Bukola Adebayo

At Africa's first-ever climate summit in Nairobi this week, government and U.N. leaders sought to promote the continent as a source of solutions to the world's global warming challenge, rooted in its rich natural resources from sunshine to forests.

But they identified one big snag: a lack of finance to turn that potential into the reality of a green and fair transition.

Last year's must-have dress, yesterday's flares and countless other Western castoffs are strangling the Global South, prompting calls for fast fashion to pay the price for rampant overproduction.

Every week, some 15 million items of used clothes end up in Ghana's capital, shipped in bales from Europe, North America and Asia to the world's biggest secondhand clothes market.

As a teenager, Kasim was the star striker of his school's football team in Ghana, earning him the moniker Starflex. But the 22-year-old has since abandoned both his studies and football for a vocation that keeps him up at night: finding and luring victims into online romance scams.

In one bedroom in Accra, Starflex and his two friends Suleiman, 19, and Patrick, 18, huddle over their phones and laptops, exchanging intimate messages with "pals", their code name for potential victims they meet on dating sites.

Riding a red electric scooter on country roads in eastern India, Sanjulata Mahanta has become something of a poster girl for millet since she stunned fellow villagers by planting the hardy grain - and making a profit - three years ago.

"People laughed at me and said I was growing grass," Mahanta, 35, said on a humid morning as farmers from Kaurikala village in Odisha state gathered under a tree for a millet workshop mixing history, cookery and climate change adaptation.

Women will bear the brunt of extreme heat as more frequent heatwaves on a warming planet pose a growing threat to their work, earnings and lives, researchers have warned.

The impacts of rising heat are disproportionately dangerous and costly to women - be it at home or on the job - according to a report titled 'The Scorching Divide' by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock).

From Zimbabwe's lithium-rich rocks to Democratic Republic of Congo's cobalt, minerals critical for clean energy technologies are increasingly in demand from Africa's trade partners as part of the global green transition from planet-warming fossil fuels.

Yet on a continent long blighted by the so-called "resource curse" - whereby nations rich in oil or gold, for example, have failed to convert this into wider prosperity - governments have increasingly restricted or banned mineral exports in recent years in a bid to boost processing and retain more of the gains.

Obaa Yaa's store is in a prime location in the middle of the bustling Makola market in the centre of Ghana's capital, but at the end of a long day of waiting, no one had bought any of the jars of shito, a local chilli sauce, that she had on display.

Her phone, at one time constantly buzzing with calls from restaurateurs and vendors placing bulk orders for her spicey seafood relish, had also fallen almost silent.

Emem Isong screamed in pain on a trolley outside a hospital accident and emergency department in Nigeria's biggest city after a car ran over her foot and broke two of her toes.

"Please hold on ... there are just three of us on duty," a nurse at the Ebute-Metta federal medical centre in Lagos told the 33-year-old. "The alternative is for you to go to another hospital."

Usman Umar was only a toddler when he began threshing rice alongside hundreds of seasonal workers who came from across Nigeria to work on the harvest at his family farm in the north-central state of Niger - the nation's agricultural hub.

The 1,800 hectares of rice, maize, sorghum and sugar cane in Emitowa, a remote community of grain farmers and cattle herders, has been in Umar's family for four generations.

A day before his wife was due to give birth, Taiwo Ajayi Oluwole frantically called relatives and friends in a desperate bid to get any cash they could lay their hands on to pay the maternity hospital in Abuja, Nigeria's capital city.

Though he had money in the bank to cover the medical bills, the hospital insisted on a down payment of 100,000 naira ($217) in cash, before it would book her in for a caesarean section.