ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Keeping girls in schools in Africa is key to lowering the fast-growing continent's high fertility rates and ultimately ending hunger and poverty, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs said Wednesday.

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta is due to open a new $1.5 billion Chinese rail line on Wednesday linking the capital Nairobi to the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, despite delays in establishing an industrial park there to drive freight traffic.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's state power firm Eskom said it will cut up to 2,000 megawatts of power from the national grid on Wednesday due to a shortage of generating capacity.

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopia postponed by a week a referendum on self-determination for its ethnic Sidama community that would have created the country's 10th autonomous region, Fana news agency reported on Tuesday.

ASUTSUARE, Ghana, Oct 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Ephraim Kofi Kenney does not like to work in the fields scaring pests away. But today he must.