There’s a lot going on in Africa beyond Joseph Kony’s atrocities

1. On International Women’s Day, Kenya’s workers offer to pay income tax — to make the point that work is as valid as any other work, and to force the government to recognize the practice as a labor.

2. The UN claims to have met the clean water Millennium Development Goal, and scientists rebut. The World Bank says the world met the Millennium Development poverty goal.

The maternal mortality MDG, however, looked pretty awful from Gobah, Liberia. A clinic there doesn’t have a microscope, malaria meds for kids 5-10, or water. That’s right, water.

3. The International Peace Institute calls our attention to actually underreported topics, namely, security in West Africa. In addition to the notorious drug smuggling, IPI draws attention to the scary combination of terrorism, drugs, crime.

4. Three men were killed in Burundi in an exchange of gunfire with the police, the latest in a series of killings that have been documented intermittently since the country’s troubled 2010 election. The UN has confirmed that the FNL, an ex-rebel group and former opposition party, has relocated to Congo, and some observers fear the ongoing gun battles suggest a return to violence with the FNL.

5. Sam Bell, who knows a thing or two about what it means to do American advocacy on African atrocities, wrote a moving tribute to Donald Payne, a long-time Sudan advocate who died on Tuesday. Bell’s tribute is itself an insightful reflection on some of the challenges of advocacy.

6. Ashley Judd listened to an awesome radio piece about some incredible Congolese women busting through the countryside to bring women’s news to the airwaves. Did you?

7. Goma, in the Congo, stares down a cholera outbreak after a month of water shortages. 

get this off tumblr.cr: the tulip tree