Tag Archives: africa

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 …

Why the opposition playbook carries risks Malawi recently held its breath as the Constitutional Court took ten hours to painstakingly read out its verdict on the highly controversial 2019 presidential elections. When it finally became clear that the judgment would nullify the election of President Peter Mutharika, jubilant opposition supporters …