Africa

Two senior UN officials welcomed on Tuesday the war crimes conviction and life sentencing of an armed combatant in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). 

The Desert Locust crisis which struck the greater Horn of Africa region earlier this year threatening food supplies for millions, could re-escalate as recent strong winds carried mature swarmlets from southern Somalia into eastern and northeastern Kenya, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Tuesday.

The “broad political consensus” reached in September that ended a two-year stalemate in Somalia must be “preserved and indeed deepened”, the country’s UN envoy told the Security Council on Monday. 

The Somali government retrains defectors from the al-Shabab militant group as barbers, drivers, mechanics and tailors.

War veteran and ex-minister Debretsion Gebremichael now leads the struggle against the government.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has welcomed the African Union’s (AU) appointment of three high-level envoys to help resolve the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, calling it an "initiative for peace.”

Three consequences of the ongoing crisis in Tigray.

The COVID-19 crisis was impacting Africa “well before the pandemic spread across the continent”, the UN chief said on Friday, marking Africa Industrialization Day, arriving at a point when many economies were expanding and “poverty was in decline”.   

Manipulated and false images with no relation to the crisis in Ethiopia are being shared online.

In a briefing to journalists on Thursday, a senior UN humanitarian official in Sudan recounted moving testimony from refugees who are crossing the border from Ethiopia in their thousands, fleeing fighting in Tigray province.

Following years of political instability and conflict, Libya is making substantial progress on the path to peace, the top UN official in the country told the Security Council on Thursday. 

Senior UN officials have conducted a two-day mission to southeastern Sudan, where some 30,000 Ethiopians have found refuge after fleeing ongoing fighting between national and regional forces in Tigray province, the world body reported on Wednesday. 

Over 1,000 people have been killed and more than 400 abducted in the past six months in intercommunal violence in South Sudan, amid fears that tensions may worsen with the onset of the dry season, the UN envoy for the country has said. 

An outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus disease in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is over, the government announced on Wednesday, after a five-month response supported by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), and other partners.   

During her visit to Ghana on Monday, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed met with young people living with HIV and disabilities in the capital, Accra.   

Some 10,000 health workers will be trained to support mothers and newborns in Africa through a partnership between the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, and Laerdal Global Health, the non-profit arm of a Norwegian company that provides innovative training, educational and therapy solutions for emergency medical care and patient safety.

A conflict in the Tigray region is threatening to destabilise East Africa. This is why.

A “full-scale humanitarian crisis” is unfolding as thousands of refugees flee ongoing fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray region each day to seek safety in eastern Sudan, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) reported on Tuesday. 

It will take a variety of different actors to confront and deal with the “daunting challenges” in the Sahel region, the head of UN peacekeeping told the Security Council on Monday.  

Maxwell Matewere, a Malawian crime prevention expert with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), has been active in the anti-human trafficking field for more than two decades. Today, he trains officials throughout Malawi to prevent and combat this crime: this year alone, despite COVID-19 restrictions, his work has led to the rescue of around three hundred human trafficking victims and 31 arrests.