Nita Bhalla

With clouds gathering over western Kenya ahead of the rainy season, people typically prepare to spray their homes with insecticide to kill the malaria-carrying mosquitoes sure to swarm when the downpours come.

But now, the people of Busia and Migori counties will not have this life-saving protection.

As Sudan's civil war escalates into its third year, women and girls are bearing the brunt of the crisis. Displaced, vulnerable and targeted, they are facing unprecedented levels of sexual violence, warn aid workers. 

Sudanese women were at the forefront of the 2019 revolution that led to the ousting of president Omar al-Bashir, who took power in 1989.  

With more than 30 years experience as a humanitarian worker in Sudan, Muna Eltahir thought she had seen it all.

The northeastern African nation has in recent years witnessed mass public protests and coups and is embroiled in an almost two-year civil war which has pitted the Sudanese army against rebel Rapid Support Forces.

Nearly one in five people are going hungry in Somalia largely due to a drought, the latest in a series of hunger crisis to have plagued the country in recent decades, said the world's main hunger monitor.

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.

Last year was the worst on record for internet shutdowns as governments increasingly used digital blackouts to control and suppress citizen rights, according to a report by Access Now.

The internet advocacy watchdog documented 296 shutdowns in 54 countries, leading to disrupted communications, economic challenges, and restricted access to vital services.

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.

While African nations sacrifice health and education services to repay foreign loans, wealthy polluting countries owe the continent more than 50 times more than Africa's total debt for damages caused by climate change, according to a new report by international charity ActionAid.

ActionAid calculated that Africa is owed around $36 trillion in climate reparations by rich countries against $646 billion owed by the continent to wealthy nations, private creditors, and global financial institutions.

TikTok is back in Apple and Google app stores in the U.S. as President Donald Trump says he could extend a 75-day delay on enforcing a ban on the short video app, adding there were a lot of people interested in buying it.

The app, used by nearly half of all Americans, went dark briefly in January, before a law, requiring Chinese owner ByteDance either to sell it on national security grounds or face a ban, was due to come into effect.

U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to freeze foreign aid has abruptly halted hundreds of life-saving programmes around the world, from malaria prevention in Kenya, to HIV treatment in Myanmar.

Trump announced the 90-day pause in the disbursement of billions of dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on Jan. 20 in order to assess whether aid allocation aligned with his "America First" agenda.