African countries once again bring up the rear in this year’s Corruption Perceptions Index , a closely watched benchmark of how well – or badly – countries are tackling graft.

Of the 47 countries reviewed in the region, corruption was perceived by executives to be “rampant” in 31, and a “serious challenge” in 13. Only three countries – Botswana, Mauritius and Cape Verde – got anything like a clean bill of health.

But amid the gloom are some interesting developments compared to last year’s table, suggesting the right mix of anti-corruption policy – plus a dose of rosy public relations – can help individual countries shake off the kind of reputation that scares investors off.

Perhaps the most stunning ascent this year was that of Liberia, storming up the chart from 138th to 97th this year, putting it well ahead of relative giants such as Argentina and Indonesia.

Monrovia has long received plaudits for its “zero tolerance” policy on graft, while its effort to buy back outstanding government debt has also soothed investor nerves. President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf won explicit backing from the United States earlier this year, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stopped off on a trip through Africa to tell her she was on “the right track”.

Over the coming years, the eyes of the world will be on how Liberia uses its share of the the proceeds from a multibillion-barrel offshore oil frontier off its coast and that of neighbouring Sierra Leone.

Likewise, Sierra Leone itself appears to be on a modest role, climbing 12 places to 146th position. The credibility of its anti-corruption drive received a boost earlier this month when it indicted the health minister on suspicion of mishandling a medical supply contract.

Sceptics noted that the indictment – the first involving an acting public official since the creation of the country’s Anti-Corruption Commission in 2000 – came just weeks before a high-profile investor conference in London.

Among the losers, Senegal stands out. Long perceived as one of the easier parts of West Africa to do business in, it even one a U.S. grant worth $540 million from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) this year in recognition of its good governance.

Does the fact that it has slipped from 85th place to 99th position suggest that the accolade is out of kilter with perceptions of those doing business there now?

Transparency International, the Berlin-based watchdog that puts together the report, concludes that the various anti-corruption reforms going on in the region will come to nothing unless there is a genuine will to properly implement them.

In that sense, a U.N.-sponsored deal in Vienna last week under which countries will from 2011 have to file reports what specific action they are taking against corruption may be a step forward – although civil society groups complain that those reports will not be sufficiently independent.

Can anything be done to help Africa shake off the corruption curse?

At a meeting in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh this month, China promised to double the aid it gives to Africa and even forgive the debt of some of the continent’s poorest countries.

We’ve known for some time that Chinese are migrating to Africa to exploit business opportunities. But it’s perhaps less known that growing numbers of Africans are also moving to China to live and work.

One of the most visible is Vimbayi Kajese, a 28-year-old Zimbabwean who reads the news on China Central Television - or CCTV - and is the country’s first African news presenter. 

CCTV 9, also known as CCTV International, is China’s state-run English language channel. As well as China, it’s available in more than 80 countries, of which six are in Africa — an increasingly important audience.

“I’ve been in China for over 3 years now,” Kajese told Reuters Africa Journal. “I came after I graduated from the U.S., and the reason why I came to China was because China is the next upcoming emerging market and definitely is the place to be.”

Kajese is one of an increasing number of young Africans heading to China, where a booming economy and ever-closer ties with Africa are creating opportunities as tempting as any in the West.

Tebogo Lefifi left her job as the CEO of a South African mining and property development firm and came to China. Now on a Chinese-funded scholarship to study Chinese economics, the 34-year-old wants to make sure Africans make the most of China’s growth. But some of that may have to wait until she’s mastered the language.
   
Lefifi is setting up an organisation for China-Africa discussion and networking in Beijing. Young African Professionals and Students, or YAPS, will eventually help African professionals and companies trying to get ahead in China.

There are also less formal opportunities. Frank Baelongandi, AKA DJ Kefra, has been playing in Beijing clubs for six years. He’s even been pronounced the capital’s best DJ. The 27-year-old from Kinshasa in the DRC originally came to study business, before taking up a residency at Vic’s, one of the capital’s biggest clubs.    

“I felt the energy, the opportunity, and I felt the magnitude,” he said. “So I just decided ‘OK I think that’s the place I should stay.’”

China’s African community has grown dramatically in the last decade. Experts estimate as many as 250,000 Africans are in the country at any one time, most of them traders in the thriving south. So it looks like ambitious young Africans are likely to keep heading out of Africa, and into China, in the years to come.

More than a billion people go hungry each day -- about the same number as did in the late 1950s. That's both a "tragedy on a grand scale" and an "astounding success," according to a new report called "Millions Fed," produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
    
While the absolute number of hungry people is the same as it was 40 years ago, the proportion is dramatically smaller -- one in six today, compared to one in three then, the report said. It illustrates 20 successful case studies where progress has been made in the fight against hunger.

Some solutions come from science: new varieties of wheat, rice, beans, maize, cassava, millet and sorghum. Others deal with markets, government policies, or the environment.
    
Two farmers from the Sahel region of Africa, oft plagued by drought and famine, visited Washington last month to talk about solutions they found close to home -- one of the success stories trumpeted in "Millions Fed."
    
Almost 30 years ago, farmers in Burkina Faso experimented with a traditional technique called "zai," digging pits in their plots and adding manure to improve soils before the rainy season, resulting in dramatically better yields.
    
"There was a long period of drought in my village," Yacouba Sawadogo told reporters. "Many people left because their life was very, very difficult. But I decided to stay," he said, explaining how he taught others the technique.
    
In Niger, farmers manage trees on their land to prevent erosion, improve yields, and provide livestock fodder. Before, women had to walk 6 miles to get firewood, but now they have enough for themselves and to sell to others, said Sakina Mati, who coordinates tree projects in six villages.
    
The projects have improved 13 million acres of farmland and fed 3 million people, said Oxfam America, a development group that works with the farmers.
    
It's food for thought as rich nations ramp up efforts to help small farmers grow more food in poor countries. "In our approach toward solutions and programs, we really need to listen as well as talk," said Gawain Kripke of Oxfam.
    
"Solutions don't always come from us."

PHOTO CREDIT: Yacouba Sawadogo on his farm in Burkina Faso /Courtesy of Oxfam America

Five-year-old Onarietta Remet is Nigeria’s most popular child painter. She’s been painting for four years now and has even sold some of her pieces.

Her father, Pius Remet, says everybody in the family is into painting and other artistic pursuits.

“When I grow up, what I want to do is paint,” Onarietta told Reuters Africa Journal in Lagos.

Art critic Dapo Adeniyi says talent such as Onarietta’s should be nurtured. “It’s a plus for us as a country that such energies are coming out.”

Onarietta showed an interest in painting when she was just 18 months old. Her parents have since encouraged her and even organised five exhibitions to show her work.

Onarietta has now done more than 150 paintings. Her parents say one of them has been sold to an international collector for $10,000, although most of her work is not being put up for sale.

How do you rate Onarietta’s paintings?

Africans living in the United States are twice as likely to graduate from college as the average American.

These African students often come from families who value education as a way to get on in life and place a high value on working and studying hard.

Sara Tsegaye, a straight-A student at UCLA, is one example of that success. Her parents fled Ethiopia in the late 1980s, first to Sudan and then, when Sara was one year old, they moved to San Jose, California.

Sara’s father works on a mobile ice cream truck in San Jose and her mother used to be a factory worker before she got laid off.

“We manage to pay for school because I’ve been working since I was 11,” Sara told Reuters Africa Journal. “I’ve been working with my dad on his ice cream truck, he’s been paying me and I’ve been saving the money. Also I had two jobs in high school and I saved up a lot of money. I understand the value of money.”

Sara wants to work with an NGO or a non-profit organisation after she graduates. She wants to travel and she wants to make a difference in the world. Other African students say they want to go home once they get a bit of experience in their careers.

But Africa is suffering from a massive brain drain just now and it’s questionable whether enough of those highly motivated students from America will return home in large enough numbers to really make a difference.

(Photo: Pope Benedict XVI with African bishops in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, 4  Oct 2009/Alessandro Bianchi)

Roman Catholic bishops called on corrupt Catholic leaders in Africa on Friday to repent or resign for giving the continent and the Church a bad name. Around 200 African bishops, along with dozens of other bishops and Africa experts, also accused multinational companies in Africa of "crimes against humanity" and urged Africans to beware of "surreptitious" attempts by international organizations to destroy traditional African values.

Their three-week synod, which ends formally on Sunday with a Mass by Pope Benedict, covered a range of Africa's problems, such as AIDS, corruption, poverty, development aspirations and crime. But it had a very direct message for corrupt African leaders who were raised Catholics.

"Many Catholics in high office have fallen woefully short in their performance in office. The synod calls on such people to repent, or quit the public arena and stop causing havoc to the people and giving the Catholic Church a bad name."

The message did not name any leaders. The international community has for years called on Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who was raised a Catholic and educated by Jesuits, to step down, saying he had brought his once-prosperous country to its knees.

Another African leader who was raised a Catholic and has been accused of corruption is Angola's President Eduardo dos Santos. Both men deny any wrongdoing.

In a section on AIDS, the bishops' message repeated the Church position that the spread of the disease could not be stopped by the use of condoms alone. Last March, on his way to his first trip to Africa, the pope caused an international storm by saying that the use of condoms could actually worsen the spread of AIDS.

Read the whole story here.

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One day this year, in all probability, the “billionth African” will have been born, a milestone that will only benefit the poorest continent if it can get its act together and unify its piecemeal markets.
   Nobody knows, of course, when or where in its 53 countries the child arrived to push Africa’s population into ten figures.
   The U.N. merely estimates that in mid-2008 there were 987 million people, and in mid-2009, 1,010 million.
   Given the difficulties of obtaining accurate data from the likes of Nigeria, where provincial population figures are often hostage to the ambitions of local politicians, or any data at all from the likes of Somalia, experts are reluctant to hazard any greater degree of accuracy.
   There is less doubt, however, about the underlying trend — that Africa’s population is set to grow faster than in any other part of the world in the coming decades, and to double by 2050.
   To some, the statistics from the U.N.’s population division will invite comparisons to the Asian giants, and inspire hopes of a flood of investment from Africans and outsiders to meet the needs of a continent likely to be home to one in five people by the middle of this century.
   By contrast, China’s projected population of 1.4 billion in 40 years will be shrinking, while India will only be adding an annual 3 million to its 1.6 billion people.
   To others, the numbers are stark reminders of the mammoth task Africa’s leaders face in providing the food, jobs, schools, housing and healthcare that are still so sorely lacking.
   UNFPA, the U.N.’s population arm, summarises by saying that sub-Saharan Africa faces “serious political, economic and social challenges” and points to the last two decades as evidence that more people does not mean more wealth.
   “Twenty years of almost three percent annual population growth has outpaced economic gains, leaving Africans, on average, 22 percent poorer than they were in the mid-1970s,” it says.
    Are Africa’s leaders ready and willing to create the truly unified common market needed to boost investment, trade and economic growth, or are short-term national interests likely to prevail, consigning Africa to a century of overpopulated poverty?

When Hillary Clinton visited the Democratic Republic of Congo in August, she spoke out against rape and said women should not be used as “weapons of war”.

The Secretary of State wanted Congo’s government to do more to stop sexual violence and prosecute offenders in an area where armed groups still use rape to terrorise local people seven years after the war was meant to have ended.

In Kiwanja in eastern Congo, counsellors are trying to rebuild the lives of rape victims, both women and men.

A 62-year-old widow, who does not want to give her real name, says she was attacked and repeatedly raped by a group of youths, who also killed her 20-year-old son.

“Esther” has already received medical help at a local hospital and is now being treated for psychological trauma.

Counsellor Mariette Paluku Nzaira says it is vital for rape victims to seek help.

“The advantage of counselling centres like this one is that when someone faces these kinds of problems they feel unworthy,” she told Reuters Africa Journal. “Often when the husband finds out he chases his wife away.”

For men such as “Francois” who have been raped, counselling is also important if they are to make sense of what has happened to them.

“Men who are raped have a feeling of anger. They are wondering how this could have
happened to them,” said counsellor Katungo Kilauri

“It is important for victims to go for counselling because when you have a problem and you don’t speak to someone about it, you can die. When you let out what is in your heart, the bad feelings go away.”

These counsellors are trying to raise awareness of sexual violence by encouraging more people to talk about it.

But is that enough? Human rights groups say hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped in Congo in the past decade by government forces and rebels. The perpetrators are almost never brought to justice.

Successive failed rain seasons in Kenya have led to a drought that experts say is the worst in the country since 1996.

And it is not just a problem for Kenya. Aid agencies estimate more than 23 million people will need food aid in the Horn of Africa region.

Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai says it shows how ill-prepared much of Africa is to deal with the effects of climate change.

Herders who depend on cattle for their food and income are having to drive their livestock hundreds of kilometres to seek pasture and water - but find little relief.

“The grass was green when I got here, but it is finished now and a lot of our animals are dying,” Grewan Lesakut, from the pastoralist Samburu community in the Rift Valley, told Reuters Africa Journal.

“The way I see it, all our cows are going to die,” fellow herder John Lenyarui said. “I know some people who had 50 cows but have nothing now, some with 200 and now have only 40 and myself I had 500 and now I have 100.”

Kenya’s Meat Commission is doing what it can. It has offered to buy thousands of cattle from their owners to be slaughtered for meat. But the government facility has been stretched to the limit and thousands of have died outside the slaughterhouse.

“This is a very ugly scene, a very disturbing scene that the country is facing,” Livestock Minister Mohamed Kuti said.

Most nomadic groups hold on to their animals even in times of severe drought, seeing them as their most valuable investment.  In desperation, Turkana villagers, from northwest Kenya, are selling their goats well below market prices to the European Union’s humanitarian wing which then distributes the meat to the hungry.

Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, says the drought is evidence of the long term effect of climate change.

“This is an excellent time for Kenya maybe to realise, and for the rest of Africa to learn, what we are talking about when we say that climate change is going to hit Africa very seriously, and it’s partly because Africa is completely unprepared for what is coming with climate change,” she told Africa Journal.

“For more than three decades we have been saying it is important to protect our forests, to protect our rivers, to protect our lands so that we stop soil erosion and to protect our wetlands.

“Somehow, all of them have come and have converged during this last two, now going to three, years and everybody and everything that is living in this country is feeling it.”

(Pictures: Turkana men slaughter goats at a livestock de-stocking centre in the Loyoro village of Turkana district in northwestern Kenya. Reuters/Thomas Mukoya. Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maathai delivers a speech in Japan. Reuters/Kim Kyung Hoon.)

Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa grower, kicked off the 2009/10 season on bleak note on Thursday, with the head of the body overseeing the industry warning that even the most optimistic forecasts predicted a fall in production.

“Our plantations have suffered from the crisis,” said Gilbert Ano, echoing concerns about the West African country’s cocoa trees becoming too old, not being looked after properly by under-supported farmers and producing less cocoa as a result.

In talking about the “crisis”, Ano used the increasingly prevalent explanation for why things in Ivory Coast — once the region’s most stable, with an economy that boomed while neighbours stagnated or went to war — are not going very well.

He is referring to the political and military quagmire his country has been stuck in since a brief 2002-2003 war, during which rebels captured the north of the country. United Nations and French peacekeepers have since overseen a fragile peace, during which a return to war has been averted but elections have failed to take place.

For a long time, this “crisis”, didn’t appear to have much of an impact on cocoa. Exports, in fact, hit record levels in 2007/08. Roadblocks and a handful of flare-ups over the years meant transporting the beans, which are used to make chocolate, became more difficult and expensive. Nonetheless, solutions, which sometimes involved transiting through neighbouring countries, were always found.

But the real impact of the “crisis” is now being felt. As politicians rowed over election dates, voter lists or rebel disarmament, the lack of investment in the trees or small-scale farmers and alleged corruption amongst administrators has done its damage and output is falling. Some say it might fall by half over the next few years.

The reforms needed to reverse this have been talked about for years but cannot take place until the “crisis” is over, cocoa experts say.

So indeed the cocoa sector can quite justifiably talk about being in crisis. But in Ivory Coast, the “crisis” is now being used to explain just about anything. A once-vibrant business environment and professional class has been caught up in the “crisis”. Though some investors have remained, many others say they are waiting for the “crisis” to end before pumping in more money. Whether to explain increased corruption or poverty rates or even justify soldiers harassing drivers on the roads at night, the answer often comes back - “It’s because of the crisis”.

Once I was told that the crisis meant I shouldn’t worry about work and, instead, go and have a beer.

Has all this talk of a “crisis” adopted its own momentum? Ivorians are weary of the “crisis” but many say a small minority are doing what they can to extend it as they have worked out how to tap the “crisis economy”, which makes it more difficult to hold people accountable. Is this true?

The only way out of the “crisis” appears to be elections but they are constantly being
delayed. First due in 2005, they are now meant to take place in Nov. 29 but that date now looks in doubt.  Will elections really bring an end to the “crisis” or will they lead to another one?