Africa

According to WHO figures, 999 people have died in DRC and two in Uganda due to the Bundibugyo strain of the virus.

Nearly 1,000 people have died from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the country’s health ministry says.

DRC’s National Institute of Public Health said on Wednesday that 999 deaths have been confirmed since the outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of the virus began in May.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), two people have also died from the virus in neighbouring Uganda.

DRC’s Health Ministry said that as of Monday, 2,473 cases had been recorded in the latest outbreak. At least 737 patients are currently in isolation and hospitals, it added.

The DRC outbreak was declared on May 15 after several deaths were recorded in the northeastern province of Ituri, where cases remain concentrated. Several cases linked to the DRC’s outbreak were then reported in Uganda.

This outbreak has killed more people at a quicker rate than any Ebola outbreak on record, including the 2013-2016 outbreak that is considered the worst on record with over 11,000 deaths out of at least 28,000 cases. That outbreak took about eight months to reach 1,000 deaths.

Last week, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the current outbreak had over the past month “expanded faster than any previous outbreak” of the virus.

Cases of Ebola, which spread through close contact and infected bodily fluids, have also been found in other Congolese provinces outside of Ituri.

‘We must act now’

The WHO’s incident manager for the Bundibugyo strain, Thierno Balde, told reporters on Tuesday that despite plans to ramp up responses to the virus, “the outbreak remains ahead of us and we are still in a phase of catching up”.

Currently, there are no approved vaccines or treatment for the Bundibugyo strain.

Separately, on Tuesday, the head of Africa’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) also said the outbreak was “escalating at an alarming pace”.

“We must act now. If we do not stop it today, this will become the worst outbreak the world has ever documented,” Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya said in a post on X.

“This is not the time for delay. We must mobilise every available resource, strengthen the response on the ground and stop this outbreak before more lives are lost.”

Kaseya also separately told a conference on Tuesday that he had written to US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and asked him to lift Ebola-related travel restrictions on Uganda since the country has not reported any new infections in about a month.

Uganda’s last Ebola patient was discharged on July 16, beginning a 42-day countdown after which it can be declared free of the virus, according to WHO guidelines.

But the US is restricting entry for all travellers who were recently in DRC and some travellers who recently visited Uganda or South Sudan.

Bamako, Mali – The ambush that killed at least 50 Malian soldiers and struck a joint convoy of the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) and Russia’s Africa Corps near the northern town of Anefis on July 18 was more than another battlefield setback.

It underscored how Mali’s armed groups are becoming increasingly coordinated, exposing the limits of the military government’s security strategy, despite growing Russian military support.

The Malian military confirmed the assault and said it had launched counter-operations, while Africa Corps later released footage it said showed drone strikes targeting fighters involved in the ambush.

The attack is the latest in a series of coordinated operations across northern Mali since April, raising questions about why armed groups are increasingly cooperating, whether Bamako’s security strategy is working, whether Russia’s military role has – and has not – changed, and what the conflict could mean for the wider Sahel.

Why are separatist and Islamic armed groups fighting together?

The July 18 ambush was jointly claimed by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a coalition of predominantly Tuareg separatist groups, and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda affiliate in the Sahel.

Until recently, such cooperation would have seemed unlikely as they have different longterm political aims. The FLA seeks greater autonomy or independence for northern Mali, while JNIM aims to establish governance based on its interpretation of Islamic law across the region.

For Héni Nsaibia, a senior West Africa analyst at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) monitor, the answer lies in a shared battlefield enemy rather than a shared ideology.

“The Tuareg-led separatists and JNIM are currently fighting together because they share a common enemy in the Malian armed forces and their Russian partners from the Africa Corps,” Nsaibia told Al Jazeera.

“In doing so, they act as force multipliers for one another, allowing them to pool resources and mutualise their efforts to confront their adversaries more effectively. These groups also share kinship ties despite their ideological differences and regard one another as sons of the land, defending their ancestral territory against invading forces.”

For Mali’s military, that cooperation makes attacks harder to anticipate and more difficult to repel, allowing armed groups to combine local knowledge, manpower and operational experience while pursuing separate objectives.

The military government’s decision to abandon the 2015 Algiers Peace Agreement, request the withdrawal of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), and deepen military cooperation with Russia reshaped the conflict. The collapse of the peace framework removed one of the few mechanisms managing relations between Bamako and northern armed groups, while the military’s increasingly confrontational approach encouraged former rivals to coordinate against a common adversary.

The shift became increasingly visible during coordinated attacks launched across several parts of the country in April, stretching Malian and Russian forces across multiple fronts. More recently, fighting around Anefis has shown that the alliance is capable not only of launching simultaneous operations but also of sustaining pressure on strategically important military positions.

With negotiations abandoned and military confrontation becoming the dominant strategy, armed groups that once competed with one another have found greater incentives to cooperate on the battlefield.

Has Russia changed the course of Mali’s war?

Since replacing the Wagner Group as Moscow’s principal military presence in Mali, Africa Corps has become an increasingly important partner for the Malian army.

Its personnel have provided combat support alongside Malian forces, while Russian drones and aircraft have expanded the military’s surveillance and strike capabilities. Those capabilities have strengthened the army’s ability to respond to attacks and defend key positions.

“Russia has helped strengthen Mali’s military, which was at risk of being overrun, and has given it more support on the battlefield,” Nimi Princewill, a regional analyst specialising in West Africa and the Sahel, told Al Jazeera.

“But this attack, as well as the earlier seizure of Kidal, suggests the Kremlin’s military support has not changed the overall picture. The conflict remains deeply rooted, with geographical and ideological dimensions that are proving difficult for the junta to tackle.” The army seized Kidal, a key town in the country’s north that the Tuareg rebels held for nearly a decade, in November 2023, but Tuareg and allied fighters retook the town in April this year.

Rather than transforming the conflict, Moscow’s military backing appears to have strengthened the army’s battlefield capabilities without addressing the political, governance and security conditions that continue to fuel the violence.

Recent operations reinforce that assessment. Convoys travelling through northern Mali continue to face frequent ambushes, particularly along routes linking Gao, Anefis and other military positions, exposing the continued vulnerability of military supply lines despite increased Russian support.

The shift away from Western security partners also changed the type of assistance available. While Africa Corps has strengthened Mali’s combat capabilities, the withdrawal of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) ended an international presence that provided logistics, monitoring and intelligence support across much of northern Mali.

The result is a military that has become more effective in direct combat but continues to struggle to secure vast, remote territory against increasingly adaptable armed groups.

Has Bamako’s strategy paid off?

The limitations of Bamako’s security strategy raise broader questions about whether it is translating battlefield gains into lasting security.

Since seizing power in 2020, Mali’s military government has centred its strategy on military force, ending longstanding cooperation with Western partners while strengthening defence ties with Russia.

But the repeated ambushes around Anefis and along northern supply routes suggest the measurable gains of this approach on the battlefield have yet to translate into lasting strategic control.

More fundamentally, the growing cooperation between armed groups with different objectives suggests that Bamako’s strategy has not prevented them from adapting and reshaping the conflict.

What could this mean for the wider Sahel?

The implications of the Anefis ambush extend well beyond Mali.

JNIM, the al-Qaeda affiliate, already operates across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, while fighting continues to spread across the central Sahel.

The evolving battlefield also presents a challenge for the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), whose members all face persistent armed violence despite expanding military cooperation. The alliance was created to strengthen collective security, but increasingly coordinated attacks suggest that cooperation among governments is being matched by equally adaptable cooperation among armed groups.

At the same time, Mali’s withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has reduced opportunities for regional coordination with neighbouring countries confronting many of the same security threats.

If the FLA-JNIM partnership proves durable, it could encourage similar tactical cooperation elsewhere in the Sahel, further complicating efforts to contain armed groups whose operations already span national borders.

“The AES was supposed to mean that our security was finally our own business. But when Mali bleeds, Niger bleeds with it, because the armed groups attacking those convoys do not recognise the Alliance of Sahel States any more than they recognised ECOWAS. We traded one set of partners we did not trust for another, and the war is still coming south,” a Niger-based security expert, who requested anonymity because he feared potential repercussions, told Al Jazeera.

Whether the tactical partnership between the FLA and JNIM proves durable remains uncertain. But the Anefis ambush suggests that as Mali’s security strategy shifts, armed groups are adapting in response, with consequences that could extend far beyond Mali’s borders.

KISUMU, Kenya — As U.S. antiabortion groups’ campaign to restrict abortion access at home and abroad has gained strength since President Trump returned to office, his administration is delivering new global momentum to the movement by exporting its view of “family values” to nations overseas.

At the annual March for Life demonstration in January in Washington, Vice President JD Vance announced sweeping new restrictions on U.S. funding for nongovernmental organizations, foreign governments and U.N. agencies that promote access to abortion, gender-affirming care and diversity initiatives overseas. “We’re going to start blocking every international NGO that performs or promotes abortion abroad from receiving a dollar of U.S. money,” he told the crowd.

That effort has been particularly active in Africa, where doctors and advocates now describe an environment of rising harassment, arbitrary detentions and deadly backstreet abortions, with often deadly results for women across the continent.

The expanded restrictions build on the antiabortion advocacy work carried out by conservative U.S. nonprofits abroad — especially in Africa, where healthcare is highly dependent on foreign aid. The region has the world’s highest estimated proportion of unsafe abortions and highest maternal mortality rates — including the highest number of maternal deaths per 100,000 abortions.

The new rules represent a radical expansion of earlier U.S. policy that cut assistance to overseas groups providing abortion-related services. Experts say at least $30 billion in U.S. aid could be affected, reshaping health policies worldwide.

“We’re seeing opportunity here to have a consistently pro-life ethic,” Nicole Hunt of Colorado-based Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian evangelical group, told the Associated Press. “We’ve been influencing health policies for a long time with our foreign aid. This is just a new direction.”

In the crosshairs is an international convention signed by African countries two decades ago declaring safe abortion a human right. Known as the Maputo Protocol, it obliges signatory nations to legalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, fetal malformation or risk to a woman’s health.

But implementation has been spotty, forcing women to seek illicit procedures. Every year, sub-Saharan Africa records over 6 million unsafe abortions, according to the African Institute for Development Policy.

Emboldened by Trump’s policies, U.S. antiabortion groups now aim to overturn even this limited access to safe abortion.

In Nairobi, Nardos Hagos of the International Planned Parenthood Federation said she is deeply worried for the future.

“We’ve now moved into a new era where we are the ones who are in opposition because the most powerful and influential supporters of reproductive health — the U.S. and a lot of Europe — are now more aligned with anti-rights groups,” she said.

“We’re gonna see more women dying from unsafe abortions.”

Africa is the focus

It’s difficult to track the full scope of the funding U.S. antiabortion charitable groups send to Africa.

Publicly available information from nonprofit tax filings of 17 such groups show money sent to Africa jumped 50% between 2019 and 2022, to over $16 million, according to an analysis by the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, a research group.

And the funding kept growing: The organizations spent almost $9.4 million in Africa during 2023 and 2024, previously unreported data analyzed by the institute show.

That’s “just the tip of the iceberg,” said the institute’s Claire Provost.

“What we’re seeing here is just a fraction of what the real investment on the continent is,” Provost said, noting that unlike other tax-exempt charitable organizations, U.S.-based churches and some religious groups are not required to complete annual financial disclosures detailing revenue, contributions and expenses.

It’s not possible to see “even limited information” about how much money the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, among others, funnel to Africa, she said.

Widely known as the Mormon church, the Salt Lake City-based church is ”increasingly active on the continent, including opposing sexual and reproductive rights issues,” Provost said. With over 1 million followers in Africa, it has held “Strengthening Families” conferences across Africa over the last eight years.

Sean E.R. Donnelly, the church’s communications manager for Africa, said in an AP interview that about a quarter of the $1.5 billion the church spent overseas last year was in Africa, for development projects “with the goal of helping people, especially families,” including in healthcare, education and emergency relief.

Asked about women’s reproductive rights and abortion, he said the church was “not really active” in those areas, but noted the issues may be discussed by its African partners during church-sponsored conferences.

“We have the deputy prime minister, we have the ministries of gender, we have all the ministers who are relevant to family, and we’re helping them … as they craft policy and strategy to make sure that we protect the family,” Donnelly said of the conferences.

Asked about the church’s position on abortion, he sent a statement outlining that it generally opposes elective abortion in most cases but allows exceptions for rape, incest or danger to a woman’s health in counseling its members. He said via email that the church conducts no activities related to abortion and reproductive rights.

Last year’s church-sponsored conference took place in Sierra Leone at a time when the country was close to decriminalizing abortion. But pressure from local religious lobbies stalled the process, local rights groups said.

Activists and rights groups have raised the alarm over the influence of local religious groups, whose strategies mirror those of some conservative U.S. Christian groups. In response to AP’s questions about the conference and any pressures around abortion and other reproductive rights issues, Donnelly said, “This is not how the church operates in Africa or globally.”

He also referred AP to the church’s Caring Report, which outlines its humanitarian work globally and does not mention the conference.

It’s tricky to determine how the U.S. money is spent once it reaches Africa because of loose requirements on disclosing financial data in African countries.

Focus on the Family spent $370,000 in Africa between 2019 and 2023, according to the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, which says that probably does not fully capture the scope of the group’s influence or work. Focus on the Family’s Hunt said its mission is “to change hearts and minds on abortion” globally, but she declined to provide details of activities in Africa.

Harassment of reproductive rights groups

Hannah Ruguru vowed to help women get abortions safely after losing her sister to a backstreet procedure. But her work at a reproductive health clinic in Kisumu in rural western Kenya has proved increasingly hazardous.

She’s been screamed at by protesters and encountered so much abuse on Facebook that she deleted her account, she said.

“Sometimes you can get scared,” Ruguru said. But “at the end of the day, I’m helping women.”

Marie Stopes International, which runs the clinic where Ruguru works, said in a 2024 report that staff in several African countries described online and legal attacks from U.S.-based groups and U.S.-funded local organizations. In Congo, it said, health workers have been detained for days for providing legally permissible services before being released without charge.

“The extent of the opposition has made abortion providers fearful of coming into work,” the report said.

In Ethiopia, the group said, the head of the local office of U.S.-based Family Watch International has “targeted and trolled members of our senior leadership team on social media,” and released YouTube videos promoting antiabortion misinformation.

In Kenya, the names and addresses of staff at reproductive rights organizations have been published online, accusing them of murder.

The owner of a private abortion clinic in Nairobi said staff members have been harassed by police and detained. Officials demand bribes, threatening charges if they don’t pay up, the owner said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.

Musoba Kitui, regional director of Ipas Africa Alliance, which promotes reproductive rights and access to safe abortion care, said the changes in U.S. foreign aid policy combined with “this advancing American interest in ideology in Africa is really concerning.”

“We think the consequences are going to be dire,” Kitui said, especially for women and marginalized communities such as LGBTQ+ people.

‘It’s a culture war’

Last year, antiabortion Christian groups from the U.S., Europe and Africa and high-ranking Kenyan officials gathered in Nairobi for a conference on “Promoting and Protecting Family Values in Challenging Times.” Poland-based antiabortion group Ordo Iuris handed out a guide in four languages, including Swahili, with tips on lobbying international organizations, including the United Nations, European Union and African Union.

Travis Weber, vice president of the Family Research Council, a Washington-based evangelical group active in antiabortion advocacy, said he traveled to Nairobi to “defend the family as God designed it.”

Charles Kanjama, vice chairman of African Christian Professionals Forum, the conference organizer, said that, previously, international aid often supported reproductive rights — but times have changed.

“We are hoping that … we can start attracting money from people who think like us,” said Kanjama, among Africa’s most prominent antiabortion figures. “It’s a culture war, really.”

Indeed, the antiabortion agenda is gaining momentum. In June, representatives of 20 African countries finalized a draft charter at a conference in Ghana that calls for rejecting sexual and reproductive health rights. It will be voted on by the African Union next year. Family Watch International’s co-founder, Sharon Slater, was among those fundraising for the charter’s passage at the European Parliament in Brussels this year.

Legal gray area

In Kenya, one of Africa’s richest countries, seven women die every day on average from complications of unsafe abortions, according to the African Population and Health Research Center.

The 2010 Kenyan Constitution permits abortion when a woman’s health or life is threatened. Subsequent court decisions have also allowed abortions in cases of rape, incest or serious threat to a woman’s mental health.

But there’s a major legal gray area. Kenya’s penal code, which dates to the colonial era, continues to criminalize abortion providers and women seeking the procedure, who can face up to 14 years in prison.

Most public hospitals don’t perform abortions, leaving women the option of pricey private clinic procedures or risky illicit methods, healthcare officials said.

In May, an appeals court in Kenya overturned a ruling that affirmed access to abortion as a fundamental right — a case led by Kanjama, who said the decision “restored constitutional balance.”

The Kenyan Health Ministry, Justice Ministry and the government spokesperson’s office did not reply to repeated AP requests for comment, including detailed questions sent via email.

The U.S. State Department, in response to an AP request for comment on the Trump administration’s new rules governing American aid overseas, said: “The American people expect their tax dollars to support programs that save lives … and reflect American values, not fund abortion-related activities, left-wing social agendas, or wasteful overseas bureaucracies.”

“U.S. assistance continues to support a wide range of maternal and child health services as part of the America First Global Health Strategy,” it said in a statement.

The toll of unsafe abortions

In Kenya, doctors are obligated to treat women suffering from post-abortion complications, often from underground procedures, including bleeding, infections and the loss of their wombs — and it’s those cases that often end up in public hospitals.

“By the time the women come, we are often dealing with a life-threatening situation,” said Dominic Omollo, the reproductive health coordinator in Bondo, western Kenya.

Even as the stated aim of U.S., international and Africa-based antiabortion groups is to protect life, activists and healthcare providers say that, in reality, the result is more unsafe abortions and more women dying.

In Karabok, a village in rural Kenya, two trees were planted at the site where Mary Olouch is buried, just feet from where the 25-year-old bled to death after an illicit abortion.

“She did not open up to anyone,” said Loice Ochieng, a community health volunteer in charge of family planning in the village.

Olouch already had a young child when she realized she was pregnant. She didn’t tell her husband. When he came home one evening, he found her bleeding and rushed her to the hospital, but it was too late.

Olouch did not qualify for an abortion in a public hospital and couldn’t afford a private clinic on her meager income selling fish. Abortion carries enormous stigma in rural communities, and husbands often don’t allow women to use contraceptives, Ochieng said.

After Olouch’s death, women started to talk more openly about abortion in Karabok, where, for many, even uttering the word had been taboo, Ochieng said.

Now, she said, if women “have a problem, they come to me, they ask. Because they have seen that this thing can cause death.”

Pronczuk and Beaty write for the Associated Press and reported from Kisumu and New York, respectively. AP writers Evelyne Musambi in Nairobi and Caitlin Kelly in Freetown, Sierra Leone, contributed to this report.

As Africa’s economies expand and become more technologically advanced, governments face a growing challenge: protecting the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) materials used in healthcare, industry, research and mining from theft, diversion or misuse.

For decades, security discussions on the continent focused largely on armed groups, “terrorism” and conflict. But as healthcare systems expand, mining grows and trade accelerates, governments are managing increasing quantities of sensitive CBRN materials essential to development.

Their growing use is driving demand for stronger regulation, oversight and enforcement.

CBRN security covers radioactive sources used in cancer treatment, chemicals used in manufacturing and mining, biological materials handled in laboratories, and technologies with both civilian and security applications.

Most materials are used safely every day, but weak regulation, inadequate oversight or theft can allow them to be diverted for criminal or malicious purposes.

“The same materials that strengthen healthcare, scientific research, mining and industry can also become security risks if poorly managed,” Mubarak Aliyu, a Nigeria-based political and security risk analyst, told Al Jazeera. “The challenge is not to restrict development, but to ensure that innovation is matched by effective oversight, secure handling practices and robust regulatory systems that prevent diversion or misuse without slowing economic progress.”

Securing growth

Held July 14-16 in Tunis, Tunisia, the Africa Shield 2026 Regional Counterproliferation Workshop brought together more than 100 participants from across Africa, including law enforcement officials, military representatives, policymakers and national coordinators responsible for implementing United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1540, which requires states to prevent non-state actors from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and related materials.

The workshop was led by the International Counterproliferation Program of the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), in partnership with the European Union Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Centres of Excellence Risk Mitigation Initiative and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute.

Now in its sixth edition, Africa Shield helps African governments strengthen their ability to prevent, detect and respond to CBRN risks through training, coordination and capacity building.

The workshop examined how governments can ensure that materials used for peaceful purposes remain secure as industries expand and cross-border links deepen.

The discussions highlighted a practical challenge: ensuring that the systems protecting these materials develop alongside the industries and services that depend on them.

From response to prevention

Africa Shield reflects a move from responding to CBRN incidents after they occur towards preventing vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

Rather than reacting only after a crisis, the programme focuses on reducing risks through stronger border controls, export monitoring, emergency preparedness and closer coordination between agencies.

Through partnerships with African governments and international organisations, Africa Shield contributes to the implementation of UNSC Resolution 1540.

Major Brittany Brown, the coordinator of DTRA’s Global Threat Reduction Africa Region Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction Program, said Africa Shield provides an opportunity for participating countries to “exchange expertise and lessons learned” while deepening partnerships to address increasingly complex transnational security challenges.

Brown said the programme had enabled African countries to “clearly demonstrate their ownership of the counterproliferation problem set”, describing it as “a critical multilateral investment” that strengthens cooperation across the continent.

Her comments reflect a wider shift in international security cooperation, with external partners increasingly focusing on strengthening national institutions and capabilities rather than creating long-term dependency.

Tunisia’s hosting of the workshop underscored the regional nature of the challenge. Positioned between North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Sahel, the country sits at the intersection of major trade and transport routes.

As those networks become more interconnected, the same corridors that facilitate commerce can also be exploited to move chemicals, radioactive sources and other controlled materials across borders.

The enforcement gap

The success of Africa Shield will depend not only on training and cooperation, but on whether governments can translate those efforts into stronger institutions and more effective enforcement.

Many African countries already have legal frameworks regulating chemicals, radioactive materials and strategic trade, but implementation remains uneven.

Authorities often face shortages of funding, specialised personnel and modern equipment needed to inspect shipments, monitor facilities and investigate possible violations.

Existing trafficking networks involving weapons, narcotics and other illicit goods demonstrate the difficulty of monitoring Africa’s vast borders and expanding trade routes. The same weaknesses could create vulnerabilities around the diversion and unauthorised movement of controlled materials.

The expansion of trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area adds another layer of complexity. Governments must strengthen security measures without undermining the trade and investment the agreement is designed to promote.

Managing that balance will require governments to strengthen security systems without creating barriers that slow legitimate trade.

“Monitoring shipments, securing materials and sharing intelligence across borders are daily struggles compounded by limited resources and exploited smuggling routes,” Phil Efe Benard, country director of the African Chamber of Content Producers (ACCP) Nigeria, told Al Jazeera. “We cannot rely solely on foreign partners. Building our own intelligence, forensic capacity and regional networks is essential, ensuring partnerships are built on African capacity, not dependency.”

Why it matters

Africa Shield reflects a broader evolution in Africa’s security priorities, expanding the focus beyond traditional threats to the institutions, regulations and technical expertise needed to safeguard increasingly modern economies.

For African governments, that means stronger customs systems, closer coordination between regulators, border agencies and security services, and greater investment in specialised capabilities.

For the challenge is ensuring that security and development advance together.

“Economic development and security should mutually reinforce each other. By enhancing oversight and promoting the responsible management of sensitive and hazardous materials, we can create an environment where innovation can thrive safely,” Kupagme told Al Jazeera.

Ultimately, Africa Shield is about more than preventing the misuse of controlled materials. It reflects a growing recognition that economic transformation brings new security responsibilities.

“One of the biggest obstacles is that CBRN security depends on consistent implementation rather than policy commitments alone,” Aliyu said. “Many countries still struggle with monitoring cross-border shipments, securing sensitive materials, enforcing regulations and sharing timely information with neighbours. Closing these gaps requires sustained investment, stronger institutions and greater trust between national authorities.”

Mogadishu, Somalia – Thousands of reel-to-reel tapes sit in an air-conditioned room in the archive of Somalia’s public radio, Radio Mogadishu, stacked on steel shelves and lined up like old manuscripts beneath a thick layer of dust.

Each reel contains a small fragment of Somalia’s 20th-century history, from news bulletins to speeches, music and voices that were once beamed out across the nation’s airwaves, some dating back to the early 1950s.

Abdiqadir Geedi Robleh, an archivist at Radio Mogadishu, threads a reel onto an old tape machine, connects it to a computer, and records the contents of each tape. A tape with a love song by Mohamed Mooge Liban, a prominent singer fills the room, and Robleh is transported, he says, to his youth.

He is working with a small team to digitise and methodically order approximately 400,000 hours of broadcasts, officials here say, before the magnetic tape deteriorates beyond recovery, taking with it a crucial record of the country’s past.

“This is the world’s largest store of Somali language music, culture, dramas and everything else, and at the moment it is locked away from the public in a kind of prison,” Robleh tells Al Jazeera. “We’re working to preserve it but also open it up in future to the public.”

Founded in 1951 during the Italian colonial era, Radio Mogadishu would grow into Somalia’s largest and most important public broadcaster. It initially broadcast in Italian and Somali before introducing foreign language services, including everything from Swahili and Oromo to English and Arabic.

In its heyday, it was among the most influential and distinctive voices in East African media, reaching audiences as far afield as Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the Middle East with a style of radical pan-African broadcasting reminiscent of Radio Cairo in the Nasser years.

With the exception of a brief hiatus in the 1990s, when it fell under the control of a warlord, it has served not only as a key source of news for Somalis and audiences across the region, but also as a vital repository of the country’s collective memory.

The effort to preserve its archives has gathered new momentum this year.

In early June, Somalia’s information ministry and the UNESCO regional office for Eastern Africa – the UN’s heritage agency – brought archivists from across the country to a workshop in Mogadishu, aimed at eventually registering its contents with UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme, which catalogues archives of important historical value.

“Protecting this knowledge isn’t just relevant for Somalia, but it is relevant for everyone,” said Guilherme Canela, a senior UNESCO official who is overseeing the project.

An expert assessment carried out in April counted roughly 45,000 tapes and reels, representing an estimated 400,000 hours of material recorded since the station’s founding. More than 85 percent remain playable, but around one in 10 has deteriorated with age, and more than 5 percent has been destroyed or severely damaged, according to UNESCO.

Radio Mogadishu’s collection was recognised both for its size and because so much of what it holds exists nowhere else.

Some were damaged in an electrical fire in 2018, Robleh says, while others were lost during fighting in 1992, when US forces battled Somali militias in the streets of Mogadishu.

During the worst of the civil war, police colonel Abshir Hashi Ali risked his life to prevent the contents of the archives from being looted. When fighting engulfed Mogadishu following the 1990 collapse of the government, he said he ran back “with the aim of conveying to Somalis the wealth that is stored here”.

Abdi Jeite, the station’s director, says the digitisation drive began as early as 2012, but has been held back for years by a lack of resources. By his estimate, only approximately 10 percent of the archive has so far been converted.

“We’ve got some new tools, and more training for our archivists, but there is still a lot of support needed,” he says.

To understand why the archive matters so much, it helps to understand what radio once meant in Somali life.

“Radio Mogadishu was arguably the preeminent media institution in post-independence Somalia,” Iman Mohamed, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and historian of Somalia, tells Al Jazeera.

“In a society that prizes orality above the written word, radio was uniquely effective at creating a common public sphere through which ordinary people could feel bonded to one another and to a shared sense of nationhood,” Mohamed adds.

Though Somali audiences could also access BBC Somali, Radio Hargeisa, and opposition stations when the government began to deteriorate in the latter part of the 20th century, it was Radio Mogadishu that dominated the “soundscape of urban Somalia”, Mohamed said.

That dominance made Radio Mogadishu a national factory of talent. “If you were a musician, poet, playwright or producer, Radio Mogadishu was the platform you wanted to appear on,” Robleh, the archivist, said. “It made Somalia’s stars.”

Robleh, the archivist, added that many BBC Somali journalists who went on to have distinguished careers first cut their teeth at Radio Mogadishu, which became an important pipeline for Somali-language talent to the BBC.

Hassan Dahir, a former journalist at the station, was one of many Somali children who grew up dreaming of working there. For years, he recalled, Radio Mogadishu was virtually the only source of news for millions, “the eyes and ears of the community”, he told Al Jazeera.

“Its reach was so extensive that even nomadic herders followed events as far afield as the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights Movement,” Dahir said.

Under Siad Barre, the military officer who seized power in a 1969 coup and ran Somalia for two decades under a self-styled socialist, revolutionary government, the station became an instrument of state ideology, mixing news, drama and religious programming with nationalist and anti-colonial content.

The station beamed pan-African songs Oh Africa, still asleep by Halimo Khalif Magool, which spurred the continent’s inhabitants to awaken and take charge of their own destinies. Mahamud Abdullahi Sangub’s Reject the Color of Imperialism was another popular song of the era in this same tradition of politically charged music, with lyrics like: “Africans listen to each other, reject the colour of imperialism, reject it, reject it, reject it!”

Many of those songs have been covered, sampled or repurposed since, and younger Somalis often encounter them with no idea who performed the originals, or the politics that shaped them, say Mohamed.

Its news coverage focused on anti-colonial wars in places such as Mozambique against Portugal, the struggle against apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa and the Civil Rights Movement in the US. It covered everything from colonial battles in Guinea-Bissau to the arrest of African American political activist and author Angela Davis.

“We were telling the stories of people resisting their oppressors”, said Dahir.

The station was a “mouthpiece of the government”, cautions Mohamed, but took on a crucial role of inculcating “a patriotic and revolutionary ideological orientation in the Somali people”.

One of the most important projects the radio supported was the Somali mass literacy campaign, when the government sent students to rural Somalia in 1972 to teach the newly developed Somali script. The campaign led to a dramatic increase in literacy across the country.

It also became deeply entangled with Somalia’s regional foreign policy, as the government spent much of the 20th century at loggerheads with Ethiopia before eventually invading in 1977.

That rivalry led Radio Mogadishu to dedicate airtime to Ethiopia’s marginalised ethnic communities, as well as armed rebel movements, particularly those from Eritrea. Among its most notable initiatives were broadcasts in Oromo and Sidama.

Dahir, the former Radio Mogadishu journalist who covered Ethiopia, told Al Jazeera that these were the first-ever radio programmes in either language, both of which had been suppressed for many years in Ethiopia under policies that privileged Amharic, the language of the country’s elite.

The station itself has taken on a far smaller role in Somali life since.

The collapse of the central government in 1991 broke the state’s grip on broadcasting, opening space for private radio, television and online outlets, which have proven popular with the Somali public.

It has lost most of its foreign-language programming, and with it, much of its revolutionary edge. The Somali state also continues to be constrained by limited resources as it rebuilds after decades of conflict.

In November 2021, the al-Qaida-affiliated armed group al-Shabab, which has waged a long rebellion against Somalia’s government, assassinated the station’s then-director, Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled, in a suicide bombing in Mogadishu.

Iman Mohamed, the historian, says that with the civil war in the country, now in its third decade, preserving the archive for posterity has become more urgent.

“The destruction of archives during the civil war has left an enormous gap in Somalia’s documentary record, which means that anyone researching the country’s history is almost entirely reliant on foreign archives or oral history,” Mohamed said.

“That is especially problematic for young people,” she adds. “Recovering what we can matters for the youth who will never have known the world that Radio Mogadishu broadcast in its heyday.”

South Africa: Fassi; Williams, Kriel, de Allende, Arendse; Moyo, Reinach; Steenekamp, Marx, Sadie, C Wiese, van Heerden, de Villiers, PS du Toit (capt), J Wiese

Replacements: Venter, Wessels, Louw, Dixon, van Staden, Jantjies, Libbok, Willemse.

Wales: Murray; Rees-Zammit, Llewellyn, B Thomas, Mee; Edwards, Tomos Williams; Carre, Lake (capt), D Lewis, Teddy Williams, Beard, Mann, J Morgan, Wainwright

Replacements: Elias, N Smith, Warren, F Thomas, Reffell, Botham, Morgan-Williams, Hawkins.

Yellow card: Warren 65

Referee: Andrew Brace (IRFU)

Assistant Referees: Pierre Brousset (FFR) & James Doleman (NZRFU)

TMO: Olly Hodges (IRFU)

FPRO: Richard Kelly (NZRFU)

Abidjan, Ivory Coast – For decades, many of Ivory Coast’s biggest consumer markets were built around international companies with established brands, global supply chains and deep financial resources.

But a number of Ivorian businesses are now finding room to grow.

From petroleum distribution and digital banking to cosmetics manufacturing, these companies are entering sectors where foreign firms have long been dominant, building customer bases at home and looking beyond Ivory Coast’s borders.

Their rise does not signal the retreat of multinational companies, which remain major players across the economy. Instead, the experiences of Petro Ivoire, Djamo and Kaira Holding show how some domestic firms are competing by moving quickly, understanding their markets and investing in production.

Fuel challenge

When Petro Ivoire entered Ivory Coast’s petroleum sector in 1994, international oil companies controlled much of the market.

Today, the company says it is the country’s largest locally owned fuel distributor and ranks third overall behind TotalEnergies and Shell.

Sebastien Kadio-Morokro, Petro Ivoire’s chief executive, said the company’s founders believed a domestic business could compete by combining knowledge of the market with international standards.

“In the 1990s, the market was managed exclusively by multinationals,” Kadio-Morokro told Al Jazeera. “My late father’s idea was that, given the local expertise we had acquired in this industry, it was important to offer something authentic to the local market while strictly adhering to international standards.”

The company says it now holds about 15 percent of Ivory Coast’s fuel market. Kadio-Morokro said being locally owned allows the company to make decisions faster than larger international rivals.

“When a strategic decision needs to be made, we can convene our board immediately and move forward,” he said. “We don’t have to navigate a long chain of decision-making through headquarters overseas.”

That approach helped Petro Ivoire move into the butane gas market in 2007, a sector the company says it now leads. It is also investing in electric-vehicle charging infrastructure as Ivory Coast prepares for changes in transport and energy use.

For Kadio-Morokro, the company’s experience reflects a broader challenge facing African businesses: building confidence that companies created on the continent can compete at scale.

“Africans must trust their countries, themselves and their continent,” he said. “There is no reason why we cannot succeed at home.”

Digital banking

In West Africa’s financial sector, another company is challenging traditional ways of accessing banking services.

Djamo launched in Ivory Coast in 2020, offering accounts, savings and investment products through a mobile application. The company says it now serves more than two million customers and 10,000 small and medium-sized enterprises.

For cofounder Hassan Bourgi, one of the biggest obstacles was convincing investors that francophone West Africa could produce a technology company capable of scaling.

“The biggest hurdle we encountered was that our region was completely off the radar for global venture capital investors,” Bourgi told Al Jazeera. “Historically, tech investment flowed almost exclusively into four main hubs: Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt.”

Djamo sought to challenge that perception by showing investors that companies from francophone markets could grow beyond their borders.

“We showed investors that it was possible to build a large company here,” Bourgi said. “We highlighted the stability of our economy and the CFA franc, which created a strong environment for us to build and expand.”

The company focused heavily on younger consumers, designing a platform around the habits of a generation already familiar with digital services.

“Generation Z was the cornerstone upon which we built our product,” Bourgi said. “We wanted to provide an experience that matched what people encountered every day on international platforms.”

Scaling up

The growth of companies such as Petro Ivoire and Djamo comes as Ivory Coast seeks to strengthen its domestic private sector and help businesses move beyond the national market.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Ivory Coast’s employers’ association, CGECI, have launched programmes aimed at helping promising companies improve access to finance, strengthen management and prepare for regional expansion.

For many entrepreneurs, the challenge is not only building a successful business at home but creating companies large enough to compete across borders.

Few stories capture that journey more clearly than Kaira Holding.

From cot to cosmetics

In 2009, Fode Kaira Yatabare launched his cosmetics company from a two-room apartment in Abidjan.

The apartment served as both home and office. Each night, he slept on a folding military cot that had to be packed away each morning to make space for work.

Today, Kaira Holding exports beauty and personal care products to 32 countries across Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

“I belong to a new generation of African entrepreneurs who passionately believe in local manufacturing and value addition,” Yatabare told Al Jazeera.

“When we started, capital constraints were immense. We launched from a tiny two-room flat. We only managed to scrape together four million CFA francs [about $7,000] to start producing soap.”

The company has since invested in its own packaging, printing and manufacturing processes, reducing its dependence on imported inputs.

“Many people fail to realise that manufacturing costs in Africa can actually be lower than in China if you fully integrate your value chain,” Yatabare said. “This vertical integration has made us more competitive.”

Kaira Holding is now expanding its research capacity and preparing to enter new markets, including China.

The experiences of Petro Ivoire, Djamo and Kaira Holding do not represent the end of multinational influence in Ivory Coast. But they show how some African businesses are building an advantage by staying close to consumers, making decisions quickly and investing in their own capacity.

For Yatabare, that ambition reflects a changing mindset among entrepreneurs on the continent.

“Africa has changed,” he told Al Jazeera. “We are moving forward guided by a singular ambition: from Côte d’Ivoire to the world.”

Uganda ⁠discharges last-remaining patient, as WHO says Ebola has ‘expanded faster than any previous outbreak’ in DRC.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that Ebola is spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo more quickly than in any previous outbreak.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters on Thursday that the Ebola outbreak in the DRC in 2018-2020 “took more than 10 months to reach 2,000 confirmed cases”. But this time more than 2,000 cases were confirmed in only two months, including 796 deaths.

“It is now the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record,” Tedros said. “In the past month, it has expanded faster than any previous outbreak.”

The DRC reported 62 new cases on Thursday, increasing its total number of confirmed infections to 2,073, though the ⁠⁠WHO has said the ⁠⁠true tally could be at least double that.

The DRC’s 17th Ebola outbreak was declared on May 15 after several deaths in Ituri, the mineral-rich northeastern province patrolled by several armed groups.

Cases of Ebola, which spreads through close contact and infected bodily fluids, have so far been found in five DRC provinces and neighbouring Uganda, though the vast majority are in Ituri.

The WHO chief highlighted that over 80 percent of new cases were being detected “outside known contact lists, showing that transmission chains are still being missed”.

He added that 377 people have recovered from Ebola in the DRC, “showing that with early diagnosis and safe care, this disease can be survived and stopped”.

To compound problems in Ituri, healthcare workers began a strike and blocked the entrance to Bunia General Hospital on Wednesday. Staff said they had not received any compensation for their work since the outbreak began, despite working under extremely difficult conditions.

In Uganda, things were looking up as its last remaining Ebola patient was discharged on Thursday, starting a 42-day countdown after which it can ⁠⁠be declared Ebola-free, said the East African nation’s health ministry.

Uganda had 20 cases of the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola since mid-May. Fifteen were people infected in the DRC who then travelled to Uganda.

Unlike the surging number of infections in DRC, Uganda has not reported a new case since June 22 .

“Today, Uganda has discharged the last Ebola patient, a Congolese national who has successfully recovered and [is] ⁠⁠ready to be with his family,” Uganda’s health ministry posted on X.

“Uganda starts ‌‌counting down. If 42 days pass without a single new case, WHO guidelines stipulate ‌‌that we will be declared Ebola-free.”

Khartoum, Sudan – A senior Sudanese minister says more than three years of a devastating war in the country have “profoundly reshaped” its demographic makeup.

Minister of Human Resources and Social Development Mutasim Ahmed Saleh told Al Jazeera Arabic that his ministry was working with several partners to strengthen population policies and link them to social protection programmes.

Sudan has been embroiled in a brutal civil war between its army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary since April 2023. The war is estimated to have killed about 200,000 people and displaced more than 11 million, creating what the United Nations calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

The war has also affected Sudan’s demographics.

Before the war, the North African country’s population was expected to exceed 64 million by 2035, according to official data. In 2020, the population stood at about 44.4 million, with forecasts of a growth rate of about 2.39 percent – one of the highest rates globally.

The war has not only displaced millions of people internally in South Darfur, North Darfur and Central Darfur states, it has also forced tens of thousands of others to seek asylum in neighbouring countries, including Egypt, South Sudan and Chad.

Saleh said the most significant demographic changes caused by the war included a general increase in poverty levels, a large segment of citizens losing their income, the deterioration of basic services in a number of areas, and a decline in the labour market and human capital.

To mark World Population Day on July 11, the minister said his government would work for the people – “the focus and ultimate aim of the state’s attention” – and strengthen social protection programmes.

Saleh said his ministry, through the National Population Council and with other state partners, would strengthen Sudan’s population policies and link them to social protection, the voluntary return of refugees, the reintegration of displaced people, and human resource development to contribute to rebuilding the country’s human capital as the “cornerstone of national recovery and sustainable development”.

He said that investing in people was “the real investment in Sudan’s future”.

“The more we succeed in restoring population stability and empowering citizens economically and socially, the closer we come to building a more stable, just and prosperous homeland,” Saleh said.

Population imbalance

Experts say Sudan is distinct in its demographic structure – it has a large youth population, with about 70 percent of the population under the age of 30, according to data from the last census conducted in 2008.

They say that its large youth population gives Sudan a demographic dividend that could drive economic development. But Saleh’s ministry said young people have faced challenges such as limited access to education, scarce job opportunities and widespread poverty, even before the conflict turned them into one of the worst-affected groups.

Khalid Saad, director of the Sudanese Center for Development Communication, told Al Jazeera that Sudan’s population crisis did not begin with the war.

Despite the country’s vast territory and abundant natural resources, it has suffered for decades from a clear imbalance in population distribution, he said.

“The war came to deepen this imbalance, redraw the demographic map through displacement and asylum, empty some areas of their populations, burden other cities with numbers beyond their capacity to absorb, while large numbers of people have returned to areas retaken by government forces,” he said.

Saad said the likely return of people does not mean the end of the demographic crisis, because returnees often go back to areas that have lost a large part of their economic infrastructure.

“The challenge therefore remains in rebuilding an environment that ensures their stability and prevents renewed displacement,” he said.

The war, Saad added, raises questions that still require precise answers: the actual scale of human losses; how the war has affected mortality rates; how it has changed patterns of marriage and childbearing; the impact of displacement and migration on birth rates and age structure; and how the emigration of skilled professionals will affect the size of the workforce in coming years.

Answers to these questions form the basis for any economic or social planning in the post-war phase, he said.

Data released by the National Population Council also points to a demographic imbalance.

Sudan’s urban population rose to about 17.9 million in 2020, with Khartoum alone accounting for about 42 percent of the country’s urban population, indicating a pattern of internal migration driven by uneven development.

The International Organization for Migration said that about 4.1 million people have returned to their areas of origin across Sudan. The vast majority — more than 80 percent — returned from within Sudan to nine states, led by Khartoum, Gezira and Sennar.

According to the organisation, the number of internally displaced people has fallen by 23 percent compared with the highest level recorded in January 2025, when the number of people displaced within Sudan stood at nearly 12 million.

Sudan has entered its fourth year of conflict amid a complex political and military landscape, with little hope of a resolution. Infrastructure has collapsed, and essential services remain disrupted.

Meanwhile, local and international warnings are mounting over a worsening humanitarian crisis, driven by shortages of food and medicines, and the difficulty of delivering aid to affected or besieged areas.

Nothing much stays with me from the first days of Twitter, which was publicly launched 20 years ago, on July 15, 2006.

I had discovered the internet back in 1995 and early on, I started thinking about how to get my voice heard by the world. I created a couple of websites through Angelfire and 8m, but there was no real ecosystem to nurture the idea. It’s like opening a shop to sell a certain product in a remote area – somewhere nobody really knows, at a time when there’s no interest – compared with opening that same shop in a mall, or on a street full of other vendors.

MySpace was another opening, but the idea was not yet ripe. Facebook came with a spark – and then we got Twitter.

“It’s like having your own breaking news platform, you’ll set your own agenda,” I remember one of my colleagues at the BBC, where I used to work, saying at the time.

It didn’t take me long to sign up. I cannot recall whether I tweeted immediately or not, yet what happened afterwards helped frame my future as an international journalist.

Twitter’s first defining moment for me was 2009’s Green Revolution in Iran, when I and others followed how the platform shaped the discourse in a way that differed completely from traditional media. We were not new to citizen journalism; a few years earlier, Salam Pax emerged as the first ever famous war blogger, presenting his distinctive view of the US-led invasion of Iraq through his individual blog. A few years later, tens of thousands of Salams have appeared – and I’m one of them.

Going through my early timeline, I see that I was tweeting randomly – an earthquake in Japan, an election in Lebanon, an explosion in Somalia, and so on. Then came the Arab Spring. Just as with many in the world, this was the moment that shaped my Twitter presence, and as I got involved in the coverage, I became well-positioned to post and attract followers.

My coverage of the Libyan revolution in March 2011 introduced me to many people and gave me a better understanding of what was happening. I was based in Sallum, a village on the Egyptian side of the Libyan border, without a connection of my own. I fed a colleague back in Cairo a sentence at a time over a crackling Thuraya satellite phone, and he typed my words into the account that I could not reach. Its password lived on my friend’s head until days later, when I finally got my hands on a satellite dish.

Trips to Libya, Egypt, Syria, Somalia – all of it made Twitter part and parcel of my journalistic journey, and it also helped me build a parallel path writing for international outlets including Al-Monitor and The Sunday Times.

Yet still, there was something else that changed my direction. Until 2013, I was a journalist covering stories without specialisation – I used to report from Iran, like I do today, yet it was not my career the way it currently is. But then I became a bureau chief in Tehran and my knowledge began growing – and here, Twitter gave me another layer, widening my network day after day.

Personally, that specialisation gave the platform its finest hour for me. I broke developments out of Iran’s nuclear talks with world powers before the news agencies had finished their first draft, filing in Arabic and English within minutes of each other and announcing the agreement itself while other newsrooms were still working on their bulletins.

The war against ISIL (ISIS) followed, then a January 2020 morning near Baghdad airport when my sources told me the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, and the deputy chief of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, were in a convoy hit by a US air strike – and I was among the first to say so.

Twitter was never only a wire service for other people’s wars. I’ve “met” heads of state and celebrities on this platform – and for a moment we felt equals. I have made my scoops there, and I have made my hugest gaffes there, too. You act and you interact and you see the result immediately, backlash or praise. It’s like a daily journal, one that outlives you. I know of many, some friends, some colleagues, some people I only happened to follow, who left our world while their accounts are still there – for us, and for me – to return to for the memory or to get a piece of information.

It was also where, on the 100th anniversary of World War I, that I told the story of my great-grandfather, Ali Hashem, who went to the war and never returned; and of my grandfather Hussein, who was three when his father was summoned to the Ottoman army and never saw him again.

It was where colleagues at Al Jazeera, stationed in the north of Palestine, went looking for my family’s village on my behalf, for a cemetery nearly in ruins, for a great-grandmother’s grave that has never been found.

It became, eventually, the subject of my own academic work too, a master’s thesis on Twiplomacy, examining how a platform built for gossip and jokes quietly rewired the choreography of nations, with Iran’s nuclear diplomacy as my case study.

In the summer of 2023 – sensing where things were headed, as new owner Elon Musk decided to change Twitter’s name to X, and to tragically, if I may so, kill the famous and lovely blue bird that accompanied the journey many made with the platform, including myself – I posted five words.

“Someone buy Twitter and save the bird.” Alas, nobody did, and the bird disappeared from the icon, and the name went with it, replaced by a single letter that still sits wrong in my mouth. In Arabic or in English, the word that comes out of me, though, is still Twitter.

Alebtong, Uganda – When Lucy Everlyn Atim returned home after six years working as a child rights activist in South Sudan’s refugee settlements, her favourite shea tree was gone.

Known locally as moyao, the tree had shaped her childhood. Every morning, she and her friends gathered beneath its branches to eat its sweet, creamy fruit before walking to school.

Its disappearance was not an isolated loss. Across northern Uganda, many more shea trees had been cut down for charcoal.

“I got concerned,” Atim, now in her mid-thirties and a climate activist, told Al Jazeera.

“The destruction of shea trees is alarming. These trees need to be protected, but people also need an alternative source of fuel.”

Uganda loses an estimated 122,000 hectares of forest each year, largely to charcoal production and logging. With about 90 percent of households relying on charcoal for cooking, indigenous species such as shea and Afzelia africana continue to disappear.

Research by Makerere University found that mature shea tree populations on fallow land fell from about 20 trees in 2008 to between 10 and 15 by 2017.

“There is still scant data on the declining shea tree population in northern Uganda,” Dr Patrick Byakagaba, the Makerere University environmental researcher who led the study, told Al Jazeera.

“More needs to be done to determine their density, sapling survival and regeneration.”

Tracking the decline is difficult, he said, because charcoal producers often uproot entire trees, leaving no stumps behind to count.

While working in South Sudan, Atim met a woman in Yida making fuel briquettes from discarded shea husks.

“I got curious. I knew this was something that could be replicated back home,” she recalled.

In 2023, she founded Moyao Africa Initiative, a social enterprise that turns shea waste into fuel briquettes, while helping women earn a living from processing shea butter.

The initiative employs six staff and works with more than 1,200 women organised in savings groups to collect shea waste, produce briquettes and process butter.

“In most households, women carry the burden of finding cooking fuel. By training them to make and sell briquettes and shea butter, we’re creating an income while providing an affordable alternative to charcoal,” she said.

Learning fuel

On a hot afternoon in Alebtong, 15 women sit on woven mats attending a training session led by Moyao Africa Initiative.

They are chairpersons of savings groups from across the district, learning to turn discarded shea husks into cooking fuel.

When the trainer asks about the process, the women answer almost in unison: collect the husks, crush them, mix them with clay and cassava flour, mould them, dry them and store them.

The lesson soon moves from theory to practice. Some women pound dried shea husks in wooden mortars while others dig up clay soil. Nearby, another group stirs thick cassava paste, the binder that holds the mixture together before it is pressed into moulds and left to dry in the sun.

Among them is Catherine Akello, chairperson of the Oteno Moyao Africa Women’s Group in Abwoc village.

Before joining the initiative, Akello valued only the shea kernels, which she processed into butter for her family. The husks were thrown away.

Now they have become a source of fuel.

“I don’t have to worry about buying charcoal whenever I want to cook because I make my own briquettes from shea husks,” Akello, a 47-year-old mother of five, told Al Jazeera.

“As a group, we’re also able to save money from the products we sell, and that helps us support our families when emergencies arise,” she said.

Demand is growing, but production remains limited by the seasonal shea harvest.

To meet it, Atim is saving to buy a carboniser, crusher and briquette-making machine costing about $530. The equipment would allow the initiative to process more shea waste and produce briquettes throughout the year.

“Our plan is to increase shea butter production from 600 litres to 6,000 litres. That means more shea husks and, in turn, more briquettes. It will help us meet demand even when raw materials are scarce,” she said.

Shared future

Renewable energy expert Bosco Odyek told Al Jazeera that turning shea husks into briquettes offers a practical alternative to charcoal by putting waste material to use.

Using a carboniser, he says, would produce cleaner-burning, smokeless briquettes that burn more efficiently.

Beyond fuel production, Moyao Africa Initiative runs environmental clubs in 20 schools across Alebtong District and works with the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) to distribute tree seedlings, encouraging communities to restore the landscape.

Paul Mwirichia, a humanitarian and development expert, told Al Jazeera that such initiatives are important but access to clean energy remains beyond the reach of many rural households.

“We have very good policies,” he said.

“The challenge is implementation. Government needs to support indigenous organisations like Atim’s because they understand the problems affecting their communities, and people trust them to address those challenges.”

For Atim, the work is about saving the tree that shaped her childhood.

The shea tree is gone, but she hopes turning discarded husks into fuel will mean fewer trees are cut down and more women can earn a living from keeping them standing.

“We are leaving no one behind.”

Walkout over late payments comes as public health officials confirm that the virus has reached two more provinces.

Staff at a hospital treating Ebola patients in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have gone on strike, alleging they have not been paid for months, bringing the facility to a standstill.

Dozens of employees at Rwampara General Hospital in Ituri province, the epicentre of the outbreak, walked off the job on Monday. The strike action came as authorities revealed that the virus has spread to two further provinces in northern DRC.

The striking workers included epidemiologists, case investigators, drivers and gravediggers.

“We don’t know how it is possible to not have been paid for two months,” Bahati Claude, a health worker at the centre, told The Associated Press.

The outbreak, concentrated in northern DRC, is the worst in Africa’s history and has already caused severe economic damage, pushing nearly one million people into poverty, according to the United Nations.

Efforts to hold back the spread of the virus have been complicated by the presence of paramilitary rebels, who control parts of the region in a bid to access its valuable mineral deposits.

The response to the outbreak has also been complicated by misinformation, deeply rooted burial practices and a lack of trust in health officials.

Health workers have been attacked by communities that believe the disease is a form of witchcraft, while bereaved families have ignored safety protocols by holding traditional burial ceremonies.

DRC’s National Public Health Institute confirmed on Sunday that the virus has spread to two new northeastern provinces: Haut-Uele and Tshopo.

The World Health Organization has warned that an accelerated response from local, national and international partners is urgently needed to bring the outbreak under control.

DRC Health Minister Roger Kamba said last week that the government was working to resolve the payroll issues and ensure employees were paid.

“We must ensure that these payments reach the right people,” Kamba said. “We have faced a few challenges, notably changes to the lists, which have led to complaints from people saying they are not being paid even though they are working. We have the means to sort this out.”

According to the latest figures, the number of Ebola cases in the DRC has risen to 1,926, with 702 deaths. The spread of the disease to Haut-Uele and Tshopo means five provinces now have confirmed Ebola cases.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has warned that the situation is worsening in areas already affected as transmission accelerates, while the risk of the disease spreading to neighbouring South Sudan is increasing as the outbreak expands into new areas.

Meanwhile, a second United States citizen infected with Ebola was admitted to a special isolation unit at Frankfurt University Hospital in Germany on Monday. Timo Wolf, head of the special isolation unit, said the patient’s condition was “currently stable”.

The man, who is in his 60s, was confirmed to have contracted the disease on Friday while working for a Christian aid group in the DRC.

Elias is likely to make his Test start since the opening round of the 2024 Six Nations against Scotland.

Cardiff’s Evan Lloyd is the other hooker in the squad and could make his first international appearance for more than a year, with Dee’s anticipated arrival in South Africa providing extra cover and experience.

Morgan is the obvious choice as captain against the world champions unless Tandy opts to rest the open-side flanker.

Wales slipped to 12th in the world rankings with their loss to Argentina and suffered a record 73-0 loss to the Springboks in their last meeting in November.

Across Africa, the ability to defend borders, monitor territory and protect critical infrastructure remains heavily dependent on foreign suppliers. Turkish drones patrol borders, Chinese surveillance systems monitor cities and Russian fighter jets form the backbone of several air forces.

For decades, African militaries have turned abroad for critical defence technologies, leaving the continent largely positioned as a buyer rather than a producer.

An Abuja-based start-up is attempting to change that equation.

Terra Industries, founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka, both in their early twenties, designs and manufactures drones, autonomous surveillance towers and unmanned ground vehicles from facilities in Abuja and Accra.

Unlike companies that primarily assemble imported components, Terra says it develops its own software, airframes, propellers and lithium-ion battery packs, with more than 70 percent of its inputs sourced locally.

The company says its systems are currently used to protect infrastructure valued at approximately $11bn, including power plants, lithium and gold mines, oil refineries and other strategic assets across eight African countries and Canada.

Building capability

The shift from importing security technology to producing it locally has become an increasingly important debate across Africa. Governments facing armed groups, porous borders, maritime insecurity and attacks on critical infrastructure are searching for faster and more adaptable solutions.

Terra’s move from private infrastructure security into engagements with Nigeria’s defence institutions reflects that changing environment. The company says its systems are designed to address challenges ranging from maritime surveillance and border monitoring to the protection of energy and mining assets.

“Coastal states in West Africa are focused on maritime surveillance because of piracy and illegal fishing in the Gulf of Guinea,” chief executive Nathan Nwachuku told Al Jazeera. “States dealing with insurgency and porous borders want persistent aerial surveillance and a rapid-response capability. Others are looking at protection for pipelines, power and energy infrastructure, and mining assets, the same problems we started solving in Nigeria.”

The company is now preparing for a larger regional footprint. Nwachuku confirmed that Terra’s second production facility in Ghana will become Africa’s largest drone manufacturing hub, with an annual production capacity of 50,000 units by 2028.

“Our long-term ambition goes beyond the continent because the threats our systems are designed to address exist across the Global South,” he said. “Governments in South Asia and South America face them too, and they face the same dependency on foreign suppliers. We intend to serve them as we grow.”

Investor confidence

The scale of investment behind Terra reflects growing interest in Africa’s emerging defence technology sector. The company has raised $34m in seed funding, which it describes as one of the largest early-stage funding rounds in African technology.

The investment was led by 8VC, the venture capital firm founded by Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, alongside Lux Capital and Valor Equity Partners, investors behind companies such as Anduril and SpaceX.

“The round closed in under two weeks, which is rare even by global standards,” Tage Kene-Okafor, Terra Industries’ director of communications, told Al Jazeera. “But what has been more exciting is our cap table, where we have the likes of 8VC, Lux Capital and Valor Equity Partners, investors that have backed companies shaping the future of defence and advanced manufacturing globally.”

Security imperative

The interest in companies like Terra comes as drones become increasingly central to conflicts across Africa. In the Sahel, inexpensive commercial drones have moved from surveillance tools to weapons used on the battlefield, creating new challenges for militaries that often lack effective counter-drone capabilities.

According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the al-Qaeda-linked coalition operating in Mali and Burkina Faso, has carried out more than 100 drone attacks since 2023, with 2025 recording the highest number to date.

Terra says its Kama interceptor drone was developed in response to this changing threat environment. The company says the system can reach speeds of up to 300kph and is designed to counter hostile drones in environments where traditional air defence systems may be unavailable or too expensive.

Building defence technology, however, is not the same as achieving defence sovereignty.

Sovereignty question

While a country can build manufacturing capacity through investment, engineering talent and industrial policy, defence sovereignty requires institutions capable of managing procurement, ensuring accountability and sustaining strategic industries over the long term.

Janice Greaver, director at the Pan African Sustainable, Innovation and Development Associates (PASIDA), argues that local production alone cannot answer those questions.

“Seventy percent local sourcing means little until we know who controls the intellectual property, who is employed and who is left out,” she told Al Jazeera. “And when private capital arms the state with no visible civil society oversight, we are simply trading one dependency (on foreign suppliers) for another (on unaccountable domestic capital).”

Terra Industries has demonstrated that sophisticated defence technologies can be designed and manufactured in Africa. Its rapid rise reflects both growing technical capability on the continent and the pressure created by worsening security challenges.

Whether that becomes genuine defence sovereignty will depend on what happens beyond the factory floor: how governments buy, regulate and oversee the technologies they increasingly seek to build themselves.

As Greaver cautions: “Its manufacturing capacity is being built, sovereignty requires the accountability structures that do not yet exist”.

Nigerian security forces have rescued 39 schoolchildren and five teachers abducted nearly two months ago in Oyo state. Authorities say eight suspected kidnappers have been arrested.

Relations begin to thaw as both countries reinstate ambassadors and reopen airspace closed to each other since April 2025.

More than a year after a diplomatic fallout, relations between Algeria and Mali are beginning to thaw, with both countries reinstating their ambassadors and reopening their airspace to one another.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced on Saturday that the country’s ambassador would return to Mali, a day after Algiers fully reopened its airspace to civilian and military aircraft travelling to and from its southern neighbour.

Issa Ousmane Coulibaly, spokesperson for Mali’s military government, confirmed in a statement that Bamako had taken reciprocal measures.

Relations between the two African nations deteriorated in April last year after Algeria said it had shot down a Malian surveillance drone for violating its airspace. Bamako disputes this, saying the drone was downed within its own borders.

The fallout between Algeria and Mali has jeopardised security in the Sahel region. Mali is a member of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), along with Burkina Faso and Niger. Both Ouagadougou and Niamey also withdrew their ambassadors to Algeria in April last year in solidarity with their ally.

The AES has experienced a surge in attacks by armed groups linked to the ISIL (ISIS) group and al-Qaeda in recent years. Many analysts argue that such groups were able to establish a foothold in the Sahel partly because of the NATO-backed overthrow of longtime Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The ousting of Gaddafi left a power vacuum that has been exploited by armed groups. Vast stockpiles of weapons belonging to forces loyal to him were looted and are believed to have been used by those groups.

Algeria has previously mediated peace talks between the Malian government and Tuareg separatist rebels waging an armed rebellion there.

However, last year’s diplomatic fallout led Algiers to step back from its role as mediator, raising concerns about Mali’s security and territorial integrity while also posing a threat to Algeria’s own internal security.

This April, Algerian Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf reaffirmed Algiers’s support for Mali’s territorial integrity, rejecting what he described as all forms of “terrorism”.

Thousands of Zimbabweans are returning home after xenophobic violence in South Africa, describing beatings, robbery and threats from anti-migrant groups. Nearly 21,300 have been repatriated by the government in five weeks, with 56,800 more self-repatriating.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo may be significantly larger than official figures indicate, with most new infections occurring outside known chains of transmission, raising concerns that health authorities are struggling to keep pace with the spread of the virus.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 80% of newly confirmed Ebola patients in the outbreak’s epicentre are not identified through existing contact-tracing networks, suggesting widespread undetected community transmission.

The outbreak, declared in mid-May, has officially infected 1,792 people and killed 625, according to Congolese government figures released on Thursday. However, WHO modelling indicates the true number of infections could be two to four times higher.

WHO Emergencies Director Chikwe Ihekweazu told Reuters that in Bunia, the centre of the outbreak in Ituri province, four out of every five newly confirmed cases are emerging outside the lists of people already being monitored after exposure to infected patients.

Public health experts view contact tracing as one of the most effective tools for controlling Ebola. When large numbers of patients are not linked to known cases, it suggests the virus is circulating undetected in the community, making containment much more difficult.

In contrast, neighbouring North Kivu province has shown encouraging progress, with nearly all new infections occurring among previously identified contacts.

Transmission remains concentrated in eastern Congo

Around 90% of all confirmed cases remain concentrated in Ituri province, particularly in the health zones of Bunia, Rwampara, Mongbwalu and Nyakunde, where transmission remains intense.

The outbreak has nevertheless expanded beyond its original epicentre, reaching North Kivu, South Kivu and more recently Tshopo province.

In Bunia—a city of roughly one million people about half of all individuals tested for Ebola receive positive results, reflecting sustained community transmission.

Milder symptoms may be helping the virus spread

Health officials believe the Bundibugyo strain responsible for the outbreak may produce milder symptoms than other Ebola variants.

While this appears to improve survival prospects for patients who eventually reach treatment centres, it may also encourage infected individuals to remain at home longer or seek medical attention later, unknowingly spreading the virus to family members and the wider community.

According to WHO, prolonged delays before isolation increase opportunities for transmission.

Community deaths remain another major concern. An analysis of the first 400 Ebola fatalities found that roughly 70% occurred outside designated treatment centres, highlighting continued challenges in identifying patients early enough to provide care and prevent further spread.

Health authorities expand surveillance

To improve detection, Congolese authorities have begun training approximately 21,000 community health workers to conduct door-to-door visits, identify suspected infections and encourage symptomatic individuals to seek medical treatment.

Officials hope stronger community surveillance will help uncover hidden chains of transmission and improve contact tracing, which remains the cornerstone of Ebola control efforts.

Hidden transmission is the outbreak’s biggest threat

The most alarming aspect of Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak is not simply the number of confirmed cases but the large proportion of infections occurring outside established surveillance networks. When 80% of new patients are unknown to contact tracers, it indicates the virus is spreading faster than health authorities can detect it.

Although the Bundibugyo strain may cause comparatively milder illness, that characteristic presents a paradox: fewer severely ill patients can reduce public perception of risk, delaying diagnosis and allowing infected individuals to remain in the community longer. Combined with high rates of deaths occurring outside treatment facilities, these trends point to persistent gaps in surveillance rather than failures of medical treatment.

The rapid expansion of community health worker programmes reflects recognition that traditional outbreak response measures alone may not be sufficient. Unless surveillance improves and hidden transmission chains are identified quickly, the outbreak is likely to remain substantially larger than official figures suggest, complicating efforts to bring it under control.

With information from Reuters.

Birao, Central African Republic – When Islam Ibrahim fled Sudan after her father was killed during the siege of el-Fasher, she thought she had escaped the worst of the war.

The 20-year-old pharmacy student fled with her mother and six sisters to the neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), leaving behind her pharmacy studies.

Now in Korsi refugee camp, she spends her days helping newly arrived Sudanese women and girls. Drawing on the medical knowledge she gained before war interrupted her studies, she volunteers to support refugees arriving exhausted after dangerous journeys from Darfur.

But even in exile, Islam says she cannot escape the pressures that followed her from home.

Her uncles have travelled to the refugee camp urging the family to return to Sudan, so her mother can settle her late father’s estate. Islam fears that returning would not only place them back in an active conflict zone but also expose her and her sisters to pressure to marry relatives against their wishes.

“I only want to go back to Sudan if it’s to continue my education,” Islam told Al Jazeera. “I don’t want to go back to Darfur to divide my father’s inheritance.”

Islam’s story is echoed across Korsi refugee camp, where an entire generation of Sudanese students is trying to salvage futures interrupted by war.

More than 30 Sudanese university students interviewed over several days described lives put on hold by a conflict that has uprooted families, shattered ambitions and left many wondering whether they will ever return home. Most are in their 20s and come from Amdafock, a border town in Darfur that became both a refuge and later a departure point as families fled escalating violence.

Many believed their displacement would be temporary. They imagined returning home to complete their degrees once the fighting stopped.

Instead, that hope has grown increasingly distant.

Their experiences reflect a wider educational divide created by Sudan’s war. Millions of school pupils and university students in Darfur and other areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have now gone more than three years without regular schooling or access to nationally recognised examinations. In contrast, despite repeated disruptions caused by the conflict, many students in areas held by the Sudanese army have gradually returned to classrooms and sat their exams, widening disparities in educational opportunities between young people on opposite sides of the war.

Lost years

Amdafock was recently seized by fighters from the Seleka rebel coalition operating across the border in the CAR, further diminishing any realistic prospect of return for many of the families originally from the town.

With support from UNHCR, dozens of Sudanese refugees have secured places at the University of Bangui, offering a fragile path back into education after years of disruption.

But returning to university has proved far from simple.

Having completed their schooling in Arabic, they must now study in French, learning an entirely new language while trying to keep pace with university demands. Many say the additional years required, coupled with financial hardship and the psychological toll of displacement, make it feel as though they are losing time they can never recover.

“We have already lost so many years,” several students told Al Jazeera.

Among them is Gamar el-Shaikh, a sociology student at the University of Bangui.

“We left Birao refugee camp, promising our loved ones that we would return with university certificates,” Gamar told Al Jazeera. “But with the educational environment we are in, and all the difficulties we face, it feels almost impossible to keep that promise.”

Another student, Baderelddian Issa, said his family fled after his father, an imam in Amdafock, was persecuted by the RSF for criticising them during sermons at the mosque.

Baderelddian told Al Jazeera that his father’s position made the family a target, forcing them to flee Sudan for the CAR, where he is now trying to continue his studies, while watching the possibility of return slip further away.

Painful choices

For some students, displacement has demanded even more painful choices.

Intisar el-Sadig lost her husband during the war before fleeing to the CAR with her young child. After UNHCR secured her a place at the University of Bangui, she made the difficult decision to leave her three-year-old son in Korsi refugee camp with her mother so she could continue her studies in the capital.

She travels back whenever she can, but says every separation is painful.

“I am studying because I don’t want this war to take everything from us,” Intisar told Al Jazeera. “If I stop now, then we will have lost not only our home and my husband, but also our future.”

Ahmed knows how quickly those hopes can collapse.

Before the war, he was studying law and dreamed of becoming a judge. His father, a Sudanese army officer, was killed during the fighting in el-Fasher. The family fled to Nyala, believing they had reached safety, but Ahmed says fighters from the RSF attacked them there. During the assault, his mother was beaten so severely that her arm was broken.

The family eventually reached the CAR.

Now living in exile, Ahmed’s studies have been put on hold, and his ambitions have narrowed to survival.

Enduring hope

Across Korsi, that sense of loss is shared in different ways.

Students who once imagined futures as pharmacists, judges, engineers, teachers and academics now spend their days navigating life in exile, learning a new language and trying to rebuild their education in an unfamiliar system while worrying about relatives still trapped in Sudan.

For young women like Islam, displacement has also brought renewed pressure over inheritance and marriage. For others, the loss is measured in years of interrupted education that may never be recovered.

Islam continues volunteering in the camp, while Gamar, Baderelddian and Intisar persist with their studies despite extraordinary obstacles. Ahmed still clings to his dream of becoming a judge.

For these young Sudanese, education has become both refuge and resistance, a fragile attempt to rebuild meaning in lives shattered by war.

“We are the lost generation of Sudan,” Ahmed told Al Jazeera through tears. “We lost everything in this war.”

South Sudan became the world’s newest country in July 2011 after nearly 99 percent of voters chose independence from Sudan.

Fifteen years later, most of the major promises that came with independence remain unfulfilled.

South Sudan remains one of the world’s most fragile states.

Oil finances nearly 90 percent of the government’s revenue, but the country remains wracked by deep inequality and violence: 82 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and political jostling between rival groups has left the young nation in a perpetual state of conflict.

Elections have never been held since independence, millions remain displaced, and the country’s economy depends on pipelines running through Sudan, the very nation it fought to leave.

‘A failed promise’

Jok Madut Jok, 57, a professor and director of graduate studies at Syracuse University, is from Warrap, South Sudan, and still has family in both rural and urban parts of the country.

Jok says he recalls the joy of the time when South Sudan broke away to establish a new beginning. It was a moment of hope. Today, though, he feels as though he has been denied all that was promised at the time.

“South Sudan at the moment is a failed promise,” he says. “South Sudanese who had lived under brutal regimes in Sudan and had been excluded from money and development programmes, and were victims of security operations in the southern part, had hung their hopes on independence.”

Jok says people are now looking towards possibilities of political transitions to hold their government accountable.

Who controls what in South Sudan?

The country is technically governed by a transitional unity government created under the 2018 peace agreement.

But that peace remains fragile.

Violence continues across Jonglei, Upper Nile, Unity and Equatoria states with clashes involving government forces, opposition fighters and other armed groups.

Elections scheduled several times since independence have again been delayed, with the latest vote planned for late 2026.

Main political and armed groups:

Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM)

The ruling party which led the independence movement.

Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO)

Led by Riek Machar, it is part of the unity government. It still maintains armed forces in parts of the country.

South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF)

The national army, formerly known as the SPLA, it is loyal to President Salva Kiir.

White Army

A loose network of armed youth, mainly from the Nuer ethnic group.

National Salvation Front (NAS)

It remains active, mainly in Equatoria province. The NAS never fully joined the peace agreement.

Who runs the government?

Salva Kiir – President since independence.

• Leader of the governing SPLM.
• Supported largely by influential sections of the Dinka, South Sudan’s largest ethnic community.

Riek Machar – Vice President.

• Leader of SPLM-IO.
• Historically backed by many Nuer supporters.
• His rivalry with Kiir triggered the 2013 civil war after political tensions exploded inside the ruling party.

Independence delivered, violence continued

Between 2011 and  2026, according to data compiled by the United States-headquartered Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), there were 13,256 attacks in South Sudan, which means 883 attacks per year on average – or more than two a day.

The majority of the attacks have been led by:

• Various communal and clan-based armed groups. These constituted 6,168, or just over 46 percent, of all attacks.
• The armed forces and police, who were responsible for 3,278 attacks.
• Unidentified armed groups, behind 2,276 attacks.
• Sudan’s People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, responsible for 900 attacks.
• National Salvation Front, behind 269 attacksForeign actors, behind 154 attacks.
• Others, responsible for the remaining 184 attacks.

Jan Pospisil, 52, a researcher at the Austria-based Peace and Conflict Evidence Platform, recently conducted a survey of more than 22,000 respondents in South Sudan.

Of them, 98 percent said they were proud of being South Sudanese. At the same time, more than 52 percent of respondents said in 2023 that they didn’t feel safe speaking up politically, and in 2025, the results were approximately the same.

Hunger persists after 15 years of violence

Hunger is worsening across South Sudan, where an estimated 7.8 million people are facing crisis levels of food insecurity between April and July 2026, about 280,000 more than projected last year, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

Of those, about 73,000 people are living in catastrophic conditions, facing starvation, extreme food shortages and a heightened risk of death.

Another 2.5 million are in emergency conditions, while 5.3 million more are struggling to meet daily food needs without exhausting what little they have left.

The nutrition crisis is worsening alongside this.

An estimated 2.2 million children under five now require treatment for acute malnutrition, an increase of about 90,000 cases since the previous assessment.

Another 1.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding women also need urgent nutritional support.

The crisis is being fuelled by conflict, displacement and repeated shocks that have destroyed livelihoods, disrupted markets and cut communities off from aid.

“My family is living in rural areas, some in the cities but have no access to quality healthcare, no clean drinking water, no road infrastructure,” Jok says. “Even if they were to farm and raise cattle, and create their own livelihoods, they usually are cut off from markets and from basic services that are the responsibility of the state, especially a state that extracts public resources from underneath the people.”

“It’s a feeling that people are totally excluded from the gains of independence,” he added. “It verges on criminal neglect.”

Economic inequality

Pospisil says despite the riches of the 150,000 barrels of oil that are extracted, sold and mainly exported every day, broader economic gains are not a reality for most of the public.

In most rankings, South Sudan languishes as the poorest nation in the world.

South Sudan mainly exports crude to China, but also has Chinese and Indian companies invested alongside state-held organisations that own blocks in the oil fields.

The number of deaths comes as healthcare workers threaten to walk off the job over a delay in payments.

At least 600 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have died from Ebola, as the number of confirmed cases of the illness rose to 1,759, according to government data.

The total numbers, released on Wednesday, were confirmed as of Tuesday, while 51 new cases and 20 deaths were recorded in the previous 24 hours.

The total of those infected does not include two cases of illness reported in Kisangani, the capital of the Tshopo province and one of the DRC’s biggest cities, as the test results were being validated, the government’s report said. They will be included in the official case total once confirmed.

One of those two cases is linked to the village of Nia-Nia in the Ituri province, where the first illnesses were reported. But the second illness “does not appear to have a geographic link” beyond Kisangani, according to the government.

As the situation worsens, healthcare workers in the Ituri province, the hardest-hit of the country’s three eastern regions affected by the outbreak, are walking off their jobs to protest against delay in payments.

In an official notice to national and provincial authorities over the weekend, front-line workers in Ituri threatened to strike if they were not paid in 24 hours. By Tuesday, some had already stopped working, although no official strike has been declared, The Associated Press news agency reported.

Some of the health professionals and other front-line workers told AP they had not been paid wages or bonuses since the Ebola outbreak was declared on May 15. They also said they were working with limited gear and treated unfairly by authorities and response teams.

“Since the Ebola virus disease outbreak was declared, we’ve been demanding payment for our work,” Dr Biensi Kano, a member of the epidemiological surveillance committee in Ituri’s capital, Bunia, told AP.

The strike comes at the start of the enrolment for clinical trials for the treatment of the Bundibugyo virus, which is responsible for this outbreak. The Bundibugyo strain of Ebola is generally considered less deadly than some others, but there is no approved vaccine.

By the time the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in May, the virus had already been spreading undetected for weeks through the mining towns of Mongbwalu, Rwampara and Bunia, before reaching neighbouring provinces, Al Jazeera’s Catherine Wambua-Soi reported from the DRC earlier this month.

Somali pirate attacks on shipping in the Gulf of Aden region are on the rise, according to the U.N., a naval task force and a joint naval communications operation. The spike comes amid ongoing tensions in the Persian Gulf between the U.S. and Iran, and one regional military task force tells us these Somali Pirate Action Groups (PAGs) may be taking advantage of that situation. Meanwhile, a think tank suggests that the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen are aiding these pirates in a form of so-called gray zone conflict.

Regardless, these incidents are posing increased security risks to a commercial shipping industry already roiled by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and its ongoing aftermath, which is starting to heat up again after about a week of calm.

The most recent pirate attack took place on Sunday.

“Yesterday, I was informed that a Palau-flagged vessel Lady Naeima, a bulk carrier, was attacked in the Red Sea by pirates,” the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez told a meeting of the organization on Monday. “At the moment it is navigating towards the next destination and the crew is safe, but it is a reminder to flag States, shipowners and vessel operators to remain alert and use the Best Management Practices to combat these incidents.”

There was another attempted attack on July 2 when pirates approached the St. Vincent and Grenadines-flagged bulk carrier MV Golden Arsenal, according to the Indian Navy.

The IMO on Monday also called for the “safe release of 44 seafarers held captive in Somali waters by pirates and armed robbers.”

“The seafarers are being held aboard three detained vessels: the MT Honour 25, Eureka and Sward, which were hijacked in separate incidents between April and May off the coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden,” Dominguez explained.  

The crews “are running critically low on food and water while living under the constant threat of violence,” he added. 

“The incidents have highlighted worsening trends in global maritime security, particularly for piracy and armed robbery in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden,” Dominguez postulated. “Over the past three months alone, IMO has recorded 24 attempted and actual incidents of piracy and armed robbery against ships in the region, involving increasingly dangerous weapons and escalating violence against innocent seafarers.” 

IMO’s figures represent a big increase over the past.

“Between 2005 and 2012, pirate groups earned between $339 million and $413 million, according to World Bank estimates. The European Union’s counterpiracy mission Operation Atalanta recorded 26 pirate attacks between 2013 and 2019 and then no attacks from 2020 to 2022,” according to U.S. Africa Command’s Africa Defense Forum. “But piracy off the Somali coast resumed with six attacks in 2023 and surged to 22 in 2024.”

The recent spike in pirate attacks spurred the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) to raise the threat level in the region.

“The threat level is assessed as SUBSTANTIAL following 7 piracy-related events since 11 June in the Gulf of Aden,” JMIC stated on Monday. “PAG operations are a strong possibility, particularly within coastal approaches, transit corridors, and other established small-craft operating areas.”

The European Naval Force Somalia Operation Atalanta counter-piracy military operation was launched in 2008 after an earlier and much larger increase in pirate activity in the region. It was one of several multinational efforts to combat piracy introduced around that period, including NATO’s Operation Allied Provider and Allied Protector. Pirate attacks also led to shipping companies hiring armed private security forces to protect their vessels. The pace of pirate attacks has ebbed and flowed over the ensuing years and while far from the peak levels of the early 2010s, these efforts continue.

A spokesperson for Atalanta told us that “in recent months, we have seen a peak in the piracy events in the area. There are different reasons that are likely behind the situation we are currently living with piracy, some of them are recurrent like the weather at sea or the difficult situation for some of the Somali population; others are related to the current instability in the area.”

The situation in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran largely closed off after being attacked on Feb. 28, is creating “indirect influences” that have led to increased pirate attacks, Atalanta told us.

“The indirect influence in the area could be seen in the increase of the maritime insecurity in the area and how this situation creates a window of opportunity for the pirates to act due to the increase of attention in other areas of the region,” an Atalanta spokesperson told us. “Also the limitation to access some ports closer to the Strait of Hormuz due to the situation.”

Meanwhile, as we noted earlier in this story, the American Security Project (ASP) think tank posited that the Somali pirates are being abetted by the Houthi rebels of Yemen.

“For the Houthis, instability generated by Somali piracy provides indirect strategic advantages by increasing maritime insecurity in the Gulf of Aden without requiring the Yemeni group to assume the significant risks associated with renewed escalation in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait,” an ASP report from May suggested. “A 2025 United Nations report indicated that the Houthis brokered arms transfer to al-Shabaab, in exchange for increased piracy targeting commercial vessels off the Somali coast. A report also suggests the Houthis equipped Somali pirates with advanced GPS tracking devices, enabling their disruption of commercial vessels. Speculation that the May 2 piracy attack happened in coordination with Houthi intelligence further reflects the increasing overlap between these groups.”

“Given Somalia’s proximity to key maritime routes, the resurgence raises concerns that Somali piracy may be leveraged as a tool to advance the maritime objectives of regional non-state actors,” ASP added. “Most notably, Houthis’ leverage of Somali piracy provides Iran and the Yemeni proxy group plausible deniability in maritime disruption amid the U.S.-Iran conflict, complicating regional security.”

This assessment is shared by AFRICOM.

“Authorities in semiautonomous Puntland State are warning that collaborations between Somali pirate groups and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen represent a major threat to maritime security in the Horn of Africa,” the command’s Africa Defense Forum reported in January. “The growing relationship between the Houthis and Somalia’s al-Qaida affiliate, al-Shabaab, includes ties to piracy and has resulted in pirate groups using more sophisticated weaponry and technology acquired from the Houthis.”

As we previously reported, the Houthis carried out a campaign against shipping in November 2023 in solidarity with Palestinians over the latest war between Israel and Gaza. It stretched into the summer of 2025, forcing some ships to avoid the Suez Canal for a far longer route around Africa, boosting shipping costs by nearly $200 billion at the time.

The Houthi attacks also forced the U.S. and allies to deploy many warships, including the Eisenhower and Truman Carrier Strike Groups (CSG) to both defend against Houthi attacks and strike targets in Yemen. These operations resulted in a large expenditure of air defense and strike munitions.

You can see video from some of those encounters below.

Strikes on Iranian-backed Houthi Targets by USS Gravely, USS Carney, and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Houthis have threatened to resume attacks in support of Iran, a potential scenario we explored in past reporting. On Monday, Operation Aspides, a European-led naval task force created to protect Red Sea commercial shipping, told us it is prepared to take action should the Houthis strike again.

“Until now, the Houthis have not initiated any attacks against the shipping industry (No attacks on MVs since September 2025),” an Aspides spokesperson told us. “The security situation in the Bab El-Mandeb, of course, remains fragile and is highly sensitive to regional escalation. From an operational standpoint, we assess that Houthis pose a threat and are capable of rapidly escalating.”

“We maintain a frequent presence at sea, monitor the situation, and adjust our actions when needed,” the spokesperson added. “In the event of a resumption of Houthi attacks on merchant vessels – which remains a possibility – we are present and ready to implement our mandate, within our means and capabilities.”

Despite the growing risk from pirates, a spokesperson for the Maersk shipping line told us that the company has resumed Red Sea transits that were paused during the Houthi attacks.

“Yesterday, we announced that one of our services will return to the Suez/Red Sea route instead of sailing around the Cape of Good Hope,” a Maersk spokesperson told us Tuesday morning. “Prior to that, we have in recent months done some one-offs by diverting some vessels to this passage, but not on a regular basis.”

The shaky ceasefire that has been in place since April 8 has reduced the risk of the Houthis resuming hostilities in the Red Sea. However, it is under strain again even as transits through the Strait of Hormuz have been increasing, though just a tiny fraction of what took place before the war.

“At least three tankers trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz via a route Iran has warned ships against using appeared to come under attack Tuesday,” CBS News reported. “Iran did not claim any of the attacks, but its state TV network said at least one vessel ignored warnings from Iranian forces.”