POPE Francis has decided to shun Nigeria as part of his African tour planned for next month that will take him to Uganda, Kenya and the Central African Republic where he will visit the poor and hold inter-religious services.

In what will be his first African trip since assuming office, the pope will meet slum dwellers and refugees and call for dialogue between Christians and Muslims in Kenya, Uganda and Central African Republic. He will spend about two days in each country and visit only the capitals.

 Since being named as the first Latin American pontiff, Pope Francis has met the most needy on each of his 10 foreign tours. He will continue this on his African trip, especially in Nairobi where he will visit Kangemi, a slum that is home to about 650,000 poor people.

He will also hold an inter-religious meeting and say a mass at a university in the Kenyan capital in memory of the victims of recent deadly attacks. Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall was the scene of a four-day siege in September 2013 that left at least 67 people dead in an attack by gunmen of the Somalia-based Islamist group al Shabaab.

Also, last April, militants attacked the Garissa University College in eastern Kenya, killing 148 people, most of them Christian. In Uganda, Pope Francis is scheduled to visit a home for the disabled in Nalukolongo, a suburb of the capital Kampala.

 His last stop will be Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, where the centrepiece of his visit to a country plagued by inter-communal violence is a meeting with Muslim leaders in the Koudoukou mosque. Violence surged in Bangui in September after the murder of a Muslim man and 77 people were killed.

Much of the violence in Bangui has been driven by a militia known as anti-balaka, which is largely Christian and a mainly Muslim group called the Seleka. Thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have been internally displaced since the Seleka briefly seized power in the majority Christian country in 2013 and although they later handed power to an interim government, the militia still controls swathes of the north of the country.