Nita Bhalla

For years Luis Treminio has provided guidance to farmers in El Salvador, using a U.S.-backed famine monitoring system to boost crop production and help prevent hunger.

Armed with public bulletins and regular food security alerts produced by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), Treminio would relay the critical data to farmers.

A suspected U.S. airstrike on a migrant detention centre in Saada, Yemen, last week killed at least 68 African migrants and injured dozens more, casting a spotlight on a perilous and often overlooked migration route.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians and Somalis cross the Gulf of Aden in overcrowded boats and trek through war-torn Yemen, braving smugglers and deserts to get to Saudi Arabia where they hope to find work.

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.