The United Nations agency tasked with alleviating the plight of the world's rural poor announced plans today to provide $15 million to a project in Senegal that aims to help families living in the West African country's "groundnut basin."

Investing in solar energy could bring electricity to millions of Senegalese, significantly reduce electricity bills in the long term, and attract millions of dollars in development funding under the UN-brokered Clean Development Mechanism, says the UN, but only if investors step in.

For years, farmers in one of Senegal's most mango-rich zones, Keur Mbir Ndao, 80km east of the capital, were losing more than half their harvests.

Thousands of people have been displaced from their homes in two districts of Dakar where houses should never have been built, according to Seydou Sysall, the former Senegalese minister of development and urban planning.

El Malick Seck, jailed editor-in-chief of the privately-owned newspaper "24 Heures Chrono", will appear in a Dakar court on 28 October 2008 to answer defamation charges brought against him by the country's Minister of the Interior, Sheikh Tidiane Sy.

As many Senegalese have been doing for the past six years now, Mrs Mame Madior Boye who was the Prime Minister in 2002 vividly remembers a day in September that year, marked by some as the "darkest nightmare" in the nation's recent history.

Poor rains and rising rice prices have contributed to increasing malnutrition to alarming levels in at least three regions of Senegal.

Nine West African countries shot up while nine others sank lower in the 2008 Transparency International (TI) ranking of perceptions of corruption in 180 countries.

The Senegalese capital, Dakar, is filled with street children from villages in Guinea Bissau.