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"I had a lump in my breast for a few years that I ignored [mainly because] it didn't hurt. It's so easy to try to deny illness," says Tracey Derrick. When she finally went to see a doctor for a biopsy, she got a big shock. The result came back positive: breast cancer.

Southern African leaders used the 30th Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit of government leaders to rally around Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's land seizures, in a move that undermines regionalism, while lamenting their own failure to implement their decisions on regional economic integration.

In the poor, drought-stricken community of Kangcamphalala, AIDS orphan Nomvula Dladla* is in tears. The 17-year-old has been told that her aunt, the only surviving relative she could live with, passed away a few hours ago of an HIV-related illness. And if she had been living anywhere else in the country, it would have made Dladla destitute.

Regional economic integration plans in southern Africa are not rooted in reality, according to civil society organisations holding a parallel meeting alongside the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Namibia's capital of Windhoek.

In April, the United Nations World Food Programme estimated it would need 190 million dollars to respond to a food crisis threatening more than 7 million people in Niger. By July, the WFP had revised the amount needed upwards to $371 million: a month later, the U.N. agency has been forced to scale back aid for lack of funds.

"My daughter had repeatedly tried to describe to me what her step-father would do to her when I was not home," says Wanza*, a 28-year-old mother resident of Nairobi's Mathare slum. "On this particular night I pretended to be asleep and watched as he left our bed and went for my eight-year-old daughter."

Joelle Nsamira Kajuga, a female agricultural researcher has a ready answer to describe which modified crop will produce a higher yield, which will be resistant to bacteria, and which will ensure food security and generate a higher turnover for poor small-scale farmers in different regions in Rwanda.

Hop over a seep of filthy sludge behind a bathroom screened with ragged sacks, turn past the toilet with battered cardboard walls, crab between mud-brick shanties roofed with rusty metal... There: emerge into a small, neat yard where a dozen women and girls are filling plastic buckets from five water taps sticking out of concrete wall.

"Africans do not believe women can do big business," fumes Zambian trader Angelica Rumsey.