On 29 July, RSF called for the immediate and unconditional release of journalist Guy-Patrick Massoloka, a Banjul-based correspondent for the Pan African News Agency (PANA) of Congolese nationality. Massoloka was arrested by National Intelligence Agency officials on 19 July and is still being held without charge.

Religious leaders in the country have made denunciations against what they called the indiscriminate application and distribution of contraceptive devices, which are designed to check population growth at the national level.

The Gambian parliament passed a tough media bill on Wednesday, two months after President Yahya Jammeh refused to sign an earlier version and returned it to the legislators for amendment. The bill was passed by 53 votes to three, with members of parliament from the ruling party castigating the independent media for being "unpatriotic" and always reporting "the bad side" of the government.

The formerly thick forests of The Gambia have been degraded and reduced during the last century because of large-scale destruction through bush fire, exploitation of forestry resources and cultivation. Because of this development, the government reacted in the early eighties in the western parts of the country through the Gambian-German Forestry Project (GGFP) and in 1996 a forestry project was started.

A two-week mass vaccination exercise against meningitis, which kills hundreds of people in West Africa each year, began on Monday in The Gambia.