Nita Bhalla

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.

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.

As the evening rush hour descends upon Nairobi, Kenyan motorcycle taxi driver Kariuki Mwangi skilfully weaves through the congestion on his electric bike, acutely aware that a quiet revolution is humming beneath him.

His emissions-free two-wheeler is at the forefront of a movement sweeping across several African cities, where ambitious initiatives are propelling the shift towards cleaner public transport.

Amina's eyes were red-rimmed and vacant, her voice a whisper of grief as she recounted the day her 17-year-old son was killed in Sudan's southeastern town of Sinja.

As gunfire erupted near their home in April, she tried to escape with her five children, but Ahmed was caught in the crossfire.

Nosizi Dube beams with pride as she clutches her newly issued Kenyan passport.

For many, obtaining a passport might be a mundane task, but for 24-year-old Dube, who was born into the stateless Shona community in Kenya, it symbolises the end of a gruelling journey towards recognition and the beginning of new opportunities.

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.