IHEU has given its first grant from a new fund for developing membership organisations. International Representative for East Africa, Deo Ssekitooleko, brought together Humanist leaders in Kenya for a meeting to try to resolve some of the conflict between Humanist groups there.

An IHEU-sponsored conference in Nairobi will provide a national platform for dialogue and reflection on the need for Humanist organisations in Kenya to come together and form a single body.

Date: 8th and 9th May, 2010.

Venue: Shaurimoyo YMCA, Nairobi, Kenya.

Theme: Developing Humanist Cohesion: Issues and Solutions.

You are invited to an IHEU sponsored conference in Kenya, on March 27 and 28.

Kenya has a population of 15 million children, constituting 54 percent of the total of 28 million. Over 12.6 million Kenyans, majority of who are children, live in absolute poverty.

The worldwide problem of belief in witchcraft and the appalling human rights abuses to which it leads received a boost in September at the 12th session of the UN Human Rights Council held in Geneva, Switzerland.

The UN Human Rights Council has published IHEU's written statement on witchcraft in Africa. The statement documents the abuse of children and others through accusations of witchcraft and supposed witch "cures". IHEU calls for improved education and policing to eliminate these twin scourges.

In a joint statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council, IHEU has called on the Council to join the fight against the twin evils of those practising witchcraft and those claiming to find and "cure" witches in Africa.

One country that could have made a great impact on the propagation of Humanism as a practical discipline in Africa is Kenya. A country that has been confirmed by archaeologists to be the origin of mankind, (the works of the Leakey family), yet didn’t possess a Humanist organisation, not until 2004.

13-15 June 2007

Nyeri and Isiolo , KENYA

Seminars on World Philosophy Day 2007

The World Social Forum, which took place in Nairobi, Kenya for the first time in Africa, was supposed to be a forum for the voices of the grassroots. But Firoze Manji writes that, despite the diversity of voices at the event, not everyone was equally represented.

As one would expect, WSF was highly heterogeneous. There was a lot going on. At one level no one can deny the diversity of people from all parts of the world. WSF seemingly reflected the heterogeneity of civil society internationally: there were initiatives from grassroots women’s organisations, from feminists, social movements, small and large African organisations, international (or is it ‘multinational’?) organisations, donors and funders, grantees, activists, hustlers and the hassled. There were vociferous anti-capitalists and anti-(capitalist) globalisation meetings and discussions, as one would expect of an event that evolved out of the need to assert an alternative to imperialist globalisations of the Davos kind. And there were those whose politics could reasonably be viewed as part of the civil society infrastructure of modern-day imperial expansion.