Nita Bhalla

The #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa and the #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests in Kenya all have one thing in common - the organising, chanting and marching were led by young people.

In Uganda, youth protesters are staging rallies outside parliament against alleged corruption and human rights abuses by leaders, inspired by similar high-profile protests in Kenya against an unpopular finance bill.

When 25-year-old Kenyan teacher Stella stumbled on an X post about a new finance bill proposing taxes on basics from bread to diapers, she brushed it off as fake news.    

"I just dismissed it as a politician complaining about something that wasn't true," Stella, who did not want to give her full name, told Context as she recalled the clamour on social media that began in May.

Kenya was bracing for fresh protests on Thursday with some demonstrators demanding the resignation of President William Ruto despite his climbdown on proposed tax hikes that sparked a week of protests, in which at least 23 people were killed.

Ruto said on Wednesday that he would withdraw a new finance bill, which proposed a slew of taxes, after protesters briefly stormed the parliament in Nairobi, sparking deadly clashes with police firing live bullets and tear gas on the streets. 

Kenyan President William Ruto has climbed down on a new finance bill after protesters stormed parliament, police opened fire on demonstrators and more than 20 people were killed across the country.

The bill had proposed a slew of new taxes on a wide range of goods and services such as bread, cars, vegetable oil and sanitary products, hitting Kenyans already overburdened by the high cost of living.

I went to cover the demonstrations in Nairobi on Tuesday and found something markedly different to previous protests I had covered during my seven years in Kenya.

When the Nigerian government announced plans in April to develop a multilingual AI tool to boost digital inclusion across the West African nation, 28-year-old computer science student Lwasinam Lenham Dilli was thrilled.

Dilli had struggled to scrape datasets from the internet to build a large language model (LLM), used to power AI chatbots, in his native Hausa language as part of his final-year project at university.

In Nairobi's informal settlement of Kawangware, Kenyan vegetable seller Beverly confronts a grim reality - her one-room corrugated iron home and everything she owned has been destroyed in the worst floods in years.

Since March, torrential rains linked to climate change have inundated parts of East Africa, destroying homes and livelihoods, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Growing up surrounded by the towering smokestacks of coal-fired power stations, 22-year-old Siya Mokoena's life is inextricably linked to the coal industry that dominates his hometown of Emalahleni in South Africa's eastern province of Mpumalanga.

Like many in Emalahleni, generations of Mokoena's family have worked in the coal sector. His father, a miner, was laid off in March when his mine was shut down.

Joe smiled nervously from behind his shades as he emerged from the cramped wood-panelled magistrate's court in Kenya's capital Nairobi. 

The slim 24-year-old man, wearing black track pants and a grey hoodie, had just testified how he and his friend had been beaten and robbed by a man they had met on Facebook last year. 

A year of record temperatures and extreme weather - from floods to fires - is due to a deadly cocktail of man-made climate change mixed with cyclical El Niño weather, scientists say.

A spate of recent heatwaves in West Africa, for example, would not have happened without climate change and was made still worse by the El Niño event, scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group found in a new report. 

U.S. President Joe Biden signed legislation this week that could ban TikTok in the United States unless the Chinese owner sells the popular short video app within a year.

The law, approved on Wednesday, is driven by widespread worries among U.S. lawmakers that China could use the app to surveil or access the data of TikTok's 170 million American users.