By December this year, aid agencies estimate that the number of displaced and hungry people in need of life-saving aid in Somalia will swell to 3.5 million-nearly half the country's population. Yet, as drought and conflict conspire to worsen the crisis, the humanitarian space to deliver food and other essential assistance in this conflict zone has all but vanished.

Nearly 180,000 children in Somalia are acutely malnourished, with 25,000 severely malnourished, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) which has scaled up its nutrition operation to reach more than 50,000 children under the age of five.

The United Nations Security Council is no stranger to intractable international disputes. But soon Sudan will present it with a different kind of problem, one it has not faced in its 62-year history.

Joshua Ebei is a chairman in one of the internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Lodwar town in the northwestern district of Turkana Central.

The call by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, for the arrest of Sudanese President, Omar al-Bashir, is already a subject of debate among journalists in Douala.

The Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) is confident that favourable conditions now exist for the reintegration of displaced foreign nationals currently accommodated at various temporary shelters across the province.

The Government is allocating land to the Sabiny who were evicted from the Mt. Elgon Forest Park and those who never benefited from the 1983 resettlement programme.

Before the post-election violence in Kenya in January and February 2008, Wangui Mwangi Theuri was a landlady in a city slum, but she is now displaced, living in a tent at the Mathare chief's camp in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Prospects for her return to Mathare, where she owned 14 rooms - which were destroyed - are bleak after "rich" people took over her land. She spoke to IRIN on 21 ...

SEVENTY percent of men in internally displaced peoples' camps drink alcohol to end their trauma, according to psychiatrists. Conan Businge reports that this almost doubles the number of women using the same coping mechanism.

The Government should exercise patience over the Juba peace talks and continue negotiations with the LRA, veteran politician Jaberi Bidandi Ssali has said.

The Mayor of Kigali City, Aisha Kirabo Kakira, has called on Rwandans who love their country to embrace positive change if they want their country to develop.

The head of the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) met today with President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan at the mission's headquarters in El Fasher.

The violent evictions in Rift Valley Province were well-coordinated and heavily funded, a human rights body has said.

Gulu District Chairman Norbert Mao has scoffed at the continued demands by the international community, especially the International Criminal Court, to have the indicted LRA leaders only tried in legally recognisable courts.

The United Nations envoy to Somalia told the Security Council today that there were limited choices for bringing peace to the violence-wracked Horn of Africa country, but that the time had come to make a final decision on the best possible option.

At its weekly press conference of 23 July 2008, MONUC called on armed groups in eastern DRC to end the suffering of the peoples of the Kivus by respecting the Goma Acts of engagement. MONUC also noted the progess of the Amani Programme in relation to the work of the Joint Committee on Peace and Security and its subsidiary bodies, which is now treating essential basic problems relating to the ...

Civil society organisations and refugee leaders say they have been ignored by the government as the complaints they lodged several weeks ago have still not been addressed.

Florence Chepkemoi lives in the western district of Mt Elgon. She lost her husband in the land clashes that erupted in September 2006. She talked to IRIN about her experiences during and after the conflict which pitted two communities of same clan against each other. Thousands of people have returned to the district and are living with other families or in transit camps near their farms.

The Fourth Division Commander, Brig. Charles Otema, is accused of grabbing an estimated 40,000 hectares belonging to internally displaced persons in the northern district of Amuru.

Thousands of people are trooping into Mau forest with the hope of benefiting from the planned Government resettlement of illegal farmers, Maasai leaders claimed Tuesday.

Two MPs Tuesday differed in public over the Government's decision to evict squatters from Mau Forest by the end of October this year.

ABOUT a thousand xenophobia refugees were removed from the Glenanda camp in Johannesburg yesterday and taken to the Lindela repatriation centre where they were to be deported to their home countries after they refused to register on the home affairs database.

On December 27, 2007, Pastor Robert Birgen of the African Inland Church, Chepsiria, stood patiently in line at Kapkuis Primary School polling station in Kuinet, a few kilometres north of Eldoret Town.

Operation Rudi Nyumbani (Return Home, in Kiswahili), designed to help about 350,000 IDPs living in camps across the country go back to their homes and farms has achieved its primary objective, at least according to the Kenyan government. Officials claim that most of the camps are closed and only 30,000 are living in the few that remain, but these numbers are disputed by independent analysts.

Four months ago, a truck laden with an assortment of furniture branched off a community access road to Awal Kok Primary School in Gulu, northern Uganda. Then, Awal Kok did not look exactly like a school; a bushy compound and a single block without windows and a door is all it had.