International “aid” for Africa is shrinking – hastened this year by chaos and renewed insularity in the United States. Africa’s trade with the world is shrinking too. For heavily indebted countries, a perfect storm has made landfall.

The end of ‘aid’

The heyday is over. We can’t just cry about it.

For five months after Israel’s war on Gaza began, Sherif Naim couldn’t open his laptop. Now, he runs Taqat — a solar-powered co-working hub helping 700+ freelancers survive war. Others like Gaza Talents are doing the same: rebuilding, even under bombardment.

Employment is resistance in Gaza

Remote-work platforms take root in Palestine as freelance tech and creative workers navigate the wartime economy.

Zimbabwean authorities took farmlands back from white farmers in the early 2000s to redress colonial imbalances. Two decades later, in lithium-rich areas, land is parceled off again – this time to Chinese miners.

Zimbabwe's lithium boom uproots locals

Chinese mining concessions force families from land they have farmed for generations.

It was raining hard in Tokyo when the Botswana men’s 4x400m relay team made history on Sunday, claiming gold at the World Athletics Championships and stunning the sprinting community. Victory in those conditions felt especially auspicious. It rains so little in Botswana that the country’s people revere precipitation. The Setswana word for rain – pula – also means wealth or blessing, and lends its name to the country’s currency.

World champs: When it pours, the pula reigns

The country’s laughing all the way to the bank after Gaborone quartet pulls off relay coup in Tokyo.

Over the next 18 months, the United States will overhaul its role in global health. A new state department policy, published on Friday, outlines a slower, more orderly pullback than this year’s abrupt closure of USAID.

A more orderly aid exit, but an exit all the same

America has a new plan to pull back from global health funding, but it still wants out.

Many African countries are spending up to 9% of their national budgets on climate disasters. Leaders are trying to future-proof the continent for a world of evaporating climate finance and accelerating pollution.

Bootstraps and shoestrings: How Africa has to beat the heat

Leaders are trying to future-proof the continent for a world of evaporating climate finance and accelerating pollution.

Days after a massive landslide buried about 1,000 people, only a few rescue workers have managed to reach Tarsin, a remote village in the Jebel Marra area of Darfur in Sudan. The landslide on Sunday also killed more than 5,000 animals, including sheep and camels, destroying survivors’ livelihoods.

They fled to the mountain. Then the mountain collapsed.

Tarsin village, on the slopes of Darfur’s volcanic highlands, shielded civilians from warring groups. But its isolation now complicates response ...

In May 2022, an Israeli sniper shot and killed Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. Last week, Israel targeted and killed five journalists in one attack. In between those dates, Israel became the largest killer of journalists in the world.

The world’s greatest killer of journalists

Israel is conducting a war against journalism. But journalists keep on documenting its crimes

All Protocol Observed. Welcome to Issue 212 of The Continent. We join more than 250 newsrooms in 70 countries blacking out front pages in solidarity with journalists in Gaza. Read Ansam al-Kitaa’s despatch from Gaza City: https://bit.ly/212_TC

From the beginning of the new school year, pregnant girls will no longer be excluded from school in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. All schools except Catholic ones, if men of the cloth have their way.

What would Jesus do?

Catholic schools defy the Democratic Republic of the Congo's ruling on pregnant pupils’ rights to an education, citing ‘morality’ and ‘disc...