REUTERS Portuguese architect Tania Monteiro and her husband are almost alone as they tour Sudan’s pyramids, a world-class attraction long neglected by the world. “People are really, really nice, always very welcoming,” Monteiro said on a visit to Meroe, an ancient city on the east bank of the Nile River about 200 kilometers northeast of the capital, Khartoum. Sudan has more, though smaller, pyramids than Egypt, but attracted only about 700,000 tourists in 2018 compared to 10 million in its northern neighbor. Conflicts and crises under former ruler Omar al-Bashir, a tough visa regime, and a lack of roads and…
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VOICE OF AMERICA Grace Chakudza gave birth in November 2019 to a healthy baby boy — her fourth child — at Achikondi Community Clinic. It opened in 2008 to help poor women safely give birth. Since then, the clinic has performed more than 8,800 successful deliveries without the loss of mother or child, according to its founder. That’s a record number in Malawi, where the United Nations Children’s Fund says the average mortality rate per 1,000 births is 22 deaths for babies and six for mothers. Chakudza appreciates the care she got from the clinic. “There is a big difference,”…
BBC NEWS AT BBC.CO.UK/NEWS Fifteen-year-old Divina Maloum of Cameroon has won a children’s international peace prize for her work with young people who have suffered extremist violence, particularly in the north of her country. The prize was awarded by Dutch organization KidsRights, which says it wants children to be recognized for their efforts to improve their own situation. In 2014, the Cameroonian teenager founded the Children for Peace movement to work with child victims of terror. She goes to communities to talk to children about their rights and tell them that they do not have to be drawn into the…
ADF STAFF Africa is on the verge of being declared polio-free after three years without any recorded cases of the disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) said in August 2019 that Nigeria had marked three years without a wild polio case, calling it a “major milestone.” If no more cases emerge in the next few months, Africa could officially be declared polio-free in 2020. The last case was recorded in Borno state in August 2016. North and South America eliminated polio more than 20 years ago. The disease has killed and disabled hundreds of thousands of people around the world.…
BBC NEWS AT BBC.CO.UK/NEWS Black Africans are at a disadvantage when it comes to drug treatments because they represent only 2% of the genetic samples used for pharmaceutical research. A new Nigeria-based genomics company wants to change that. According to Abasi Ene-Obong, founder and CEO of biotech startup 54gene, black Africans and people of black ancestry are more genetically diverse than all of the other populations in the world combined, making their genetic information “a huge resource to be tapped.” He has set up a genetic research laboratory in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, from where his team analyzed 40,000 DNA…
BBC NEWS AT BBC.CO.UK/NEWS Queues have formed outside banks in Zimbabwe as people hope to get hold of the country’s first Zimbabwe dollar notes issued since 2009. The currency was scrapped a decade ago because hyperinflation caused prices to double almost daily. Zimbabwe’s central bank hopes the new notes will ease a severe cash shortage as the country suffers a deepening economic crisis. The bank has played down fears that the move will fuel further inflation. Inflation in Zimbabwe reached 300% in August 2019 — the highest rate in the world. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe insists that the 2-…
ADF STAFF The Kingdom of Axum, also known as Aksum, was the first to do many things in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was the first kingdom to mint its own coins. It created its own written language, called Ge’ez, which still is in use in Ethiopia today. Its king was the first to adopt Christianity as an official religion. And Axum dominated trade in the Horn of Africa and across the Red Sea for centuries. Although the kingdom dated to the first century A.D., its time of greatest influence and prosperity was from the third century to the sixth century. The…
CLUES This area has 18 lakes of various sizes, depths and colors. These permanent lakes in a desert result from an aquifer and a complex hydrological system that is not fully understood. Some of the lakes have blue, green or reddish water, which reflects their chemical composition. About a third of the surface of the lakes is covered with green floating reed carpets that contrast with the water. ANSWER Lakes of Ounianga, northeastern Chad
ADF STAFF Cyber security experts say Africa’s top smartphone brand has sold tens of thousands of phones loaded with malicious software. The phones drain users’ data, sign them up for subscription services without their knowledge, and make them unwilling accomplices in fraudulent ad schemes. The Triada malware turned up on Chinese-made Tecno W2 smartphones in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Ghana and South Africa, according to a recent report. Traida uses a hard-to-remove program known as x-Helper to do its dirty work, experts say. In addition to creating fake subscriptions, the malware generates fake clicks on banner ads in the background of sites…
ADF STAFF A woman prayed in the rubble of a mosque on the beach at Jamestown, Ghana. Nearby, despondent men sifted through the wreckage of the historic fishing community, looking for anything they could salvage from their homes and businesses. A school was leveled, a playground destroyed and an area where locals played soccer on the beach was covered with debris. Ghanaian leaders promised for years to revitalize Accra’s iconic fishing community, a popular tourist attraction where locals row colorful canoes into the Gulf of Guinea to catch fish that are smoked on the beach and sold locally. Officials procured…