Bukola Adebayo

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.

Health experts are urging countries to earmark billions of dollars of the financing to be pledged at the COP29 summit to fund healthcare policies as pollution and extreme weather events take their toll on humans’ well-being.

With the world reeling from a string of extreme weather events this year, hospitals and health workers from Nigeria to India have had to deal with disease outbreaks linked to floods and the effects of deadly heatwaves, while responding to new disease patterns linked to rising temperatures across the globe.

Four years ago, Nigerian Ernestino Amaechi got a visa to study business in the U.S. but now he worries he might be forced to go back home and be separated from his two American-born children if visa rules are tightened after the U.S. election.

Originally from the southern Rivers State in Nigeria, where he got his undergraduate degree, Amaechi now works as a part-time teacher at a community college thanks to a scheme that allows students to stay on after they graduate and get work experience.

Cici Brinces came to Lebanon as a domestic worker 14 years ago, married a Palestinian, had a son, survived leukaemia and was building a new life. Then bombs began falling in Beirut and now she wants to go home to the Philippines.

"I feel that the end is near for me - worse than when I had cancer," said Brinces, 46, who fled her home near the airport two weeks ago and lived on the streets for days before moving into a shelter with her 10-year-old son.

Artificial intelligence and traditional aid are helping farmers like Salihu Ali in northern Nigeria act before their farms are submerged by increasingly regular floods fuelled by climate change.

Ali was warned that floods were coming in 2022 and was provided with cash to prepare his farm in Dasin Hausa, a remote village of cowpea, maize, and rice farmers in Adamawa state.

Mpox is nothing new to Africa yet there is no vaccine available on the continent, exposing rank inequity in global distribution as tens of richer nations inoculate people facing far less risk.

Experts say that inequality - alongside competing health problems and slow regulation - is putting millions of Africans in jeopardy, after scientists found the virus was now mutating fast, leaping from person to person and stealing over borders.

Bola Adeshiyan last ate 16 hours ago and she is hungry. To take her mind off the ache in her stomach, she leaves her tiny one-bedroom flat and walks around the bustling streets of her neighbourhood in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital.

On her return, the 55-year-old drinks a little water and settles down to wait to collect leftover beans and unsold bread on credit from a food vendor later in the day.