Pictures from Mogadishu, Somalia what else can you do but donate to Médecins Sans Frontières.

A feeding centre in Mogadishu fills with refugees coming to the city to escape drought

Farmers have brought families and a few surviving animals to the capital because the drought has destroyed their grazing lands

Built to house 90,000 people, the camp is now home to more than four times that number as people keep arriving

A MSF (Doctors Without Borders) feeding centre in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya, near the Somali border

A malnourished child receives treatment at the MSF feeding centre in Dadaab

Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya received 1,000 new refugees a day in June, five times more than a year ago

Photographs: Robin Hammond/Panos.

First President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt resigns and then President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali resigns in Tunisa.

However unbelievable it might have seemed a few months ago the question is not if but when will the next dictator fall? Today it’s looking like it’s going to be Colonel Gaddafi in Libya but there’ve been recent protests in Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Jordan, Morocco and Yemen.

It’s time for Europe to end its complicit support for these heinous dictators. Whilst we might have trepidation over whatever’s coming next we surely don’t wish to repeat the mistakes made in Iran and Iraq. We in the west must do all we can to encourage democracy there are too many examples in the region the alternative – there’s little else we can do.

Contraception and abortion isn’t “just” a women’s issue it’s a development imperative as this extract from Owen Barder’s post on family planning in Ethiopia highlights.

Access to family planning and safe abortion is an important challenge in Ethiopia. With better primary health care and childhood immunization, infant mortality is falling, so families increasingly want to limit the number of children they have. The shift to smaller family sizes is a hugely important driver of development, known as the demographic transition. When a family has two or three children, all of whom are likely to survive, they are able to invest in the children’s nutrition, health and education, in a way that is impossible for most families with nine or ten children. This investment in each person then leads to higher incomes and better standards of living.

The desire to have smaller families is driven by a combination of rising incomes, improved life expectancy, lower infant mortality, better education and increased savings, as well as changing cultural and social norms. It is not clear whether it is possible to influence from the outside the rising demand for smaller families, and I personally have reservations about whether we should attempt to do so. But in Ethiopia, people want smaller families yet cannot access the services they need to achieve this.

Today Ethiopia and Germany have roughly the same number of people (around 82 million). But unless something changes, by 2050 Ethiopia is projected to more than double its population to 174 million, while over the same period Germany’s population is likely to decline to 72 million. The cause is simple: Ethiopia’s total fertility rate of 5.4 is four times greater than Germany’s rate of 1.3.

According to the Guttmacher Institute Ethiopia’s average family size is slowly declining, from 6.4 children per woman in 1990, to 5.9 in 2000, to 5.4 in 2005. Yet this fertility rate is still much higher than the average of four children per woman that people actually want to have. Many Ethiopian families want to reduce the number of children they have, but do not have access to the basic family planning services they need to do so. The study finds that 68% of sexually active women in Ethiopia have unmet need for contraception.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that would it cost about $180 million a year to provide modern contraception to every Ethiopian woman who wants it (that’s the all in cost, including supplies, logistics, systems, and training). They estimate that there would be direct savings to the health service as a consequence of reduced pregnancies and unsafe abortions which would more than cover the costs.

And the results would be striking. If every woman who wanted to use family planning had access to modern contraception, each year in Ethiopia there would be 1 million fewer unwanted pregnancies, 340 thousand fewer abortions (a reduction of more than 80%), 130,000 fewer infant deaths and 6,500 fewer women dying in childbirth.

These benefits for individuals and families are compelling enough. But there would also be substantial benefits for the economy as a whole. As a rule of thumb a reduction in fertility of one child per family increases annual per capita GDP growth by a quarter of a per cent a year. Hence if Ethiopian women could achieve the reduction in family size they currently want, from 5.4 to 4.0, this would increase growth of GDP per capita by approximately 0.35% a year. Over a decade of sustained access to contraception, the effect would be higher incomes worth approximately the same as a 60% increase in today’s level of foreign aid. And because population growth would be slower, it would achieve the rare double benefit of increasing standards of living while reducing the pressure on natural resources and the environment.

The economic effect of access to family planning could be even greater because it enables a virtuous circle which plays an important part in the development process. As incomes rise, and education and health improve, families tend to want fewer children. For example, in Ethiopia over the next decade incomes per head may rise by more than 50%, which is likely to lead to a further fall in the number of children that Ethiopians want to have. But to meet this desire for smaller families, people need access to family planning. By setting off a virtuous circle of rising income per capita, lower desired family size, greater use of contraception, lower numbers of children, and so rising income per capita, a decade of access to modern family planning could have roughly the same effect on incomes in Ethiopia as the entire international aid programme does today. Owen Barder, Family planning in Ethiopia and the new UN strategy, Owen Abroad.

It is a startling revelation that something as simple as basic family planning can have such an impact.

There’s all the stupid celebrity publicity how about some real news a point Kevin Watkins makes about maternal death

The women facing these risks do not make headlines. Last week, the world’s media descended on a high court in Malawi to cover Madonna’s application to adopt Mercy James, a four-year-old orphan. There has been no coverage of the fate of Mercy’s 18-year-old mother, who died five days after giving birth, or why Malawi has one of the world’s highest maternal death rates. Kevin Watkins, The Guardian.

I guess African women aren’t newsworthy – racism and sexism in one.

In a letter to The Guardian Zimbabwean, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai calls for armed peacekeepers.

In the course of the last few tumultuous months, I have often had cause to consider what it is that makes a country. I believe a country is the sum of its many parts, and that this is embodied in one thing: its people. The people of my country, Zimbabwe, have borne more than any people should bear. They have been burdened by the world’s highest inflation rates, denied the basics of democracy, and are now suffering the worst form of intimidation and violence at the hand of a government purporting to be of and for the people. Zimbabwe will break if the world does not come to our aid.

Africa has seen this all before, of course. The scenario in Zimbabwe is numbingly familiar. A power-crazed despot holding his people hostage to his delusions, crushing the spirit of his country and casting the international community as fools. As we enter the final days of what has been a taxing period for all Zimbabweans, it is likely that Robert Mugabe will claim the presidency of our country and will seek to further deny its people a space to breath and feel the breeze of freedom.

I can no longer allow Zimbabwe’s people to suffer this torture, for I believe they can bear no more crushing force. This is why I decided not to run in the presidential run-off. This is not a political decision. The vote need not occur at all of course, as the Movement for Democratic Change won a majority in the previous election, held in March. This is undisputed even by the pro-Mugabe Zimbabwe electoral commission.

Our call now for intervention seeks to challenge standard procedure in international diplomacy. The quiet diplomacy of South African President Thabo Mbeki has been characteristic of this worn approach, as it sought to massage a defeated dictator rather than show him the door and prod him towards it.

We envision a more energetic and, indeed, activist strategy. Our proposal is one that aims to remove the often debilitating barriers of state sovereignty, which rests on a centuries-old foundation of the sanctity of governments, even those which have proven themselves illegitimate and decrepit. We ask for the UN to go further than its recent resolution, condemning the violence in Zimbabwe, to encompass an active isolation of the dictator Mugabe.

For this we need a force to protect the people. We do not want armed conflict, but the people of Zimbabwe need the words of indignation from global leaders to be backed by the moral rectitude of military force. Such a force would be in the role of peacekeepers, not trouble-makers. They would separate the people from their oppressors and cast the protective shield around the democratic process for which Zimbabwe yearns.

The next stage should be a new presidential election. This does indeed burden Zimbabwe and create an atmosphere of limbo. Yet there is hardly a scenario that does not carry an element of pain. The reality is that a new election, devoid of violence and intimidation, is the only way to put Zimbabwe right.

Part of this process would be the introduction of election monitors, from the African Union and the UN. This would also require a recognition of myself as a legitimate candidate. It would be the best chance the people of Zimbabwe would get to see their views recorded fairly and justly.

Intervention is a loaded concept in today’s world, of course. Yet, despite the difficulties inherent in certain high-profile interventions, decisions not to intervene have created similarly dire consequences. The battle in Zimbabwe today is a battle between democracy and dictatorship, justice and injustice, right and wrong. It is one in which the international community must become more than a moral participant. It must become mobilised.

It is time for us to act.

Robert Mugabe is easily one of the most murderous leaders in the world today; he has created a country where life expectancy is barely 40-years [1], one of the world’s worst [2]. In March, Zimbabweans overwhelming voted for change in such numbers that Mugabe was unable to rig the result forcing him into a runoff election with challenger Morgan Tsvangirai on 27th June. In an attempt to win that election, Mugabe has unleashed an unprecedented reign of terror, even for Zimbabwe, in an attempt to force the populace to vote for him. Why have we not sent in the troops, Mugabe is every bit as odious as Saddam Hussein was. That would be because of a lack of oil or nuclear weapons.

[1] CIA World Factbook
[2] World Life Expectancy.