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Africa rising: COVID-19 cases are surging across Africa, with many countries experiencing a fourth wave amidst the Omicron variant. In Nigeria, the number of daily confirmed infections over the past week jumped from 76 to 451, following the discovery of the new variant in the country. Both South Africa and Kenya surpassed the WHO high-risk threshold of 5% for COVID-19 cases, with South Africa exceeding a 30% positivity rate and Kenya at 6.5%. However, despite the surge of COVID-19 infections in Africa, the number...
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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) allocated $650 billion worth of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to its members in August, and activists are pressuring rich nations to channel, or recycle, their SDRs to low- and middle-income countries to help them recover faster from the COVID-19 pandemic. Advocates for the recycling of SDRs argue that low- and middle-income countries, especially in Africa, should benefit more from the new SDR allocation as their economies have been badly battered by the pandemic. As a result...
In Cape Town, the team at the Women’s Legal Centre are champions of women’s rights and staunch defenders of women when they’re at their most vulnerable. They are at the forefront of changing South Africa’s legal landscape. And as South Africa’s only African feminist law centre for women’s rights, they are making huge strides, especially for black women.
“We call it ‘feminist activist lawyering,’” Seehaam Samaai, the centre’s director, said. “It’s very important for us to ensure that the courts,...
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Vaccine bandits: A black market for vaccines is undermining Kenya’s vaccination campaign, just weeks before a mandate goes into effect. Corrupt officials are diverting vaccines, falsifying records, and smuggling vials (to mostly remote areas) for $30 to $50 each. These vaccine bandits create significant health concerns: the doses are often transported without adequate refrigeration, they risk contamination, and they aren’t being administered by healthcare professionals with proper sanitation or precautions. The Kenyan government offers doses for free to its citizens, but...
South Africans are furious over re-imposed travel bans after the Omicron variant was detected in South Africa on 24 November. The UK was the first country to announce a red list of countries that citizens were prohibited from travelling to. This list includes South Africa and Botswana – the two African countries with the first confirmed cases of Omicron infections – as well as Angola, Namibia, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The US, EU countries, Canada, UAE, Australia, and...
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Omicron rising: Health officials in South Africa announced Wednesday that the Omicron variant has become the most prevalent version of COVID-19 in the country. The number of cases doubled from Tuesday, and test positivity climbed from 10.2% to 16.5%. In Gauteng province, early analyses suggest that COVID-19 cases and test positivity are increasing faster than in previous waves. While hospitalizations in the country are also rising, it’s too soon to draw conclusions about Omicron’s transmissibility and lethality, and officials are urging caution. On Wednesday,...
Earlier this month, seven ONE Champions and one ONE staff member attended the YouLead Africa Summit in Arusha, Tanzania, where they discussed the future of the continent and the importance of youth representation.
The YouLead Summit is an annual forum of young leaders, mentors, government policymakers, civil society, and other partners from all over Africa to craft responses to the continent’s rapidly growing youth population, their challenges, and opportunities.
Happening since 2017, the forum is the highlight event to the Youth...
Two decades ago, HIV/AIDS infections were doubling each year and almost 4,000 people died daily from the virus.
Since then, the global response has come a long way and serves as a model of how to address a public health crisis. AIDS-related deaths have dropped by more than half since their peak in the early 2000s. And now, 27.5 million people have access to life-saving treatments.
But COVID-19 has severely impacted a lot of that progress, as the world battles twin...
Cases of sexual violence against women are increasing in Ethiopia, as the conflict between the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed continues. Seventy women in Nifas Mewcha in the Amhara region reported being raped by TPLF fighters during a nine-day period in August when the armed group took control of the town, according to an Amnesty International report. Many of the women said they experienced physical and mental health problems after the...
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Surge campaign: Nigeria plans to administer more than 1 million vaccines a day, starting this Friday. The surge is intended to vaccinate half of its target population, or 55 million people, by the end of January. Just 1.5% of Nigerians are fully vaccinated. The government says it has enough vaccines in the pipeline to hit this mark, as well as plans to scale up vaccination sites. But success is far from assured. Nigeria’s political and economic troubles risk...