The Bidibidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda is home to some 270,000 refugees, largely from South Sudan. It’s now the site of a new program to safely remove e-waste from solar lanterns and their batteries, in what the International Organization for Migration (IOM) says will also provide training and jobs to…
The Chinese government has pushed back over remarks about telecom firm Huawei and its presence on the African continent, made by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman of the United States. Sherman made her comments during a just-concluded diplomatic swing through South Africa, Angola and Gabon. In Angola, she visited…
The Central African Republic has become the first nation in Africa to adopt Bitcoin as an official currency, saying the move will put the C.A.R. “on the map of the most courageous and visionary countries in the world.” President Faustin-Archange Touadéra announced the decision in a statement, welcoming the news…
Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, a native of Burkina Faso, was awarded this years top prize in architecture for his climate-focused work, much of it in West Africa and in Kenya, Sudan and other parts of the continent. Kéré was named this year’s recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize for pioneering…
A team of researchers working from South Africa have located the century-old wreck of the Endurance, the ship commanded by Sir Ernest Shackleton in the Weddell Sea before it was crushed by ice and sank to the bottom. The team worked from the South African polar research and logistics vessel,…
Nearly all of the Starlink satellites launched last week from Kennedy Space Center in the United States will, or have already, fallen back to earth because of a geomagnetic storm that interfered with their deployment. The satellites, a part of South Africa native Elon Musk’s plans to improve communications around…
Google CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted African innovation during a brief address Monday to the Business Forum of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) held in Addis Ababa. The business forum was held on the margins of the annual African Union Summit. It focused on transportation as part of…
Parts of West Africa can expect improved Internet access in the near future, following a deal between the Kenya-based Intersat and European provider Eutelsat. The delivery of Internet services will rely on the Eutelsat Konnect satellite, which was launched two years ago. The COVID-19 pandemic originally delayed progress on its…
A massive outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday left people across the globe waiting for services they depend on to come back online. AWS said it was aware of the problem but an hours-long outage was expected to continue until the service was fixed. Many digital services, including…
Apple announced on Tuesday it has filed suit against an Israeli company that’s been closely monitored for its role in supplying spyware to foreign governments—a number of them on the African continent—and placed on a U.S. entity list for its development of Pegasus surveillance tools. “NSO Group creates sophisticated, state-sponsored…
African internet growth depends on greater engagement, not AFRINIC The Supreme Court of Mauritius recently lifted a freeze on the bank accounts of African regional internet registry (RIR) AFRINIC, but the firm, one of the world’s five IP distributors, remains entangled in a legal imbroglio that has led some commentators…
An Israeli company scrutinized for its role in supplying spyware to foreign governments, a number of them on the African continent, has been placed under new restrictions by the United States government. NSO Group, which develops and supplies Pegasus software, is now on the Entity List at the US. Department…
Users of Facebook and its related services, Instagram and Whatsapp, reported global outages of the social media platforms on Monday. The services went down shortly before 7 p.m. in Kenya. South Africans and Egyptians said they were unable to access Facebook, even as users from India, Canada, the United States…
A new tool to map floods around the world, especially those that occur in the Global South, has been launched through a partnership between Google, MapBox, and other players working with a UN University group based in Canada. The World Flood Mapping Tool uses the Google Earth engine combined with…
Morocco, Egypt and Rwanda are just three of the nations where governments and their leaders are named in an ongoing investigation into the use of Pegasus spyware supplied by Israeli tech company NSO Group. The Pegasus Project, coordinated by the Paris-based NGO Forbidden Stories, looks at how the technology is…