Africa - The African Mirror

Nov

2020

Africa faces wait for mass COVID-19 vaccination

MASS vaccination against COVID-19 is unlikely to start in Africa until midway through next year and keeping vaccines cold could be a big challenge, according to the continent's disease control group. Some European countries expect to start rolling out vaccination campaigns as early as January. But health campaigners are worried that Africa will find itself near the back of the queue for COVID-19 vaccines after wealthier nations signed a raft of bilateral vaccine supply deals with pharmaceutical companies. "We are very concerned as a continent that we will not have access to vaccines in a timely fashion," said John Nkengasong,…

Nov

2020

By The African Mirror

Comic Relief stops sending celebs to Africa after white saviour furore

NEWS

SOPHIE DAVIES BRITISH charity Comic Relief says it will stop sending celebrities to Africa to raise funds following criticism that figures like singer Ed Sheeran acted like "white saviours". The charity won a Norwegian advocacy group's Rusty Radiator Award for the worst appeal of 2017 for a video about street children in Liberia, where Sheeran offered to pay their hotel bills, criticised as "poverty tourism" by the jury. "African people don't want us to tell their stories for them, what they need is more agency, a platform and partnership," comedian Lenny Henry, co-founder of Comic Relief, said in a statement.…

Aug

2020

By The African Mirror

State of democracy in Africa: changing leaders doesn’t change politics

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

NIC CHEESEMAN, Professor of Democracy, University of Birmingham FOR the last few years the African political landscape has been dominated by high profile changes of leaders and governments. In Angola (2017), Ethiopia (2018), South Africa (2018), Sudan (2019) and Zimbabwe (2018), leadership change promised to bring about not only a new man at the top but also a new political and economic direction. But do changes of leaders and governments generate more democratic and responsive governments? The Bertelsmann Transformation Index Africa Report 2020 (BTI), A Changing of the Guards or A Change of Systems?, suggests that we should be cautious…

Jul

2020

By The African Mirror

Internet shutdowns in Africa threaten democracy and development

MEDIA FREEDOM

TOMIWA ILORI, Doctoral Candidate and Researcher at the Expression, Information and Digital Rights Unit of the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria MAGNUS KILLANDER, Professor, Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria IT'S broadly accepted that there’s a close relationship between development and access to information. One of the first economists to make the link was Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics. Increasingly over the past two decades, the internet has been a major factor affecting the right to development. The United Nations definition of…