Migrants across the Southern Africa region are massively disadvantaged as they find themselves excluded from vaccine programmes – even when the global vaccine initiative COVAX often funds these programmes.
With unusually hot and dry weather beating down on this Southern African nation, climate change and the accompanying drought have cost farmers much of their cattle herds. In response, many ranchers are turning to goats to preserve their livestock assets.
Agriculture is the major employer and a backbone of the economies of Southern Africa.
Janet Mutoriti (30), a mother of three from St Mary’s suburb in Chitungwiza, 25 kilometres outside Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, frequently risks arrest for straying into the nearby urban forests to fetch wood for cooking.
Malawi, which has a population of 14 million, has an HIV prevalence of 10 percent. Almost a third of the infected are aged below 30. This is in part the result of early sexual debut for young girls, a practice encouraged in parts of the country where girls participate in traditional initiation ceremonies. Pilirani Tambala looks at why young Malawian girls are engaging in sex too early and what is being done to discourage the practice.
Maureen Phiri, 18, has a soft voice and a strong message about HIV and young people in her country. “In Malawi, people are still in denial because of cultural beliefs. Traditional leaders and churches are denying the disease. Let us gather those leaders and hear from young people what is really happening.”
Carolina Poalo strikes the dry earth over and over with her hoe, her frail body bent almost double. She is determined to begin planting. During the long, dry season in Mozambique, she and her two young grandchildren have eaten little but cassava leaves.
Three-month-old Simplicious Gift lives in Mafunga village in Malawi’s southern rural district of Chikhwawa, 48 kilometres from the commercial capital, Blantyre. His is a poor farming village of about 1,200 people who live off their harvests and the produce from their livestock of goats, pigs and cows.
Question marks hang over the legitimacy of Angola’s general election as Africa’s second-longest serving leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos has won a five-year term in office following his party’s landslide victory.
Legendary and controversial Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, who once famously told people to let him write and drink his beer, has been dead for 25 years. However, interest in the life and work of the author, who has become a cult icon to aspiring young writers in Zimbabwe and abroad, will not die.
Fisherfolk and farmers living near Malawi’s second-largest water body, Lake Chilwa, are relocating en masse and scrambling for space around its shores as the lake has dried to dangerously low levels.
The move in Malawi to close down Chinese businesses outside of the four major cities has been condemned as xenophobic by rights organisations. A new law enforced Jul. 31 barred foreigners from carrying out trade in Malawi’s outlying and rural areas.
Swazis should not see the ongoing nationwide one-month teachers’ strike as a movement capable of overthrowing the political regime here, despite the fact that civil servants and nurses have joined the action, according to political analyst Dr. Sikelela Dlamini.
A transboundary initiative aimed at providing clean drinking water and proper sanitation between Angola and Namibia is making steady progress.
The Southern African Development Community's protocol on shared watercourses is recognised as one of the world's best. But sound agreements on the sustainable and equitable management of joint water resources require effective means to implement them.
When you board Mozambique’s national carrier, Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique, you will most likely be given small blue packets of peanuts to munch as the jet whisks you from the country’s capital, Maputo, to as far afield as Europe. Sugar, salt or chilli flavour. Take your pick.
Millions of Angola’s poorest families are facing critical food insecurity as a prolonged dry spell across large parts of the country has destroyed harvests and killed off livestock.
While women constitute the majority of food producers, processors and marketers in Africa, their role in the agricultural sector still remains a minor one because of cultural and social barriers.
The only two female heads of state in Africa, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Malawian President Joyce Banda, have just committed to using their positions to improve the lives of women across the continent.
The cost of maintaining and expanding water infrastructure in southern Africa is high. And while South Africa may be in a better economic position than the rest of the region, it also faces funding challenges that are similar to those of its neighbours.
On a continent of over one billion people, where half the population have mobile phones, the use of mobile communication and internet technologies is crucial to boost development in Africa.