– NEWS –
Gunmen kill 37 in Niger village: Armed men killed 37 civilians, including 14 children, in an attack on a village in southwest Niger, officials said Tuesday. Unidentified shooters opened fire on Monday in the commune of Banibangou, in the Tillaberi region near Niger’s border with Mali. A local official told AFP news agency that the assailants „arrived on motorbikes“ in the village of Darey-Daye in the afternoon as people were working in the fields.
dw.com
Jihadist attack in Burkina Faso kills 80 people: Burkina Faso’s president has declared three days of national mourning after suspected jihadists killed 80 people, including 59 civilians, in an attack in the north of the country. The assault on Wednesday near the town of Gorgadji also left six pro-government militiamen and 15 military police dead, the government and the military said on Thursday. The soldiers and militia had been guarding civilians setting off for Arbinda, another town in northern Burkina. In an ensuing gun battle, security forces killed 58 terrorists and put the rest to flight, according to the government. Nineteen people were also wounded, it said.
theguardian.com
Uganda bans 54 NGOs: Ugandan authorities have halted the operations of 54 non-governmental organizations for alleged non-compliance. The suspensions are being seen as an effort to tighten control over civil society. Uganda’s National Bureau for Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO Bureau) which falls under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said that the organizations had not complied with the NGO Act. Of the 54 NGOs, it said that 23 had expired permits, while the bureau said 15 had not filed annual returns. Others are alleged to have failed to register with authorities.
dw.com
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At least 64 dead in floods in Niger: At least 64 people have died in floods in Niger. Heavy rains had flooded 63 communities in the country, the ministry of disaster management announced Monday. Around 70,000 people were affected by the floods and at least 5,000 houses collapsed, it said. Weather experts expect further heavy rainfall with the risk of flooding in the coming days.
ghanaweb.com
More than 50 people feared dead after migrant boat sinks off Canary Islands: Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service said Friday that an inflatable dinghy was spotted by a merchant ship on Thursday, 255 kilometers south of the Canary Islands. Clinging to the sinking dinghy was a sole survivor – next to her were a dead man and a dead woman, the rescue service official said. The woman later told rescuers that the boat had left Western Sahara a week earlier carrying 53 passengers from Ivory Coast.
infomigrants.net
Children in Africa hit particularly hard by climate change, says Unicef: Young people living in the Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau are the most at risk of the impacts of climate change, threatening their health, education, and protection, and exposing them to deadly diseases, according to a UNICEF report. The report ranks countries based on children’s exposure to climate and environmental shocks, such as cyclones and heatwaves, as well as their vulnerability to those shocks, based on their access to essential services.
unicef.org
Gunmen kill seven at Shell gas project site in Nigeria reuters.com
Uganda to take 2,000 Afghan refugees at US request reuters.com
Army says attack on Malian military convoy kills at least 15 apnews.com
Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera criticizes global vaccine distribution taz.de
Zimbabwe to compensate victims of Mugabe-era massacre africanews.com
– BACKGROUND –
Covid vaccines produced in Africa are being exported to Europe: South Africa is still waiting to receive the overwhelming majority of the 31 million COVID-19 vaccine doses it ordered from Johnson & Johnson. It has administered only about two million Johnson & Johnson shots. That is a key reason that fewer than 7 percent of South Africans are fully vaccinated — and that the country was devastated by the Delta variant. At the same time, Johnson & Johnson has been exporting millions of doses that were bottled and packaged in South Africa for distribution in Europe, according to executives at Johnson & Johnson and the South African manufacturer, Aspen Pharmacare, as well as South African government export records reviewed by The New York Times. „Global allocation of vaccines is currently not being made by public health officials but instead by a handful of company officials, who consistently prioritize Europeans and North Americans over Africans,“ said Matthew Kavanagh of the Health Law Institute at Georgetown University in the US. „This vaccine apartheid situation is unnecessarily prolonging the crisis, and it plants the seeds for future social unrest,“ said the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng.
nytimes.com, dw.com, rfi.fr
Google and Facebook expand undersea cable network in Africa: Facebook has announced that it will back two new underwater cable projects—one in Africa and another in Asia in collaboration with Alphabet Inc.’s Google—that aim to give the Silicon Valley giants greater control of the global internet infrastructure that their businesses rely on. The 2Africa project, a partnership between Facebook and several international telecom operators, said Monday that it would add four new branches: the Seychelles, Comoro Islands, Angola and Nigeria. Separately, Facebook said Sunday that it would participate in a 7,500-mile-long underwater cable system in Asia, called Apricot, that would connect Japan, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. Google said Monday that it would also join the initiative, which is scheduled to go live in 2024.
wsj.com
– NUMBER –
Approximately 1.5 million refugees live in Uganda.
qz.com
– QUOTE –
„It’s just as we experienced in colonial times, when resources were taken from the African continent.“
Moses Mulumba of the Center for Human Rights and Development in Uganda on vaccine distribution.
sueddeutsche.de
– AT LAST –
Ghana tests e-Cedi: Ghana has made a big step in its journey towards launching a central bank digital currency, this time picking a technology partner for the CBDC pilot. The Bank of Ghana recently announced that it had partnered with a German firm for the design and implementation of the digital cedi. The e-Cedi project will be in three phases—design, implementation and the pilot. In the first phase, the focus will be on specifying and defining all the framework parameters of the CBDC pilot, from economic and technical to regulatory requirements. Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) will then take all these requirements into account as it builds the CBDC in the next phase. In the final phase, users with diverse backgrounds—demographic and socio-economic—will test the e-Cedi via different channels, ranging from mobile apps to smart cards.
coingeek.com