Burkina Faso's government has asked the World Health Organisation (WHO) for help in its fight against meningitis. The request coincides with the start of the 2002-2003 meningitis season.

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has deplored the failure to solve the murder of Norbert Zongo, publisher of the weekly paper "L'Indépendant", who was shot dead on a road in southern Burkina Faso on 13 December 1998.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and its partners are expanding help to more vulnerable children in Burkina Faso. They are providing school materials to 10,000 children this year, up from 850 in 2000. Parents of many of these children died of AIDS. Only about a third of children in Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest countries, are enrolled in primary school.

A total of 165,000 of Burkinabe child migrants between 6 and 17 years old have migrated to work while 9.5 percent of Burkinabe children 6-17 years old were found to live outside the proximity of their parents, according to a recent study by the World Bank. The objectives of the study were to identify how many children were involved in child migration from rural areas in Burkina Faso, to establish why the children migrate and also where the high risk areas were for child migration.

Burkina Faso has at least 165,000 migrant labourers aged six to 17 years and half of them work abroad - mainly in Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Benin - a study on child labour migration shows. Most of the young migrant labourers were boys, according to the study by the NGO Terre des Hommes and the World Bank.