.…

BY WACHIRA KIGOTHO

RESEARCHERS studying mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are warning illegal uranium mining continues in a country still riven with political violence and weak government authority.

Indeed, militia groups and government soldiers continue to benefit from illegal uranium mining in the eastern DRC, claims Ms Nyambura Githaiga, a researcher with the Nairobi-based African Conflict Prevention Programme.…