SABON YELWA  (AFP) – The idea undoubtedly seemed strange at first: take the plastic water bottles that litter Nigeria’s roads, canals and gutters and allow people to live inside them.

Not literally, but almost.

What a group of activists did was come up with a plan to build a house using those bottles, providing what they say is an environmentally smart strategy of chipping away at a housing shortage in Africa’s most populous nation.

With the prototype near the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna now well underway, the group wants to extend its efforts and build more, aiming to unleash what they say is some long bottled-up potential.

Unconvinced? Supporters say those yet to see the structure on the outskirts of the village of Sabon Yelwa can throw stones if they want to. This house is being built to last.

“This is the first house in Africa built from bottles, which could go a long way in solving Nigeria’s huge housing need and cleaning the badly polluted environment,” project initiator Christopher Vassiliu said during a tour of the building.

It is in many ways a marvel to look at. The project was initiated by the Kaduna-based NGO Development Association for Renewable Energies (DARE), with help from foreign experts from Africa Community Trust, a London-based NGO.

Sitting on 58-square metres (624-square feet), the two-bedroom bungalow looks like an ordinary home, but it differs in many ways. When completed, the house whose construction started in June will be used to train masons in building such structures.

It is made from capped, sand-filled plastic bottles, each weighing three kilogrammes, or nearly two pounds.

The bottles are stacked into layers and bonded together by mud and cement, with an intricate network of strings holding each bottle by its neck, providing extra support to the structure.

Bottle caps of various colours protrude from the cement-plastered walls, giving them a unique look. Those behind the project claim the sand-filled bottles are stronger than ordinary cinder blocks.

“The structure has the added advantage of being fire proof, bullet proof and earthquake resistant, with the interior maintaining a constant temperature of 18 degrees C (64 degrees F) which is good for tropical climate,” Yahaya Ahmad, the project coordinator said.

– Three million bottles daily –

With the right adjustments to the supporting pillars the building can be as high as three stories, but can go no higher due to the weight of the sand-filled bottles, Ahmad said.

Situated amidst an expansive irrigation farm, the building consists of a rotunda-shaped living room which connects to the interior via a short corridor.

Two rooms stand opposite with a bathroom and a toilet between them. A side door leads to an open courtyard and the kitchen.

The house is also designed to produce zero carbon emissions as it will be wholly powered by solar panels and methane gas from recycled human and animal waste.

“Nigeria has a serious waste and energy problem, and this project is one small step towards making positive changes,” said Katrin Macmillan, a British environmental activist involved in the project.

“Plastic bottles take hundreds of years to bio-degrade in landfills.”

Construction, which has reached 70 percent completion, is estimated to require 14,000 bottles. Huge piles of empty plastic bottles litter the site from donations from embassies, hotels and restaurants.

Environmental experts say Nigeria, a country of some 160 million, throws out about three million plastic bottles daily.

The country is also grappling with a deficit of 16 million housing units that requires a staggering 45 trillion naira ($300 billion) to meet, according to Nigeria’s Federal Mortgage Bank.

Plastic houses are cheap to construct as it costs a quarter of the money required to build a conventional house, said Vassiliu, a Greek national who has been working in Nigeria as a water drilling engineer for 30 years.

The project is to cost two million naira ($12,700), Vassiliu said.

A second plastic bottle project is due to commence in January at a primary school in need of more classrooms in the town of Suleja near Nigeria’s capital Abuja.

“The project would take 200,000 bottles out of landfills into education”, said Macmillan.

In what’s being called the first research of its kind, a study found that HIV-infected women in Africa are more likely to spread the AIDS virus if they use hormone-based birth control.
The women studied were about twice as likely to transmit HIV if they were on the pill or taking a hormone shot like Depo-Provera, compared to those not on the such birth control. The research is the first to look at this question, according to Renee Heffron of the University of Washington, one of the researchers.Women studied were about twice as likely to transmit HIV if they were on the pill or taking a hormone shot compared to those not on the such birth control.Women studied were about twice as likely to transmit HIV if they were on the pill or taking a hormone shot compared to those not on the such birth control. Kimimasa Mayama/Reuters

Their research also found that uninfected women were about twice as likely to catch AIDS virus
 from their infected partners if they were on hormonal contraception, compared to those who were not. That finding echoed a phenomenon seen in earlier studies.
The researchers checked to make sure there were no significant differences in condom use, sexual behavior or other factors that would account for the differences.

The research was presented Wednesday at a meeting in Rome of the International AIDS Society.
The researchers said the findings need to be confirmed in follow-up studies, and should not cause women to immediately change birth control practices.

The increased risk of HIV infection also must be balanced against the consequences of unintended pregnancy, which in Africa can include maternal mortality and financial squalor, they explained.

“Contraception is incredibly important to economic and social development of women and children worldwide,” said Dr. Jared Baeten, another University of Washington researcher on the study team.

Hormone shots release progestin, which keep a woman’s ovaries from releasing eggs and also thins the lining of the uterus. Birth control pills contain progestin or progestin and estrogen and work the same way.
It’s not clear exactly how the hormones may help spread the virus, but the theoretical risk has been known from earlier studies.

A Kenya study found an increase in HIV-infected cells in cervical tissue after women started using various hormonal contraception.
The new study was done from 2004 to 2010 in seven African countries — Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and South Africa.
It included nearly 2,500 women with HIV whose male partners were not infected. About a third took hormonal contraception at least once. Most of them were on the shots, which are taken once every few months.

The men had a 2.61 per cent chance of becoming infected in a year’s time if their partner was on hormonal contraception. If not, their chances of infection were 1.51 per cent.

The research team also looked at about 1,300 couples in which the men were infected but not the women. About 20 per cent of the women were on hormonal contraception, mostly injections.

The study found those women had a 6.6 per cent chance of becoming infected in a year, compared to 3.8 per cent for woman not on that kind of birth control.

Source: CBC and The Canadian Press

At this year’s Euromoney Awards for Excellence, Ecobank Transnational Incorporated was recognised as the “Best Bank in Africa” for its demonstration in leadership, innovation and momentum across the 32 markets in which it has a presence, making it the 1st African bank to win this award.

In its evaluation, Euromoney highlighted Ecobank’s unparalleled reach in Africa and its role in providing the banking infrastructure for Africa’s growing middle class and in facilitating banking transactions across the continent for companies and individuals alike.

Commenting on the Group’s achievement, Arnold Ekpe, Ecobank’s Group CEO, said: “Our vision has always been to provide world-class banking services, whilst also enhancing the financial integration in Africa.  Even as this accolade comes as a gratifying acknowledgement of the Group’s significant progress to date, we are mindful of the need to remain focused on improving our services and financial performance.  We are grateful for the continued support from our clients, shareholders and employees, without whom this achievement would not have been possible.”

Commenting on the Award, Ecobank Kenya’s Managing Director Tony Okpanachi said, “This award attests to our drive to stand out in the market place as the bank that uses innovation to meet customer needs.  As we seek to reach out to more markets across the world we are determined to attract and retain more customers with our creative and enhanced banking experience.”

The annual Euromoney Awards for Excellence, now in their 20th year, continue to be amongst the most respected awards in the financial services industry. All the awards have one central theme; they recognize institutions and individuals that demonstrate leadership, innovation, and momentum in the markets in which they excel.

Source: CSR Africa

MPs angered by the demand for tax arrears on their salaries have threatened to force an early General Election if the decision is not revoked.

They have declared that their intention to “punish” President Kibaki, Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka by pushing them out of office for what they describe as “betrayal and dishonesty”.

The politicians are buoyed by the position of House Speaker Kenneth Marende, who has maintained that President Kibaki and Mr Odinga had, in the run-up to the referendum last year, assured members of the current Parliament they would not be taxed.

The 40 MPs who met last Thursday night in Mombasa to put final touches on their plan to fight the taxation bid accused the coalition leaders of “lying” to Parliament.

They maintained that their interpretation of the Constitution–articulated in Attorney-General Amos Wako’s opinion to Parliament in 2010–was that the 10th Parliament was exempt from taxation.

But Mr Odinga dismissed the commitment as a “gentleman’s agreement”, which cannot be superior to the Constitution.

“Once the new constituencies are in place, we will trigger fresh elections. Our opinion is that the principals have more to lose than MPs by going to the polls. More than 70 per cent of MPs are financially stable and don’t fear elections,” said Yatta MP Charles Kilonzo, who is among those spearheading the campaign.

He indicated they want the elections held by October. It is however not clear how it would be possible to hold elections by that time.

Although Parliament has enacted the relevant law, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission is yet to be established.

Once established after a long and elaborate process which will include interviews, vetting and approval by Parliament, the electoral team has the first four months to complete review of constituencies boundaries started by the now defunct Ligale commission.

“The most annoying to MPs is the fact that the principals deliberately lied to the National Assembly,” Mr Kilonzo told Sunday Nation from Juba where he was attending the celebrations for the independence of South Sudan.

The MPs are under pressure from the public and the Charles Nyachae-led Commission on Implementation of the Constitution to pay taxes on their salaries.

Mr Nyachae says Article 210(3) of the Constitution was clear that all State officers must pay tax on their income.

“There are many State officers. It is not just specific on MPs. That provision is not among the suspended ones under the Sixth Schedule. It therefore means it became operational from the promulgation day,” he said.

Assistant minister Mwangi Kiunjuri yesterday accused the coalition leaders of failing to comply with Chapter 6 of the Constitution on leadership and integrity for misleading MPs that their pay would not be taxed.

The President gave the assurance following AG’s opinion in interpreting the new Constitution. Kenya Revenue Authority boss Michael Waweru and the Ministry of Finance also gave a similar assurance in letters addressed to House Speaker Kenneth Marende.

“It is rather unfortunate and disturbing that the PM would go public to deny he was part of the pact when he co-chaired that meeting with the President,” Mr Kiunjuri said.

He declared that he would support any move by backbenchers to censure the leaders.

“They owe Parliament an apology and a proper interpretation of the law. The Chief Justice should tell Kenyans the proper position to stop this mob justice against MPs.”

In addition to the tax arrears, the MPs argue that they will face penalties for late payment.

“The taxman has another card under the table, which is penalty for late remittance. Once you pay, you are confirming default and the penalty is automatic,” argued Mr Kilonzo.

Mr Kiunjuri said if MPs are to obey the current directive to pay taxes, modalities of doing so will have to be worked out between the KRA and Parliament “because not every MP has a million in his account at any time and for public show-off”.

Globacom Nigeria, the country’s second national carrier is set to take competition in bandwidth services to a new level as it plans to offer cheaper prices to internet service providers in Nigeria.

With this development, more Nigerian cities will soon be able to enjoy the benefits of ample internet bandwidth due to the low price offer from Globacom’s international submarine cable.

This follows a new move by the company to empower and encourage Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to extend their business to all major cities in the country.

Folu Aderibigbe, head of Glo 1, said the company would now offer internet bandwidth and extend help in setting up operations to all ISPs desiring to extend services to major cities where they do not currently have presence.

He noted that most of the ISPs in Nigeria at the moment operate mainly in Lagos alone or in few other cities mainly due to the huge capital expenditure involved in setting up operations in other cities and the unavailability of reliable bandwidth in those areas.

“Globacom has decided to address this problem by providing the required bandwidth in all the major cities and removing the burden of huge capital needed by the ISPs to start operations in all major cities where their services are needed,” Aderibigbe explained.

Globacom, riding on its MPLS-VPN network spread across the country, has extended Glo1 services to all major cities in Nigeria, thus empowering ISPs to extend the benefits of bandwidth to the cities.

Glo 1, which is the only optical fiber cable that connects United Kingdom directly from Nigeria, has provided solutions to the bandwidth capacity constraints in the West Africa region.

With its integration with Globacom’s 10,000km nationwide optical fibre cable, Glo 1 is able to give end-to-end connectivity, including last mile solutions, thus providing a one-stop shop for customers’ requirements.

Source: IT News Africa

If you are suffering an identity crisis and aren’t sure how African you might be, here are 10 things that are certainly sure to remind you. These are in no particular rank order.

You know you are African When…

1. You open a butter container expecting butter but instead you see leftover stew

2. Relatives you’ve never seen before in your life ask you if you remember them…over the phone

3. You bring extra containers to parties to bring food home

4. Your parents want you to be come a Doctor, a Lawyer, an Architect, or an Engineer

5. The women in your family seem to have battles during prayer

6. During a graduation your parents are the only ones that scream “PRAISE DA LORD”

7. When you were a young girl your parents expected you to know how to cook or else no one would marry you.

8. As a female, you’ve heard either “You are the sugar in my tea, the butter on my bread” or “The only cockroach in my closet”

9. Going to university is NOT optional

10. Footsteps could mean a surprise beating is near

Bonus

11. You attend a party that goes into the wee hours of the morning for a baby that has been asleep since the party started

During a series of trips to Africa last year, Tim Solso had a realization: China was beating him at his own game.

So the chief executive of Cummins Inc., a maker of truck and machinery engines, vowed to catch up. He plans to quadruple the company’s sales in Africa to about $1 billion within five years, investing $15 million annually to train staff and build sales offices from Johannesburg to Casablanca. The company recently installed in South Africa an executive to oversee Africa operations, previously supervised from Europe and Indiana.

Cummins has ramped up sales of generators to clients such as this bottler in Nigeria.

Cummins joins a growing number of U.S. companies vying for a stronger foothold on the continent. Caterpillar Inc., the giant maker of construction equipment, is selling more trucks to Mozambique and Zambia. Harley-Davidson Inc. is opening dealerships in Botswana and Mauritius. General Electric Co. has its first aircraft-leasing office in Ghana for Central and West African airlines. Google Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are among the dozens of other U.S. companies moving in or expanding.

Until now, “Africa has been just a rounding error for us,” says Brady Southwick, Cummins’s new head of Africa operations.

U.S. companies’ game of catch-up shows the perils of waking up late to the next big frontier market, Africa. The continent’s economy is forecast to grow to $2.6 trillion in 2020 from $1.6 trillion in 2008, fueled by booms in mining, agriculture and development of ports, roads and other infrastructure, according to McKinsey Global Institute. The middle class is growing, and total household spending now exceeds that of India.

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A new program from HP is equipping African health workers with cell phones so that information about outbreaks can be collected and analyzed as fast as possible.

If officials in the developing world could track the development of a malaria outbreak in real time, they could quickly act to squelch the spread of the disease, monitor treatments, and make sure areas have adequate malaria nets.

HP’s new partnership with Positive Innovation for the Next Generation (PING) will do just that, by equipping health-care workers in Botswana with HP Palm Pre 2 cell phones to gather malaria data via an app and upload the information to the cloud. Workers can also tag data with pictures, video, and audio. When it becomes clear that roving rural health-care workers have spotted enough individual malaria cases to signal an outbreak, Ministry of Health officials and other health workers in the area will be notified via text message.

It’s a big upgrade from the current system, where reports filter in from health clinics “at a snail’s pace,” according to Paul Ellingstad, Director of Health Initiatives for HP’s Office of Social Innovation. With the new system, “within hours when you have the beginning of an outbreak, health officials are alerted,” he says.

Botswana is a near-perfect test site for the program–it’s a stable democracy, and has a fairly stable economy with a cell phone penetration of 140% (meaning people have 1.4 cell phones on average).

The program has been running in pilot mode for the past three months, and it will continue for the next nine. So far, it has been working well.

“There is a lot of excitement and positive feedback from health-care workers,” says Katy Digovich, PING’s director of operations. Eventually, Digovich hopes that every health-care facility in the country will get at least one Palm Pre 2. Once the program expands, it may include reporting for other deadly diseases, including tuberculosis and Ebola. “We’re hoping to add them one by one,” says Digovich.

The partnership is limited to Botswana for now, but similar initiatives could work in other countries where cell phone penetration is high. “For all the talk of a global community, we increasingly see as we shift to more use of mobile solutions and the cloud that some of the real areas of innovation are places that people would find difficult to pinpoint on map,” says Ellingstad.

Source: Fast Company

International development banks, UN agencies, and intergovernmental organizations have pledged to support the sustainable development of tourism in a network of parks spanning ten countries in West Africa. Commitments to the West Africa Parks Project came out of a UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) Donor’s Conference held in Dakar, Senegal (May 27-28, 2011), chaired by the Prime Minister of Senegal, Souleymane Ndéné Ndiaye, and attended by Ministers of Tourism of West African countries.

“Today, major international organizations have pinpointed tourism as one of the most effective tools for Africa’s economic growth and development,” said UNWTO Secretary General, Taleb Rifai, opening the conference, “With their support, sustainable tourism can flourish, generating jobs and income for local communities, while protecting the region’s rich biodiversity.”

The West Africa Parks Project brings together ten West African countries – Benin, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Sierra Leone – sharing a network of parks and protected areas, to ensure means for its conservation and jointly promote the region as a tourism destination.

Participants at the Donors’ Conference included the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), both of which made concrete commitments to the project. The UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the French Cooperation Agency (Coopération française), and the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), which funded the initial feasibility study, pledged to support the project through funds and/or technical expertise.

Recommendations coming out of the conference praised the project as a vehicle for “sub-regional economic integration” and called on the governments and managers of the parks and protected areas to involve local communities in its implementation. It was also recommended that private-sector participation in developing the common area be strengthened.

Source: http://csrdaily.csrafrica.net/market-place/3233-international-community-to-back-tourism-development-in-west-african-parks.html

An inaugural summit on the use of mobile communications to support healthcare opens in Cape Town on Monday.

This emerging field is often called “mHealth” and the four-day summit is organized by the mHealth Alliance, founded by the United Nations Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation. It is sponsored by the cellphone industry body serving the world’s more than five billion mobile subscribers, the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GMSA).

For mobile industry leaders like GSMA’s Gavin Krugel and Telefonica’s Carlos Martínez Miguel, who spoke at a recent pre-conference briefing, the challenge is in finding sustainable business models that can give a return on investment to the mobile industry through mHealth initiatives.

“If we can take a sliver of the revenue of the health industry, this should be quite an opportunity for the mobile industry,” Krugel said.

Sandhya Rao, the senior advisor for private sector partnerships at USAID, is trying to develop the business case for mobile operators to get involved in mHealth. She is enthusiastic about the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), a U.S.$10-million joint venture with global U.S. pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer goods manufacturer Johnson & Johnson to be launched in South Africa, Bangladesh and India.

In contrast with mHealth interventions in developed countries, such as using smartphones to link community-based patients to hospital infrastructure, MAMA relies on the use of SMSs from inexpensive cellphones to register due dates with clinics, send information to support healthy pregnancies and remind new mothers about vaccinations and dates for check-ups.

The head of Technology Partnerships at the UN Foundation, Adele Waugaman, said at the briefing that several research studies are to be released at the summit. A survey that her foundation has undertaken with the World Health Organisation aims to measure progress in mHealth in 112 countries and will provide a benchmark that governments and NGOs can use in measuring progress in mHealth programs.

Healthcare in Africa is thought to be particularly well-placed to benefit from mHealth initiatives, given that mobile penetration in sub-Saharan Africa now stands at 49 subscribers per 100 inhabitants, according to business market research firm Frost & Sullivan. This represents nearly three times the coverage of fixed-line phones.

There are hopes that mobile technology can support healthcare in developing countries much as mobile banking services have assisted Africans underserved by mainstream financial services. The Times of Zambia recently noted in an editorial that the focus of mobile healthcare initiatives on rural people is vital because “they constitute the bulk of small-scale farmers who produce 80 percent of maize, the staple crop”.

Not all health professionals are convinced that mHealth is key to improving healthcare. For Professor David Sanders of the School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape and a member of the international People’s Health Movement, mHealth is “a useful adjunct, but you still need inputs to address water and sanitation and other basic public health measures, and you need competent health workers”.

Questions were asked at the pre-conference briefing about the health issues relating to mobile phones in the wake of a study released last week by the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The study by a working group of 31 scientists from 14 countries showed that cellphone use might increase the risk of developing certain types of brain tumours and thus should be classified in the same category of “possibly carcinogenic” substances such as lead, chloroform and coffee.

Following the briefing in advance of the mHealth Summit, journalists who asked about this study were sent a statement from GSMA. “The IARC classification suggests that a hazard is possible but not likely,” said director for Research and Sustainability, Dr Jack Rowley. “Importantly, present safety standards remain valid and the result should be understood as indicating the need for further research.”

Rowley noted that studies to follow the health of up to 250,000 mobile phone users over a long period of time are underway in Europe.

The opening address at the mHealth Summit will be given by the South African deputy minister of communications, Obed Bapela. The country’s deputy minister of health will also attend, and the summit’s organizers expect participants from several African countries, including Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria.

Source: All Africa