ADF

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE In the northern Senegalese city of Saint-Louis, excavators are ripping up the beach to lay giant basalt blocks in an 11th-hour effort to keep the sea at bay. When finished, a black sea wall will stretch 3.6 kilometers along the coast of the country’s former capital. Dire warnings about the risk of rising sea levels already are a grim reality in Saint-Louis, where seafront residents are abandoning their homes to the encroaching Atlantic Ocean. The sea wall is a stopgap. Some are skeptical that the historic city of 237,000 people can be saved at all. Saint-Louis stands only…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE During the week, Dr. Georges Bwelle, 49, specializes in intestinal surgery at the main hospital in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. On weekends, though, he takes to the road. He leads a team of volunteers that crams into a minibus and heads out into remote areas. The tiny mobile clinic provides basic health care to those in need. Recently, his nongovernmental organization (NGO), called ASCOVIME, visited the prison at Nkongsamba, about 350 kilometers northwest of Yaoundé. Team members examined nearly 500 prisoners and their family members. Volunteers brought in equipment, transforming a room near the cells into a small field…

ADF STAFF | Photos by AFP/Getty Images Mass atrocities, forced displacement, public executions: Terror. It has been a fact of life in parts of Africa’s Sahel region since extremists gained a foothold in Mali in 2012 and then spread their reach beyond its borders. Despite efforts by regional security forces and global partners, the violence shows no sign of stopping. By the end of 2021, there was an 18% increase in violent events and a 14% decrease in fatalities compared to the record-setting violence of 2020 in the Sahel, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED),…

ADF STAFF As extremists launched murderous assaults on Burkinabe churches in 2019, neighboring Ghana took note. In preceding years, Islamist-backed terrorism and violence, born in Mali and spreading south, had infiltrated Burkina Faso and crept ever closer to Ghana’s northern border. Although hundreds of kilometers north of the border, the church attacks still were a source of unease. Their brutality toward people of faith and houses of worship was striking. In Silgadji, Burkina Faso, gunmen rushed in on motorcycles and killed a pastor, two of his sons and three other congregants in April 2019, the BBC reported. Less than a month…

ADF STAFF Africa agriculture experts are calling for countries across the continent to increase their capacity for local food production to avoid future food shocks like the one created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The invasion that began in February shut down exports of grain, fertilizer and other key agricultural components from both countries, which are two of the world’s leading exporters of foodstuffs. As a result, prices for bread and other staples spiked across Africa, setting off a nutritional crisis in some countries. Africa does $4.5 billion in business with Ukraine, the great majority of that in grain imports.…

ADF STAFF West African governments should consider renegotiating deals with foreign distant-water fishing companies that often offer little benefit to either party, according to a maritime expert at Duke University. Analyzing 2017 data, John Virdin, director of the ocean and coastal policy program at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke in the United States, noted that most bottom trawlers in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone are owned by Chinese companies. The foreign trawlers notoriously engage in illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. In Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, foreign industrial fishing fleets generated little or…

ADF STAFF Recent media campaigns by the Islamic State group have encouraged fighters to pursue hijra, or migration, to Africa and foster extremism. Experts predict more terrorism on the continent. Since the Islamic State terrorist group’s defeat in Iraq and Syria, the organization has shown an intention to revive itself through multiple branches in Africa. If the group’s promotion of Africa as a destination for extremism “proves to be sustained and successful, the group may continue to build its ranks, alliances, and reach in the region, which could in turn result in more violence and pose a threat to any form…

ADF STAFF Highly trained dogs recently helped arrest three poachers suspected of killing rhinos in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. Rangers in helicopters spotted one dead rhino and an injured rhino after tourists alerted them to gunshots in the park in June. They dispatched rangers and K-9 units. The dogs picked up the scent of three Mozambican nationals armed with a high-caliber hunting rifle, ammunition and horns from three rhinos, France 24 reported. They quickly arrested the suspected poachers. In South Africa, home to 80% of the world’s rhino population, K-9 units play an important role in combating poaching. South…

ADF STAFF Mohamed Znagui Sid’Ahmed Ely knows the security challenges of the Sahel well. A former brigadier general in the Mauritanian Army, he has spent time in command positions, as an instructor and at the country’s general staff headquarters. He humbly says, “My career is a normal career of an officer,” but his resume shows he has been at the forefront of the region’s fight against extremism.  He commanded the region’s Joint Military Staff Committee (CEMOC) in Tamanrasset, Algeria, and later was appointed inspector general of the Mauritanian Armed Forces. He also spent time overseas as a defense attaché.  In…

ADF STAFF There’s a fantastic amount of gold to be found in the Sahel. In addition to the region’s large-scale industrial mines, there are small artisanal mines — hundreds of them in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — with people, including children, mining gold with simple hand tools. A 2019 International Crisis Group report said that more than 2 million people in the three countries work in small-scale artisanal mines. With so many mines and miners, the three countries can’t protect them from attacks and raids by terrorists and robbers. The region has become the center of a surge in…