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.

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?

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.

Millions of years ago, Madagascar separated from the other continents and evolved separately. Today it has about 12,000 plants most of which can be found nowhere else in the world. Many of these plants have medicinal properties, but their habitat is under threat.

In the town of Tolear, people rely on herbs as the nearest hospital is far away. Traditional healers combine plants and a little bit of magic to cure patients.

“The forest helps us to cure all illnesses,” Dimbiraza, a traditional healer, told Reuters Africa Journal. “So we need to preserve the forest everywhere in the world, not just in Madagascar, in the world because the forest is nature. It’s our second God. There’s God up there and the forest is our second God.”

The forest around Tolear is like a huge natural pharmacy.

Malagasy companies such as Homeopharma manufacture plant products for sale at home and for export to Europe and the United States.

Claude Ratsimivony, the company’s chairman, says the market is seeing growth rates of 30 to 40 percent and there are still medicinal plants to be discovered.

“We still have not discovered everything. We know that there are about 12,000 species, but Madagascar is a country that is mysterious in the respect that it still guards the secrets of its traditional healers.”

But some of Madagascar’s plant secrets may be lost before they can even be found as forests are being cut down for charcoal and farming.

The government has initiated several conservation projects and wants to do more to preserve the plants that contribute to both modern and traditional medicine. It will be interesting to see if they can keep ahead of the slashers and burners.

A project in Ethiopia that helps destitute women become self-reliant by providing them with paid employment has attracted a lot of attention from politicians visiting Addis Ababa for an international get-together.

Alem Abebe is a 14-year-old girl who left home three years ago and made her way to the capital. She now earns 50 US cents a day working at the Abebech Gobena project in one of the city’s slums. It’s not enough to send money home, but enough to survive — and to pay for night school.

But by the World Bank definition, Abebe and other women working at the project are still extremely poor: they earn much less than the daily income of $1.25 or roughly one euro that’s now used to measure poverty.

But the whole point isn’t to hand out money for free: but to help women who would be on the street get a job, an education - and a future.

It’s a departure from previous aid models, which saw large sums handed over by the West to African countries, a system that some say hasn’t really helped the world’s poorest continent.

“The model that’s coming up or that I’m proposing is essentially a model where Africa and Africans become equal partners with the rest of the world, not one where there’s a donor and a recipient where Africans are viewed as secondary citizens,” Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian author, told Reuters Africa Journal.

“This is really an environment where Africans are getting something, they’re getting paid for doing something, for being entrepreneurs, for generating something, for building products, for establishing infrastructure. It’s not the aid model where you get money for nothing,” said Moyo, whose book Dead Aid argues that Western generosity often doesn’t actually help in the long run.

Today the global financial crisis means that Western countries are trying to save their own economies and are no longer prepared to spend so much on aid. So is direct aid still a solution. Or are small projects that generate employment better at fighting poverty?

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi agreed to sit down with Reuters on Wednesday only hours before leaving for the G8 summit in Italy. He told us he planned to remind the rich leaders he met there that the economic slowdown and global warming are having a disproportionate effect on Africa. And that the world’s poorest continent did nothing to cause them.

The former rebel represented Africa at this year’s G20 summit of rich nations and is arguing the case on behalf of the continent again today and tomorrow. Continental spokesman seems a roll Meles — who has a passionate interest in economics — is comfortable with. But he told us it was only related to his job as Ethiopian Prime Minister and that he has no desire to take on a pan-African job if and when he retires as leader — something he has recently said he has plans to do.

“The key message for us is to ask the G8 to live up to their commitments,” Meles said, looking relaxed in his Addis Ababa office as he prepared to fly off to Rome. “The promise (from the G20 summit) was that something like $50 billion dollars would be made available to poorer countries. Slightly more than $20 billion of that is on hand. The rest needs to be fulfilled.”

The Ethiopian leader also said Africa’s myriad problems were being compounded by global
warming and it was essential that the continent be compensated by the rich world at
environment talks due for Denmark in December.

“Many institutions have tried to quantify (the amount of compensation) and they have come up with different figures,” Meles said. “The sort of median figure would be in the range of $40 billion a year.”

But some analysts think that figure is very ambitious, especially bearing in mind that only $20 billion of the $50 billion promised at G20 has so far made it into the hands of those to whom it’s been promised.

Meles certainly sounded like he was heading off to the G8 with a full plate of issues and ideas for the world’s richest nations.

The problem is that fewer big initiatives are expected to be agreed in Rome as there were at the G20.

So what’s the best he, and Africa, can really hope for?

Is the developed world to blame for the economic difficulties the world’s poorest are facing? If so, what should it do? And should Africa be compensated for climate change?

On May 19, voters in Malawi will go to the polls to elect their next president. The Democratic Progressive Party has been in power for the last four years and is fielding President Bingu wa Mutharika as its candidate once again.

Despite facing a strong alliance of the main opposition leader and a former president, the incumbent is expected to win on the back of an economic boom.

Though critics accuse Mutharika of rigging his way into office, he is credited with helping to improve Malawi’s economy. Since he took over, the country has experienced an average economic growth of 7 percent.

“He inherited a very politically and economically mismanaged legacy … and it was a very tall order to get the country running, to try to get the confidence of very important external players in Malawi,” said Dimpho Motsamai, a political analyst at the Institute for Global Dialogue in South Africa who specializes on Malawi.

“So his vision was one of economic rejuvenation, stricter physical management of economic resources — very prudent management of economic resources — and one that would deal with socio-economic inequalities in Malawi,” she told Reuters Africa Journal.

Malawi has also experienced severe drought. 2005 was its worst year and nearly half of the country faced starvation and a lack of maize, the local staple. Wa Mutharika’s government implemented fertilizer and seed distribution programmes. Last year the country produced a surplus of 1.3 million tones of maize — the highest in 10 years — and became an exporter of food rather than an importer.

Though 7 other candidates will challenge the president, his stiffest competition is expected from John Tembo of the Malawi Congress Party, who has been endorsed by the country’s former president Bakili Muluzi.

Muluzi stepped down in 2004 after he couldn’t change the constitution to allow him to run for a third term. Malawi’s electoral commission has barred Muluzi from running. The former president was arrested and charged with stealing donor money while in office. Despite, this some Malawians still see Muluzi as a liberator because he ousted the country’s first leader, Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

Malawi is not be a regional leader but what happens during the election may influence what happens in other emerging African democracies. And if the incumbent does win as expected, it may also demonstrate that old Clintonian mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Africa is the least electrified continent on the planet and getting power into the homes of millions of people who don’t have electricity is an enormous challenge.

Rwanda is Africa’s most densely populated country and 9 out of 10 people there don’t have electricity. The government is now tapping its own natural resources such as the methane deposits under Lake Kivu to try to meet the country’s growing energy
demands. 

The lake holds huge reserves of methane, a gas produced by the fermentation of sediments at the bottom of the lake.

Methane is combustible and can be used to produce electricity. But in high concentrations it can also be dangerous.

Alex Kabuto, chief technician at the methane extraction plant at the lake, says the amount of gas under the lake is increasing and it is good idea to extract it to reduce the risk of explosion.

“So the best way for us to do is to extract the gas, use it for energy and electricity it’s good for the country, and at the same time control the lake,” he told Reuters Africa Journal.

Rwanda’s first methane extraction rig opened only last year, after 5 years of building work. Lake Kivu’s methane reserves could satisfy Rwanda’s energy needs for the next 200 years.

And Rwanda desperately needs more energy. So far most of the country’s electricity has come from hydropower. But water levels are declining and 90 percent of Rwanda’s population aren’t even on the electricity grid yet.    

But the majority of homes without electricity are in the rural areas and in spite of the methane extraction it will take years to get the grid out to all the houses.

So in the meantime Rwanda is trying to get electricity to the people by focusing on renewable energy. Villagers in Rukore, 30 km north of Kigali, are adapting to biogas, a new technology introduced a few months ago.

Jean Claude Uwizeye, a government biogas technician, explains: “Cow dung is the main material we are using here in Rwanda because we found that many households have cows in their homes. Two to three cows are enough to produce gas for cooking
and lighting in their rural households.”

Biogas also helps protect the environment by giving rural residents an alternative to cutting down trees for firewood.

So far more than 300 biogas plants have been built around the country — but there are 9 million Rwandans who don’t have electricity. 

In a time of global warming and diminishing resources, powering up the millions of homes that are still in the dark is a major challenge.

But is it realistic for Rwanda to rely on its own natural resources, such as methane or biogas, to bring electricity into all its homes?

On Jan. 14 Reuters hosted a live video Q&A with our renowned photographer Finbarr O’Reilly about his experiences in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Finbarr addressed what drew him to Africa and the most difficult aspects of being a photographer in a war zone.

Finbarr is still available to answer questions, submit them in the comments section below or send a Twitter message with the hash tag "#finbarr" .

Check out "Death all around," his multimedia report from a Congolese refugee camp, dispatches from Chad and Afghanistan, selected photos from his portfolio, and an audio slideshow from his most recent Congo assignment.

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On my latest trip to report on Congo's seemingly unending cycle of violence, I wanted to go beyond generic images of downtrodden refugees and brutal conflict.

I spent two years in Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda from 2002 to 2004, covering the regional war that engulfed much of central Africa, and I grew to admire the strength and humour of the long-suffering Congolese.

I returned in November to cover the rebel offensive on the eastern town of Goma. When heavy gunfire erupted while I was photographing at Kibati refugee camp, I was quickly offered shelter in a flimsy tent by Boniface Buhoro, a tailor trying to protect his sister and three-year-old son.

Such kindness is typical of Congo ʼs resilient population, subject to miserable circumstances, misrule and war. Refugees frequently offered warm greetings, friendly smiles and handshakes in squalid camps where they may not have eaten for days.

Amid the chaos of fighting, people fleeing their homes and the demand for quick news pictures, I tried to slow things down by taking intimate portraits.

By shooting with a very low depth of field, I hoped to extract my subjects from their surroundings and portray them as individuals with names and stories that matter.

More than five million people have died, most from lack of access to food or basic health, during a decade of fighting in Congo. This makes Congo 's enduring conflict the deadliest since World War Two.

Most of the victims perish far from sight, deep in the bush. This time, death seemed all around.

Driving to the front line early one morning, mist hung over the road and smoke from Nyiragongo volcano darkened the sky.

Marking the first rebel position were the bodies of two government soldiers, a bullet through each of their skulls.

Traveling north later, I reached the hilltop village of Kirumba , where local Mai-Mai militiamen had clashed with government troops fleeing the Tutsi rebel advance.

The army quickly buried their dead, but the Mai-Mai corpses were set on fire by beer-drinking troops.

I found them the next morning, fat still bubbling on one charred corpse, its genitals cut off. Another body had an umbrella stabbed into its face. Soldiers joked and laughed.

Back near Kibati camp, I followed a funeral procession into a sun-dappled banana grove. A tiny purple casket containing the body of eight-month old Alexandrine Kabitsebangumi, who had died from cholera, was being lowered into the dark earth.

The grove was filled with graves. As women sang a haunting hymn, the mourners moved aside, allowing me to photograph.

There's no joy getting a good picture from a baby's funeral.

Another victim, another memory, another ghost.

Congo is still defined by Joseph Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness, which described "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." The horror Conrad depicts in his haunting novel, written more than a century ago, lingers today, with Belgian colonial greed replaced by rapacious warlords and profiteers still raping the nation's vast resources at a great human toll.

But signs of hope linger. I covered the tumultuous run-up to 2006 elections and after tense days of photographing riots, mob violence and gun battles in Congo's capital Kinshasa, I would head not to the nearest bar, but to a dilapidated compound, home to children crippled by polio. There, among dozens of twisted bodies and withered limbs, the day's tension melted away.

The 100 children at the Stand Proud compound in Kinshasa must rank among the world's most disadvantaged. Handicapped, impoverished, often rejected or abandoned, and living in Africa's deadliest war zone, they should have little to celebrate. Instead, the lively "polio kids" offer an oasis of hope, unity and optimism in a vast country marked by despair. Despite their polio-damaged legs, wrapped in casts or makeshift braces fashioned from scrap metal, the children dance enthusiastically to loud Congolese music or challenge visitors to madcap games of soccer.

These moments, along with the brave, resilient people I met in refugee camps define the country's character more than the misery and violence.