Author: Agencies

What if handwashing, a simple measure to prevent the common flu, could also offer protection against skin cancer? The idea may sound audacious, but it wasn’t conceived by an Anderson Centre laureate; rather, it emerged from the mind of a 14-year-old. Heman Bekele, a 9th-grade student at W.T. Woodson High School in Annandale, Virginia, clinched the grand prize of $25,000 as the victor of the 2023 3M Young Scientist Challenge, presenting a melanoma treatment in the form of a soap bar. As the champion of the nation’s premier middle school science competition, now celebrating its 16th year, Bekele has been…

Military rulers in Gabon on Tuesday threatened to arrest the heads of businesses who have collected money for work that was not performed. While ordering the resumption of work at utility and construction sites after years of abandonment, Gabon’s military-appointed Prime Minister, Raymond Ndong Sima, told state TV that the junta-led government will ask contractors who abandoned work after collecting money to resume their projects or face arrest. The announcement was part of a promised crackdown on corruption. Sima said that scores of companies have resumed work after the central African state’s coup leader, Gen. Brice Oligui Neguema, visited several…

The prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing in 2023 has been secured by a dynamic duo from Senegal. The duo’s short story, “A Soul of Small Places,” resonates with profound literary trends in the country while delving into the burgeoning realms of horror and speculative fiction across the African continent. Specialist in African literature, Caroline D. Laurent, provides insights into their achievement. What is the Caine Prize, and what significance does winning it hold? The Caine Prize, bestowed annually since 2000, recognises a short story crafted in English by an African author. Its primary objective is to introduce African literature…

South Africa is rapidly approaching a significant milestone with its 2024 national general election. Recent electoral trends and opinion polls indicate that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is poised to fall below the 50% threshold of the national vote for the first time since the advent of democracy in 1994. This potential shift is expected to usher in South Africa’s inaugural national coalition government, marking the end of single-party dominance. A crucial player in this transformation is the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the nation’s third-largest political party, whose electoral support has been steadily growing since 2014. During this period,…

The recent synthesis report for the Global Stocktake suggests growing agreement on the necessity of fossil fuel phaseouts. However, African negotiators have expressed their dissatisfaction with the report’s approach to equity and differentiation, as well as its treatment of finance and technology transfer. One of the central focus areas at this year’s COP will be the global stocktake, which essentially serves as a collective progress report on the Paris Agreement’s goals. It evaluates mitigation, adaptation, and means of implementation, including finance, while also addressing issues like loss and damage and response measures. This year’s stocktake, the first under the Paris…

On 24 May, a flutter of excitement spread through the sun-scorched city of Maroua in northern Cameroon. Earlier in the day, four elephants had become separated from their herd as they migrated from Waza National Park and ended up wandering through the town’s asphalt roads. Despite being relative neighbours in the country’s semi-arid Far North region, many residents had never seen these huge creatures in the flesh. The phenomenon of elephants venturing into the outskirts of Maroua is a relatively recent occurrence. Curious onlookers took to the streets to follow the wayward visitors. “It was simply amazing,” says Adamu Hamadou,…

Released globally as an acquired Netflix Original on 22 September, Nigerian film The Black Book has taken the streaming world by storm. Netflix says the action-thriller, starring Nollywood icon Richard Mofe-Damijo as Paul Edima, an avenging ex-security operative on the hunt for the murderers of his only child, ranked fourth globally amongst the platform’s English-language titles after the first weekend of its release. The Editi Effiong-directed film also pulled in at least 5.6 million views in the first two days, ranking in the top ten in at least 38 countries, with audiences in South America and Europe also tuning in. “The…

This year’s Nobel economics prize has been awarded to Claudia Goldin, an American economic historian, for her work on women’s employment and pay. Prof Goldin’s research uncovered key drivers behind the gender pay gap, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. She is only the third woman to receive the prize, and the first to not share the award with male colleagues. The 77-year-old academic currently teaches labour market history at Harvard University in the US. She had “advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, pointing to her work examining 200 years…

For weeks, Uganda’s political scene has been rocked by a scandal involving the country’s second-largest opposition party, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC). Allegations have surfaced that key party leaders received campaign funds from President Museveni in 2021, purportedly to co-opt the FDC and thwart a potential alliance with the largest opposition party, Bobi Wine’s National Unity Platform (NUP). The accused leaders – FDC party president Patrick Amuriat and Secretary General Nandala Mafabi – have admitted to receiving the money but have declined to disclose its sources, purportedly to protect their donors’ security. This ambiguous stance and the NRM’s history…

The average debt ratio in sub-Saharan Africa has almost doubled in just a decade—from 30 percent of GDP at the end of 2013 to almost 60 percent of GDP by end-2022. Repaying this debt has also become much costlier. The region’s ratio of interest payments to revenue, a key metric to assess debt servicing capacity and predict the risk of a fiscal crisis, has more than doubled since the early 2010s and is now close to four times the ratio in advanced economies. As of 2022, more than half of the low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa were assessed by the…