Bukola Adebayo

Supporters point to the jobs and talk up the money. Opponents mourn the lost mangroves, the oil-slicked earth and all the broken promises to mop up past spills.

Drilling is back on the agenda in Nigeria.

When COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020,  the international community had dire predictions for Africa: the region's underfunded and poorly equipped health facilities would crumble and millions of people could die.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa said in April 2020 that up to 3.3 million Africans could lose their lives as a direct result of COVID-19.

For almost five years, Sumaya's work as a psychologist at a charity-run clinic in northwest Syria offered a lifeline to the many people scarred by the country's 14-year civil war.

She counselled patients depressed and suicidal after years in displacement camps, or traumatised by the conflict.

After years of conflict fuelled by the plundering of mineral resources, and with the global aid system in turmoil, fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has exposed millions to what U.N. experts have called "unimaginable hardship".

Eastern provinces have been wracked by some three decades of violence by state and non-state actors fighting to control gold mines and rich reserves of tin ore, coltan and tungsten ore, exacerbating one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

A week before Christmas last year, I stocked my refrigerator with tomatoes, carrots, green peppers and chicken - all bought after hours of ferocious haggling at the chaotic Mile 12 market in Lagos.

I also cooled four dozen homemade ginger-flavoured hibiscus drinks to accompany the jollof rice and chicken I would serve to guests at my Christmas Day party.

From Gaza to Ukraine, more than 180 million people are caught up in humanitarian emergencies, but while a handful make headlines, many crises fly under the radar.

Here are the 10 that attracted the least media attention last year, according to research by aid agency CARE.

Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi has been part of countless demonstrations over the years, but the anti-government protests that hit the country last June and July defied all expectations.

Mwangi said he witnessed something unprecedented - a powerful awakening of the Kenyan youth who leveraged social media to mobilise against a finance bill which proposed a raft of tax hikes.

Deep inside the mangrove forests of the Niger Delta, thousands of young men use makeshift equipment, risking arrest and accidents, to refine a valuable commodity: oil. 

They fill a pressing gap in Nigeria. Africa’s top petroleum producer can’t refine nearly enough oil to fulfil its citizens’ needs. As fuel prices have surged in the last year, demand is higher than ever for black market fuel. 

Protracted armed conflicts in Sudan, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo and escalating gang violence in Haiti are fuelling hunger and displacing people and show no signs of ebbing in 2025.

Here's how the four countries are struggling with urgent humanitarian crises that lack enough attention and funding.

Young Africans are on the march, with the most recent demonstrations on the streets of Mozambique rounding out a year of protest on the continent that has put ageing leaders on notice they must change - or go.

From Nigeria to Kenya, voters have demonstrated en masse in a youth-led repudiation of politics as usual, accusing the old men at the top of cronyism, bankrupt economics and poll fraud.