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AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE A Nigerian lawyer who helped secure the release of more than 100 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Chibok was awarded one of the United Nations’ top prizes. Zannah Mustapha was given the annual Nansen Refugee Award for his “crucial mediating” role and his work helping children affected by the long-running conflict. Mustapha, 58, said the award was unexpected but he was “exceedingly happy” to have been chosen. “I look forward to being a worthy ambassador for such a noble award,” he said in an interview in the capital, Abuja. Mustapha set up the Future Prowess Islamic Foundation…

REUTERS Five countries in the Sahel are setting up a security bloc to crack down on trafficking, terror and other cross-border crimes. The force assembled by the G5 Sahel bloc — Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — is expected to comprise about 5,000 troops. “We bring this combat against terrorism not only to protect our own people and countries but for the whole world,” Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou said at a news conference in the capital, Niamey. The idea of the G5 force was conceived in 2015 and was expected to be operational by the end of 2017. In…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Algeria announced that it has destroyed the last of its stock of anti-personnel mines, 10 months after fully demining the entire country. A total of 5,970 mines were destroyed at a ceremony in Djelfa in southeast Algeria. Algeria ratified the Ottawa Convention banning anti-personnel mines in 2000 and said it completed the demining of its territory in December 2016, clearing 9 million land mines. The scourge claimed 7,300 civilian lives in the North African country, mostly during the 1954-1962 war of independence, according to Deputy Defense Minister Ahmed Gaid Salah. Algerian demining specialists cleared mines from 1963 to…

REUTERS Maritime police from Somalia’s semiautonomous region of Puntland seized a boat loaded with weapons from Yemen. Puntland authorities displayed dozens of anti-aircraft guns, machine guns, AK-47 rifles and boxes of ammunition from the boat apprehended off the Horn of Africa. European maritime forces patrolling sea lanes off Somalia tracked the small vessel, known as Al Faruq, from Yemen, said Abdirahman Mohamud Hassan, director general of Puntland maritime police force. He said they had seized other boatloads of weapons destined for Islamic State and al-Shabaab militants active in Somalia. However, on this occasion the cargo was believed to be owned…

BRAND SOUTH AFRICA A group of students from South Africa’s University of the Western Cape (UWC) is the first African research team to lead an experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. Better known as the home of the Large Hadron Collider, CERN is one of the most prestigious science research facilities in the world. Colliders are used in particle physics research, in which particles are accelerated and hit other particles. CERN has the largest collider in the world, and it also is described as the largest machine in the world. The team of postgraduate students fired…

VOICE OF AMERICA A farmers’ group in South Sudan’s Imotong State says it has found a way to combat the dreaded fall armyworm, which has devastated crops across the continent. Robert Lokang, leader of the Bidaya Farm Association, regularly sprays his crops with a concoction of neem tree leaves, ash, powdered soap and water. The all-natural formula is designed to kill the armyworms while not harming the plants. It’s not a new invention. Lokang said he learned it decades ago as a child, when his father used the same concoction to ward off pests. He said that in 2016 the…

JEFFREY MOYO/INTER PRESS SERVICE Sixty-seven-year-old Hloniphani Sidingo smiles broadly while popping out through the gate of a clinic in her village, as she heads home clutching containers of anti-retroviral (ARV) pills. The first Bantu people to dwell in present-day Zimbabwe, the Khoisan, also known as the Bushmen or Basagwa, populate remote areas of southern Africa, particularly Angola, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Here, the Khoisan community is found in Matabeleland North’s Tsholotsho district, where many like Sidingo live. An estimated 1.2 million people in Zimbabwe are living with HIV/AIDS. This includes nearly one in three Khoisan people. Now,…

FRIDAY PHIRI/INTER PRESS SERVICE Frequent extreme weather and climate shifts challenge already vulnerable groups such as smallholder farmers. Between 2004 and 2014, farmers are said to have endured the brunt of the $100 billion cost of extreme weather. With traditional insurance proving costly, the alternative approach — weather index-based insurance, which links payouts to events triggered by extreme weather — is becoming popular. In Zambia, the World Food Programme has been testing such an intervention since 2015 in the Pemba district of Southern province. The insurance product targets farmers who have engaged in climate-smart agricultural practices, also known as conservation…

WORLD BANK On a typical morning in elementary schools across Uganda, children can be heard chanting letters of the English alphabet, each letter assigned to a common item found around the home, followed by its vernacular word to help with association and memory. “Axe, banana, cup, drum,” they sing, working their way down the chart. This is the way generations of Ugandans have learned. “That is learning English as a language,” says Caroline Kavuma, an early-grade reading specialist with Uganda’s Ministry of Education. Although it may be easy for children to learn English, she adds, it is more difficult for…

NEWS AGENCY OF NIGERIA The largest manufacturing conglomerate in West Africa wants to create 15,000 jobs by launching a sugar industry in Nigeria’s Niger State. The Dangote Group, headed by billionaire Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has signed a $450 million memorandum of understanding to develop an integrated sugar industry in the central Nigerian town of Lavun. The 16,000-hectare plantation would produce 12,000 tons of sugar cane per day. “Dangote Group is a firm believer in the vast economic potential of Nigeria,” Dangote said. “We have decided to invest in local sugar production in Niger because of the vast arable land available…