Bukola Adebayo

A short-term renewal of the Africa-U.S. AGOA trade deal would deepen uncertainty for African exporters and instead the pact should be reformed to spur investment in strategic sectors, like critical minerals, a Nigerian business leader said.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act was signed under President Bill Clinton's administration in 2000 to boost economic ties with African countries, but it expired at the end of September with no clarity on its future.

Nigerian director Sarah Kwaji was always unsettled by how mental health issues were ignored by Nollywood, Nigeria's prolific movie industry.

So when she got the opportunity to produce her first film in 2023, Kwaji decided to document a Nigerian mother's struggles with depression.

Be it AI pest detectors in Kenya or Nigerian soil-free farming, climate change is pushing farmers to innovate and show the sort of can-do spirit that experts say is vital if Africa is to overcome its twin scourge of high heat and hunger.

The experts - drawn from government, farming and the lab - are meeting in Senegal to brainstorm new ways to deal with old threats as farmers across whole swathes of Africa face famine, conflict, a debt crisis and ever-worsening climate shocks.

As funds dwindled, the World Food Programme last month issued an urgent SOS to donors: it could no longer deliver food to 1.3 million people displaced by conflict and extreme weather in Nigeria's northeast and its operations were about to collapse.

The U.N. agency, the largest provider of global food aid, said it had already distributed its last grain reserves and that without new funding, it would have to shut down 150 nutrition centres treating 300,000 malnourished children.

Africa's biggest gold producer Ghana is deploying artificial intelligence, GPS trackers and drones to crack down on illegal gold mining that has poisoned its rivers and destroyed its forests.

In June, the government launched the National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat, a multi-agency initiative that is using technology to detect and track illegal sites.

Nearly 40% of Ghana's gold is extracted by small-scale miners who use dangerous chemicals like mercury and cyanide to process it.

Home to the world's No. 2 tropical rainforest, Democratic Republic of Congo plans to expose half its land to oil and gas drilling in what conservationists call a major threat to endangered apes, local jobs and global climate goals.

Using geospatial mapping and analysis, U.S.-based NGO Earth Insight calculated that 52 oil and gas blocks put up for auction in May - on top of three previously awarded - cover about 124 million hectares of DRC's forest, peatland and inland waters.

More than half of all international students last year studied in four countries: the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia, according to Project Atlas 2024, a research portal focused on student mobility.

The United States - home to elite universities such as Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford - was the top destination in 2024, hosting a record 1,126,690 students, according to the portal, which is run by the Institute of International Education.

Nigerian student Owolabi has been meticulously scrubbing his X feed, deleting tweets and comments about U.S. policies, especially those relating to then President Donald Trump's 2018 reference to "shithole countries" in Africa.

Owolabi, 23, got a place at the University of New Haven in Connecticut for a master's degree in cybersecurity this year, but with the Trump administration pausing student visa appointments ahead of new social media vetting guidelines, he is worried.

At a tense meeting in Nigeria's capital Abuja, health workers poured over drug registers and testing records to gauge whether U.S. aid cuts would unravel years of painstaking work against tuberculosis in one of Africa's hardest hit countries.

For several days in May, they brainstormed ways to limit the fallout from a halt to U.S. funding for the TB Local Network (TB LON), which delivers screening, diagnosis and treatment.

I had a nagging suspicion that I had malaria - again - even before my test results came back from the lab.

Two weeks before, my joints began to ache and routine tasks, like taking a shower, left me panting as though I had run a race. During the day, my head was pounding and at night fever had me tossing and turning in my sweat-soaked bed.