Kisumu, Kenya | AFP | On farms across Africa, a seemingly innocuous brown and beige caterpillar is waging a silent war, devastating rural incomes and posing a major threat to the continent’s food supply. In just two years, the so-called fall armyworm has colonised three-quarters of Africa, according to the …

Kigali, Rwanda | THE INDEPENDENT | For a week, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda took renowned travel documentary maker, Peter Greenberg, on a tour of the country known as the “land of a thousand hills.” Greenberg is America’s most recognised, honoured, and respected front-line travel news journalist. He is a multiple …

NAIROBI | Business Wire | The Board of Directors and Management of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) are pleased to announce the appointment of Njuguna Ndung’u as the next AERC Executive Director effective September 1, 2018. Prof. Njuguna Ndung’u is well known to the AERC network as a trainer and …

Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | Burundi on Tuesday launched the official campaign for a referendum on constitutional change that could enable President Pierre Nkurunziza to stay in power for another 16 years. Twenty-six parties, most of them aligned with the ruling CNDD-FDD party, have been authorised to campaign for the …

London, United Kingdom | AFP | British MPs threatened Tuesday to issue a formal summons to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg for him to testify over a major privacy row, after he declined to appear. Zuckerberg was grilled by the US Congress last month but sent one of his executives to …

Kano, Nigeria | AFP | Dozens of people were killed on Tuesday when two suicide bombers detonated their explosives at a mosque and a market in Mubi, northeast Nigeria, residents said. “We have evacuated dozens of dead and injured people to the hospital and the rescue operation is still ongoing,” …

Cairo, Egypt | AFP | Patriotic statements, flashy commercials and an anti-drug campaign: Mohamed Salah’s dazzling displays for Liverpool have taken the football world by storm, and on his home turf in Egypt seemingly everyone wants a piece of him. Salah has shot to stardom thanks to his goal-scoring exploits …

Kano, Nigeria | AFP | At least 10 gold miners were killed by armed men suspected to belong to a kidnapping and cattle rustling gang in the northern Nigeria state of Kaduna, police said Sunday. The bandits opened fire on a group of gold miners at a small-scale mine in …

Bétaré Oya, Cameroon | AFP | For a time, the land around the village of Longa Mali in eastern Cameroon was one of the most prized in Africa, and powerful machines gnawed greedily into its soil to extract precious gold. Today, abandoned with almost the same speed as it was …

Geneva, Switzerland | AFP | Three quarters of freshwater species endemic to East Africa’s Lake Victoria basin face the threat of extinction, conservationists said Monday, warning the biodiversity there was being “decimated”. A fresh report backed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assessed the extinction risk of …