Tag Archives: africa

Johannesburg, South Africa | AFP | African nations fighting the novel coronavirus face a foe as stealthy and dangerous as the microbe itself: misinformation and apathy, fuelled by deep distrust of government. Bogus news and indifference to official warnings are emerging as giant obstacles in a region where poor healthcare infrastructure, …

Lagos, Nigeria | AFP | Equipment shortages, scarce beds and poorly-paid doctors and nurses: Africa is finding that it has few means to protect itself as a feared coronavirus tsunami looms. Earth’s poorest continent has so far confirmed around 1,800 cases and 57 deaths — a tally that is low compared …

Kigali, Rwanda | AFP | Rwanda went into shutdown on Sunday, imposing some of the strictest coronavirus measures in Africa where infections are rising fast and hospitals ill-equipped to cope. The central African nation banned all “unnecessary movements”, mirroring steps by governments from the Indian Ocean nation of Mauritius to …

Geneva, Switzerland | AFP | The head of the World Health Organization said Wednesday that while Africa so far had seen few cases of COVID-19, the continent should “prepare for the worst”. “Africa should wake up,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists in a virtual news conference. Tedros said that to date, 233 cases of the …

Their ageing rulers are finding new ways to thwart them | THE INDEPENDENT | One day in January Comlan Hugues Sossoukpe woke before dawn in Lomé, the capital of Togo, and slipped across the frontier to a safe house in Benin. It was only the second time he had been …

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The World Health Organization-WHO will scrutinize the COVID-19 cases that have been reported in Africa. This comes at a time when more countries on the African continent seem to be reporting cases of the disease. According to WHO officials, scrutiny is needed to ascertain …

Geneva, Switzerland | THE INDEPENDENT & AFP  | Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV). A novel coronavirus (nCoV) is a new strain that …

Scientists identified Algeria, Egypt and South Africa as the most likely to import new coronavirus cases into the continent | THE INDEPENDENT | Whether it’s a matter of faulty detection, climatic factors or simple fluke, the remarkably low rate of coronavirus infection in African countries, with their fragile health systems, …

West African political leaders recently announced that the CFA franc – a currency created by France in 1945 for its colonies and still used by 14 African countries – will be replaced this year by a new currency pegged to the euro called the eco. COMMENT |Célestin Monga | But …

The financing gap to achieve the SDGs; between $500bn and $1.2tn, is beyond what many states can deliver COMMENT | KARNIKA YADAV | There is only one road left to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set for Africa for 2030 and that’s through sustainable businesses. The sluggish progress to …