Author: Agencies

Growing up, many young Africans nurse the ambition of playing football professionally in Europe and becoming superstars. The BBC reports that about 260 million people in Africa follow the English Premier League. Dreams, for some, do come true, and a few have succeeded in making the journey to Europe. According to Football Benchmark, African players – most of them from West Africa – make up about 6% of the total player base of the 11 most prominent leagues in Europe. But it’s a difficult road, with ups and downs. In my recent study of two West African footballers, Paul and John, in the German professional…

On 28 February, a French court declared an appeal against a controversial oil and gas project in East Africa, largely owned by TotalEnergies, to be inadmissible. Sitting in summary proceedings, the Judicial Court of Paris did not assess the details of the claims brought by several NGOs but dismissed them based on various technicalities. Six French and African civil society groups had called for the court to order the suspension of the Tilenga oil field development and the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), arguing that TotalEnergies had failed to comply with France’s “law on the duty of vigilance”. This…

The COVID-19 pandemic was a shock to higher education systems everywhere. But while some changes, like moving lectures online, were relatively easy to make, assessment posed a much bigger challenge. Assessment can take many forms, from essays to exams to experiments and more. Many institutions and individual academics essentially outsourced the assessment process to software. They increased their use of programs like Turnitin to check for matched wording in students’ assignments. And for closed-book, timed tests they used tools such as Proctorio, which monitor a student’s computer or phone while they write exams. But universities did not seize this chance to reflect on what…

On 1 March, 2023 the Ugandan parliament granted opposition MP, Mr Asuman Basalirwa, leave to introduce the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2023. This draft bill prescribes ten years of imprisonment for persons who will be found guilty of homosexuality, aggravated homosexuality, and persons who attempt to commit homosexuality. It also proposes a two-year jail term for those aiding and abetting homosexuality; and a five-year sentence for those promoting homosexuality. Landlords who rent property to homosexuals face a year in jail. Suspected Ugandan homosexuals living abroad could be extradited to stand trial in Uganda. It is the latest peak of an anti-gay campaign in the…

Mental health problems among adults are an ever-increasing public health concern. These include depression, anxiety, and conditions associated with bad childhood experiences such as abuse. Several factors are known to influence the development of mental illness. These include anxiety, early adversity, socio-economic status, and some demographic characteristics such as where a person lives. In a recent study we assessed the prevalence of mental health problems among South African adults. We also explored socioeconomic and demographic associations with depression, anxiety and adverse childhood experiences. We found that South Africans who were exposed to adverse experiences in early childhood had a higher risk of probable depression or probable anxiety in adulthood than people…

Last month, award-winning author and academic Siddharth Kara published Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives. The book draws attention to labour conditions and living standards in areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that mine cobalt, a metal that will be critical in the hoped-for global energy transition. Across 250 pages, it argues that by consuming products that contain Congolese cobalt, Western consumers are complicit in a human rights and environmental catastrophe. In the US and UK, the book has been rapturously received. It became a New York Times bestseller in its first week of release and received a glowing…

BY ANSELM KIZZA-BESIGYE Ugandan queer feminist anthropologist, poet, and activist Stella Nyanzi was arrested in November 2018 for violating the Computer Misuse Act when she posted a poem on the occasion of President Yoweri Museveni’s birthday in which she wishes he had been “prematurely miscarried just like [he] prematurely aborted any semblance of democracy, good governance and rule of law. “The portions of the poem which were used to indict Nyanzi, and around which much of her case revolved, were those in which she made repeated reference to the president’s mother’s vagina, describing it in rather vulgar terms. Refusing bail, Nyanzi had already been imprisoned for almost…

It’s hard for many of us to imagine a world without instant, limitless internet access. Some have even argued that it should, alongside access to clean water and electricity, be considered a basic human right. But in fact only 64.4% of the global population as of January 2023 are internet users. Asia and Europe are home to most of the people who are connected. Africa comes in third. However, accessibility varies wildly across the continent. About 66% of people in southern Africa are internet users. In east Africa the figure is 26%; it is just 24% in central Africa. People in rural areas have…

Bola Ahmed Tinubu was on Wednesday declared the winner of Nigeria’s controversial presidential elections, as opposition leaders decried the polls as rigged and called for a fresh vote. Tinubu, 70, represents the ruling All Progressives Congress party, which received close to 8.8 million votes – about 36.6% of the total, according to Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman Mahmood Yakubu. He defeated vice president Atiku Abubakar of the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and popular third force candidate Peter Obi, who has gained in popularity among young people in particular. In an acceptance speech, Tinubu thanked voters and said he…

A French civil court ruled on Tuesday that a lawsuit brought by campaigners against energy major TotalEnergies over its oil projects in Uganda and Tanzania was inadmissible. Under the case filed in 2019, six French and Ugandan activist groups had accused the company of not doing all it could to protect people and the environment from the Tilenga oil development and the $3.5 billion East African Crude Oil Pipeline. The campaigners wanted the court to order TotalEnergies to halt the east African projects, basing their case on a 2017 French law that requires companies to identify human rights and environmental risks…