BAMAKO, 20 Jan 2006 (IRIN) - Africa, the world’s poorest continent, for the first time is playing host to the World Social Forum, the anti-globalisation movement set up as a counterweight to a forum of the world’s rich and powerful.Full report

DAKAR, 11 Nov 2005 (IRIN) - A yellow fever epidemic has been confirmed in the Kayes region of western Mali, the UN World Health Organisation said on Friday.Full report

BAMAKO, 19 Sep 2005 (IRIN) - Mali’s largest union sent a shot across the government’s bows on Monday by making good on a promise to hold a 24-hour strike, describing it as a “warning” and vowing to press on until its demands were met. Full report

GAO, 17 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - When Tashcout Worra Kofan was young, she would gather together her small children, pack her thatched domed hut onto donkeys and together the family would trudge alongside their grazing sheep across the semi-desert of eastern Mali.Full report

GAO, 15 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - Mali is not in a state of famine, aid workers say. Instead, like many countries in the region, Mali suffers from deep rooted poverty that means children die every year of hunger and only long-term development and investment will end the cycle. Full report

GAO, 10 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - Emaciated baby Jibril is lucky. If he hadn’t been carried by his mother from their village in eastern Mali, to the main hospital in Gao on Wednesday morning, doctors say he would have been dead by Thursday.Full report

MARSI, 8 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - The normally dusty Sahelian plains around Gao in eastern Mali are vividly green after the first rains, but there’s still not enough food to go around. Aid workers have recorded a particularly high number of malnourished children and an emergency food distribution programme has swung into action.Full report

BAMAKO, 3 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - The international community must wake up and stop an already bad food crisis in Mali spiralling out of control, British-based aid agency Oxfam said on Wednesday.Full report

BAMAKO, 26 Jul 2005 (IRIN) - From her office in the capital Bamako, the government's head of food security says there is no risk of famine in Mali this year. But some aid workers operating in the arid north and east of the country, disagree. Full report

FANA, 8 Jul 2005 (IRIN) - Anti-globalisation activists from three continents gathered in Mali this week to condemn unfair trade practices and Third World debt at a forum timed to coincide with the G8 summit in Scotland, where the leaders of the world's richest countries are haggling over measures to relieve poverty in Africa.Full report

MALI: Nomadic lifestyle threatened by years of successive droughts

MALI: No famine, but a perennial problem of poverty

MALI: Desert blooms with first rains but hunger continues

MALI: Drawing up a national care plan for kids at risk