Bukola Adebayo

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. 

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.