Dr. Charles Murigande is a former Rwandan minister of education and until his retirement in June 2020, he was the deputy vice-chancellor in charge of institutional development at the University of Rwanda. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a lesson for Africa’s education sector: The continent must assume greater responsibility to address an unprecedented learning crisis. Africa must better address a crisis that threatens the vision of a knowledge-based society able to survive in a global and competitive environment.  Exacerbating learning poverty  Since the...
As COVID-19 spreads across low- and middle-income countries, billions of people are vulnerable to variants that could resist vaccines and put the world back at square one in tackling this pandemic. So why isn’t the vaccine already available to everyone, everywhere? It comes down to supply and distribution. Rich countries have bought up the majority of the supply and are hoarding even what they don’t need. Meanwhile, low- and middle-income countries are struggling to roll out the doses they do...
COVID-19 has certainly had a negative effect on the African economy but is not responsible for all the economic challenges faced on the continent. Even though Africa’s economy has been affected by the pandemic, the continent has fared well due to the urgent preventative steps taken by individual governments to avoid the advanced spread and effects of COVID-19. But with the COVID-19 crisis, Africa has experienced an unprecedented economic shock. Despite the efforts made by the governments to support their...
African countries are facing a third wave of COVID-19 infections which threatens to be even more brutal than the two that came before. Across Africa, between June and July, cases rose by nearly 200%. The continent just exceeded its worst-ever week in the pandemic, and the WHO has warned that cases are now doubling every three weeks. Over a dozen countries have already reported their highest rate of infections since the start of the pandemic, with over 700,000 confirmed...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. Tanzania’s new president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, is slowly reversing the COVID-19 policies of her predecessor, the late John Magufuli, who infamously declared that the coronavirus had been defeated in the country. He banned the publication of official data and reports on the disease, even as doctors privately reported a rise in the number of patients with COVID symptoms dying in hospitals. Despite being...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. While Ethiopia is struggling to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, another life-threatening crisis is going largely unnoticed. Famine looms for millions of Ethiopians in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, where an alliance of the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF), Amhara militia, and the Eritrean Defence Force (EDF) has gone to war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), an armed rebel...
Since the first reported case 40 years ago, HIV/AIDS continues to be a global health crisis, particularly in Africa. The continent is home to about 15.2% of the world’s population, but home to more than two-thirds of total HIV infections in the world — roughly 35 million people. Additionally, 91% of HIV-positive children are in Africa. This high number of infections on the continent is largely attributed to poor access to healthcare, unsafe sexual practices, and high mother-to-child transmission Unfortunately,...
Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project. African governments have been urging rich countries to make COVID-19 vaccines more accessible to their citizens. But some countries on the continent are either returning the vaccines or destroying them, a scenario that indicates significant weaknesses in both the supply and demand side of mass vaccination programmes. Vaccines are going to waste in some African countries because there isn’t sufficient uptake; in...
On 12 March 2020, Kenya confirmed its first COVID-19 case. Since this ill-fated day, the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the country and its economy. People are still trying to battle this virus, learn how to cope, and emerge stronger after the pandemic.  The economy, however, has since faced major setbacks in its growth. Kenya is Africa’s third-biggest economy and it has not suffered such a new low in 12 years since the post-election violence experienced in 2008. According to...
Africa saw its first reported case of COVID-19 in Egypt in February 2020, and then soon after the first case in sub-Saharan Africa was confirmed in Nigeria. Within a few months, the pandemic spread throughout the continent, impacting peoples’ lives and livelihoods drastically, and majorly impacted the continent’s economies.  Here’s a closer look at COVID’s impact and why the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is key to helping African economies recover.  COVID-19’s effects on the economy African economies suffered greatly from trade...