Malawi seals Beira-Malawi oil pipeline deal
[Gregory Gondwe] Malawi has sealed a US$150 million deal with a Qatar firm, Venessia Petroleum, which is to construct a pipeline for refined oil from Beira in Mozambique to Nsanje in Malawi. The project will drastically reduce the cost of importing fuel; currently it is brought in by trucks, via Tanzania, and via Beira and Nacala in Mozambique.

Using e-mail as storage: A cautionary tale
For some people, losing an e-mail account is akin to losing family photographs in a flood or fire. Even if the service is free, the offending company had better be prepared to apologize gracefully and profusely, said Ben Chestnut, cofounder and partner of MailChimp.

SOUTH AFRICA

European logo competition goes global
Designers, agencies, studios and students from all over the world are invited to enter Wolda, the Worldwide Logo Design Annual. Replacing the successful European Logo Design Annual (Eulda), Wolda is a graphic design awards scheme that rewards the best logos and trademarks designed throughout the world.

Boost for education in Rwanda
[Walter Wafula] Rwanda has been chosen as the first country to benefit from support by the Global Education Alliance, a creation of several stakeholders in The World Economic Forum.

New partners link up to improve training of government officials
Microsoft and the Centre Africain d'Etudes Supérieures en Gestion (CESAG) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which aims to deliver high-quality ICT policy training to government employees in West and Central Africa.

AU summit must help Africa industrialise
[Michael Appel] The African Union (AU) Summit taking place in Ethiopia later this week, must take substantive decisions to advance the industrialisation of Africa as envisioned in its theme.

AFRICA

Apologies flood market as communication networks fail
[Dumisani Ndlela] A flurry of advertisements, with headlines like “Our telephone lines are down”, has recently developed into a common feature on Zimbabwe's newspaper pages.

ZIMBABWE

Zimbabwe: Between the lines
The Zimbabwean government's move to ask two independent newspapers it has banned to re-register is being viewed with much scepticism in local media circles.


Can healthy web site traffic save newspapers?
Raw numbers don't really tell whether newspapers are profiting from the uptick in visits to their sites, said Mike McGuire, vice president of research for the media industry at Gartner. "The challenge is how papers can effectively monetize that. There is a concern that a lot of people expect ad-supported content to be free."

GHANA

Putting African football in the picture
Africa Interactive works together with local media talent in Ghana to put the Nike5showdown tournament in the picture.

AFRICA

Africa's blogging revolutionaries
The world's poorest continent is, not surprisingly, also its least wired. However, Web use in Africa has exploded almost ninefold since 2000, experts say. By prying open the stranglehold that repressive regimes once held on the news, it has become, in the hands of ingenious Africans, a powerful tool for democratization and even disaster relief.

KENYA

Kenya: Violence paralyses western towns as political crisis deepens
Increasing violence and tension in several towns in western Kenya continue to hinder the provision of basic services such as health, education and transport, in addition to causing untold suffering to thousands of people displaced since the unrest began in late December.