ADF

REUTERS In late 2021, Nopea Ride, Kenya’s electric taxi fleet service, opened an electric vehicle (EV) charging hub at Village Market in the capital, Nairobi, demonstrating the growing demand for electric mobility in East Africa. The Finnish electric cab company earlier had announced that it planned to triple its fleet in Nairobi, helping reduce emissions from the city’s notorious traffic. EkoRent, the parent company of Nopea, now has about 1,500 EVs in its fleet.  Estonian on-demand transport company Bolt announced in October 2021 that it will roll out electric cabs in South Africa. It came four months after the company…

REUTERS In Nigeria, a country heavily reliant on revenues from its oil exports, entrepreneur Ifedolapo Runsewe has identified another type of black gold: used car tires. She has set up Freetown Waste Management Recycle, an industrial plant dedicated to transforming old tires into paving bricks, floor tiles and other goods that are in high demand. “Creating something new from something that will otherwise be lying somewhere as waste was part of the motivation,” Runsewe said at her factory in Ibadan. “We are able to create an entire value chain around the tires,” she said, holding a paving brick that is…

ADF STAFF Internet blackouts have become the tool of choice for many governments trying to quash protests or tamp down on unrest, sometimes in violation of their own constitution. Advocates for internet freedom say that up to 90% of people on the African continent have experienced some kind of government-mandated total or partial internet disruption in recent years. Among the most notable shutdowns was the Nigerian government’s blockade of the social media site Twitter in 2021 that lasted for seven months. It cost the nation more than $1.6 billion in lost business, according to internet analyst NetBlocks, which tracks internet…

ADF STAFF Larba Mathieu Yougbare hunched over as he tried to loosen the firm, dry soil with a small hoe. Frustration was as evident on the farmer’s face as beading sweat. He returned to the eastern Burkina Faso city of Fada empty-handed. “The harvest is bad,” he told the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) earlier this year. “We came here because we were forced to flee our village. Our fields in the village are more fertile than those here.” Yougbare was given a small plot to work near Fada, but his efforts have yielded few rewards. Hunger stalks…

ADF STAFF Fishing was a reliable livelihood in coastal Ghanaian communities such as Apam, Cape Coast and Elmina for centuries. The waters still bustle with fishing activities, but for years fishermen have returned to shore with gradually smaller catches. Locals blame the lack of fish on large industrial trawlers, mostly Chinese. For years, the vessels practiced “saiko,” the illegal transshipment of fish at sea. The trawlers typically transfer their massive catch to a large canoe capable of carrying about 450 times more fish than an artisanal fishing canoe. The transfers at sea help trawlers avoid catch limits. “My family and…

ADF STAFF Nigerian officials hope to use South African technology to help protect their nation’s marine resources. The technology would help Nigeria monitor the movement of vessels anywhere in its waters, George Moghalu, managing director of the Nigerian Inland Waterways Authority, said in a report by the Independent Nigeria newspaper. Moghalu said in late September that he exchanged visits with a South African technology company, but he did not name the company. The unspecified technology could help combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, piracy, kidnapping, and weapons and drug smuggling, among other sea crimes. “We visited them and they…

ADF STAFF In 1861, 3,000 heavily armed female Soldiers charged a thorny wall during a skills demonstration. King Glele, their ruler in Dahomey, a region that is now part of Benin, was eager to show off the ferocity and skill of his warriors. The 400-meter-long wall bristled with acacia branches with 5-centimeter-long, needle-sharp thorns. The women were barefoot, armed with clubs and knives. Some of them — “Reapers” — had 1-meter-long razors that, the king said, could be used to cut a man in half. The warriors charged the wall, ignoring the savage wounds caused by the thorns. They clawed…

CLUES Humans have fished and hunted in the area for 2,000 years, creating shellfish mounds, some of which are several hundred meters long.  Some of the mounds contain burial sites.  This area was formed within the delta of three rivers. It includes 200 islands and islets, mangrove forests, and a mix of salt water and fresh water.  ANSWER  Saloum Delta, Senegal

ADF STAFF The Lake Chad region boasts interconnected communities that share ethnic and economic ties across four countries. They have traded and intermingled with one another for centuries. But the arrival of Boko Haram has damaged these ties and destroyed local economies. Since 2013, the terrorist group has infiltrated communities across the region where Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria meet. Today, Boko Haram dominates the cross-border economy, generating millions of dollars through operating public markets, and an array of crimes such as extortion, kidnapping and armed robbery. “The group preys on local communities for its resilience, survival and capacity to…

ADF STAFF From the coasts of Africa to South America, around the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, China’s distant-water fleet (DWF) is steadily decimating fish stocks worldwide. China’s bottom trawl fleet catches an estimated 2.35 million tons of fish per year around the African continent worth more than $5 billion, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). “That is huge chunks of money that can be ill afforded,” Steve Trent, EJF founder and CEO, told Financial Times. “The people that are affected, as is so often the case, are primarily the poor coastal communities. When the fish is gone,…