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COTE D'IVOIRE: Pregnancy one more strike for girls’ education

Sylvie Kouamé*, 17, told IRIN she had sex for money with a man she met on line in her home country Côte d’Ivoire. She needed a few dollars for school fees. She no longer needs money for school. Five months pregnant, Kouamé dropped out a few years short of graduating secondary school. “Imagine – I had these expenses, and my parents have been unemployed for six years,” she told IRIN. “So a couple of years ago, I joined a club of girls at school who hook up with guys by way of the internet.” ...

Ivory Coast sends army to secure cocoa-growing area

Ivory Coast has sent hundreds of soldiers to bolster security in its cocoa-growing west, but farmers caught up in simmering land disputes say that won't lure them back to fields they abandoned during years of conflict.The west of the world's top cocoa producer was the scene of some of the most violent clashes during and since a brief 2002-2003 war, in which rebels seized the north, dividing a country that was once the most stable in West Africa.

COTE D'IVOIRE: Malnutrition concerns in country’s prisons

DAKAR Tuesday, September 02, 2008 (IRIN) - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has launched a nutritional feeding programme at the main prison in Abidjan after the incidence of beriberi, a sickness linked to vitamin deficiency, reached epidemic levels. The ICRC says it first detected the illness in Abidjan’s Maison d’arrêt et de correction d’Abidjan (MACA), the largest prison in the city housing 5,400 prisoners in a space intended for 1,500, in 2002. An emergency programme...

COTE D'IVOIRE: Urban displaced slip into obscurity

DAKAR Monday, September 29, 2008 (IRIN) - People who flee to cities because of conflicts or natural disasters tend to become invisible to the authorities and organisations that can help them, says US-based Tufts University and the Geneva-based International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The IDMC and Tufts University researched the protection needs of displaced people in Sudan’s Khartoum, Colombia’s Santa Marta, and Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire. Lost in the crowd As opposed to rural...

COTE D'IVOIRE: Shaky peace leading into elections

ABIDJAN Wednesday, October 01, 2008 (IRIN) - As presidential elections approach at year-end after repeated delays, analysts worry slow progress on meeting the demands of the Ouagadougou peace agreement, combined with what they see as continued hostility among some in power towards foreign-born Ivorians, threaten the elusive stability in the still-divided country. “Ouagadougou was a breakthrough because the protagonists of the crisis came together to agree on their own timetable and roadmap to...

COTE D'IVOIRE: Farmers return to land in west after deadly clashes

DAKAR Friday, November 28, 2008 (IRIN) - Some 70 long-displaced farmers - mostly immigrants - returned this week to a cocoa plantation in western Côte d’Ivoire, despite deadly clashes triggered when armed youths tried to block their return. UN and local officials say the clashes - in the sub-prefecture of Zeaglo, some 450km northwest of the commercial capital Abidjan - underscore the importance of reconciliation efforts in the volatile west, a zone long wracked by land disputes and hit by...

COTE D'IVOIRE: Who is to blame for dumping toxic oil sludge?

ABIDJAN Wednesday, October 01, 2008 (IRIN) - A trial is under way in Abidjan of local officials accused of conniving in the dumping of toxic oil sludge in August 2006 and causing over a dozen deaths, and illnesses to tens of thousands. Victims of the Abidjan dumping scandal, environmentalists and lawyers say the real culprits have slipped away. The president of the Union of Abidjan and Surrounding Areas’ Victims of Toxic Waste, Ouattara Aboubacar, told IRIN the trial of 12 Abidjan port and...

COTE D'IVOIRE: Toxic waste criminal investigations may indict higher-ups

DAKAR Thursday, October 02, 2008 (IRIN) - Ivorian government lawyers have said they may pursue criminal investigations against the Netherlands-based oil trader Trafigura, which owned the oil waste dumped in open-air sites in Abidjan in 2006. Ivorian health officials, an independent investigation panel, and European lawyers have said the poisonous sludge led to more than one dozen deaths and tens of thousands of people to fall ill in Abidjan. Trafigura settled a civil case with the government...

COTE D'IVOIRE: “Rapes are encouraged”

DAKAR Tuesday, October 21, 2008 (IRIN) - Rapes of women and girls are common in western Côte d’Ivoire and generally go unpunished, said residents of the region. “These days nearly every time we hear of armed robberies in homes, on the roads or on plantations, we hear of rape,” said a resident of the western town of Duékoué some 500km from the commercial capital Abidjan, who wanted to remain anonymous. “We hear of two, three, four rapes every day.” With the proliferation of arms since conflict...

COTE D'IVOIRE: “Alarming” malnutrition in north

DAKAR Friday, October 24, 2008 (IRIN) - In Côte d’Ivoire government health officials and aid agencies are launching emergency feeding and special nutritional training in the north to respond to what nutrition experts call “alarming” malnutrition levels. Nearly 18 percent of children in the north are acutely malnourished according to a July 2008 nutritional survey by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) conducted in collaboration with the national government...