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ADF STAFF Google plans to open its first artificial intelligence (AI) center on the African continent. The center, which was slated to open in 2018 in Accra, Ghana, will bring together top machine learning researchers and engineers and address challenges in health care, agriculture and education, Google said in a blog. Moustapha Cisse, a staff research scientist from Senegal, will lead the center. “AI has great potential to positively impact the world, and more so if the world is well-represented in the development of new AI technologies,” wrote Cisse and Google AI senior fellow Jeff Dean in a blog post…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Tunisia’s tourism industry, hard hit by terror attacks in 2015, is rebounding, with revenues up nearly a third in the beginning of 2018, the sector’s minister said. “There is a significant improvement,” Tourism Minister Selma Elloumi Rekik told AFP, as visitor numbers surpassed the first five months of 2014, largely due to rising Russian and Chinese arrivals. The 2015 attacks devastated Tunisia’s tourism industry. An attack at the National Bardo museum in Tunis and another targeting a beach resort in Sousse together killed 59 foreign tourists and a Tunisian guard. Visitor arrivals surpassed 2.3 million through May 20,…

DEFENCEWEB As part of a push to support counterinsurgency and peacekeeping efforts, the United States donated equipment and vehicles to the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF). The equipment donated on June 7, 2018, included 30 Mercedes-Benz trucks, six boom lifts, a rough terrain container handler, three Oshkosh armored trucks, a bulldozer, 10 generators and spares.  The equipment was donated at a ceremony attended by U.S. Ambassador to Uganda Deborah Malac and received by Ugandan Chief of Defence Forces Gen. David Muhoozi at the Uganda Rapid Deployment Capability Centre in Jinja district. The center is a unit of the East African…

DEFENCEWEB Six Southern African Development Community (SADC) states agreed to strengthen cooperation to battle the scourge of poaching, particularly that of rhinos and elephants. The countries — Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe — met in Mpumalanga, South Africa, for the fourth multilateral meeting of defense and security chiefs on anti-poaching. During the meeting, Gen. Solly Shoke, chief of the South Africa National Defence Force (SANDF), said they were “close-knit member states” and must collectively deal with poaching to find a common long-term solution. After years of increases, South Africa saw a slight decline in the number of…

REUTERS Landlocked Ethiopia, which lost its access to the Red Sea nearly three decades ago, plans to build a Navy as part of military reforms.  The country disbanded its Navy in 1991 after its then-province Eritrea seceded in the wake of a three-decade war for independence. Ethiopia maintains a maritime institute that trains seafarers.  “Following the efforts made to build capacity of our national defense, we built one of the strongest ground and air forces in Africa,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said during a meeting with senior military officials. “We should build our naval force capacity in the future.” …

WORLD BANK  Photos by VINCENT TREMEAU/WORLD BANK Ousmane Diallo is a 35-year-old university graduate with a degree in sociology. He owns 8 hectares of farmland in Mandiana, one of the most remote places in Guinea, about 730 kilometers east of the capital, Conakry. Mining companies operate in the area, where artisanal mining provides an income to more than 80 percent of the local population. Unlike his peers in the mining sector, Diallo decided to invest in agriculture when he could not find a job, because he “understood the agricultural potential of the region.” When he started farming in 2014, he…

THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION As a young boy chasing chickens on his parents’ farm in northern Uganda, Louis Lakor dreamed of becoming a teacher. But when he finally set foot in a local primary school at age 7, it was as an armed killer. Abducted in a night raid, Lakor was forced to become a child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group, which terrorized northern Uganda for nearly two decades before being driven out of the country by a military offensive in 2005. Clutching a gun handed to him by his kidnappers, Lakor was ordered to “shoot everything…

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A southern white rhino that became pregnant through artificial insemination increases hopes that a nearly extinct close relative, the northern white rhino, can be saved. News that the female southern white rhino named Victoria was pregnant was seen as a breakthrough and a step toward saving the northern white rhino species. If Victoria is able to carry the calf to term, it will be born in mid-2019. The world’s last male northern white rhino, Sudan, died in March 2018 at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy, his home for 10 years after being transferred from a zoo in the…

VOICE OF AMERICA In Morocco, a giant solar power plant near the city of Ouarzazate soon will increase its capacity to 580 megawatts. Solar energy has been slower to arrive in West Africa than in some other parts of the continent, but growth is underway. West Africa’s largest solar power station officially opened in November 2017 in Zagtouli on the outskirts of Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou. It cost $55 million to build with funding from France and the European Union. Zagtouli now delivers 30 megawatts to the national power grid. Before Zagtouli, West Africa’s largest solar station was in Bokhol,…

REUTERS In this arid stretch of Kajiado County, Kenya, where worsening heat and drought have been tough on livestock farmers, Arnold Ole Kapurua is experimenting with a hot new crop: chilis. Ole Kapurua, 29, a farmer and agronomist, now grows 2 acres of the fiery pods — and is training other farmers to do the same — as a way to protect their incomes in the face of harsher weather linked to climate change. “With time we realized that we weren’t making good money as our livestock income stagnated,” he said. “During drought we lost our herds to hunger and…