Jamal Osman , Reporter

Only five years ago West Africa was in the middle of the worst Ebola outbreak in history. An epidemic that many UK volunteers helped to fight.

The biggest swarm of locusts for decades sweeps across East Africa, and it’s threatening to wreak catastrophe on countries already struggling with food insecurity. 

A million undocumented migrants in the UK don’t even exist in the eyes of the law. But they do exist: and they live in constant fear of being caught and deported.

Last night, in the first in our DNA series, we looked at the family secrets unwittingly unearthed with the surge in popularity of home ancestry tests.

At least four militants from the extremist al-Shabaab group attacked the hotel in the southern port city of Kismayo.

After this programme reported on it last year, it was extensively debated online, transforming the life of one of the women we spoke to.

In recent years, South Africa has seen a surge in organised street violence, but this gang war is not being fought over drugs, but taxi routes.

Somalia used to be a byword for war and hardship, and thousands of Somalis escaped to this country to seek safe refuge.

“Gender-based violence is a national crisis that we are determined to end.” – the words of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa last month as he promised the ruling ANC party would tackle the alarming rise in sexual assaults against women. The statistics are staggering. In South Africa the murder of women is five times higher…

Sierra Leone is facing a crisis of teenage pregnancies, caused in part by the Ebola outbreak two years ago.

In Somalia, poverty is forcing women into sexual exploitation as men from the country who’ve emigrated to the west return to take advantage of them. Many of the women are refugees who are lured by the offer of a better life abroad. They often go through a fake wedding ceremony. The women are later abandoned…

The first funerals have already begun, as Somali officials said more than 300 people are now known to have died in Saturday’s horrific truck bombing in Mogadishu. There’s a warning the death toll is almost certain to rise. Hundreds of others were hurt in the blast, overwhelming hospitals with the sheer numbers of injured, many…

This year, East Africa has been hit by one of the worst droughts in recent decades. Nowhere more so than in Somalia, where the UN estimates that six million people are at risk of famine. Half the population live under the Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab, who are aiming to prove they too can provide for…

One of the places most affected is Somalia, where a drought, described as the worst in living memory, is causing record levels of rising hunger. Political unrest and the insurgency of jihadi groups haven’t helped.

Many of the people fleeing famine and political instability in places like Sudan and Somalia end up in refugee camps like Dadaab in Northern Kenya.