Big3Africa.org

The final round of negotiations to draft a Global Plastics Treaty kicked off on Tuesday, August 5, in Geneva, Switzerland with a renewed push to strike a deal that could drastically reshape how the world produces, uses, and disposes of plastics.

Across Kenya and other arid and semi-arid regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, communities continue to grapple with the devastating impacts of drought, erratic rainfall, deforestation, and decades of unsustainable land use. These challenges have left swathes of once-productive farmland barren, pushing millions of people deeper into food insecurity and poverty.

Women in informal settings were found to be 10.8 percentage points more likely to suffer from depressive symptoms than those in better-equipped households. The ripple effects of poor mental health, researchers warn, stretch beyond individuals and threaten the social and economic stability of entire families.

In Hadado town, within Wajir West sub‑county, the creeping desert is erasing a community’s future. One of the learning institutions in Hadado, Athibohol Primary School, now lies half-buried beneath relentless sand dunes.

Environmentalists and climate justice advocates have raised questions about how Kenya frames its climate resilience strategy after the counties of Kiambu, Nairobi and Mombasa were excluded from the latest disbursement of KES 11.2 billion in climate financing under Kenya’s Financing Locally-Led Climate Action (FLLoCA) programme.

In the remote highlands of northwestern Cameroon, 315 kilometers from the capital Yaoundé, lies a calm, sapphire-blue lake surrounded by misty hills and scattered villages. On the night of August 21, 1986, that serenity was shattered when Lake Nyos unleashed a catastrophe unlike anything seen before.