Feature Stories

Five years ago, news that she had cervical cancer shattered Millicent Kagonga’s world. It upended her marriage, she was spurned by family and friends, and lost a child while undergoing treatment she could barely afford. Her agony seemed endless. But months of painful therapy stopped the spread of the cancer and the thirty-year-old mother of two has now taken on a fresh battle: helping patients and survivors of the disease cope better. We bring her story in her own words.

“Why is Ebola taking so long to end?” a man attending a community meeting outside Butembo town in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) wants to know.

Canada’s Minister for International Development, Honourable Karina Gould, held talks with World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, on ways to strengthen collaboration in the area of health while on a visit this week to the regional office in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo.

“From the moment I arrived, my mission was to save lives. I am proud of it,” says Dr Aissatou Bah, a member of the World Health Organization Ebola vaccination team in Beni, a town in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). 

How do you deliver nearly three tons of supplies every day to halt Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) conflict-affected north-eastern region? For the World Health Organization (WHO), a 40-strong operations support and logistics team works almost non-stop to speedily dispatch materials across an area four times the size of neighbouring Rwanda.

With the death toll from the world’s worst measles epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) surpassing 6000, the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling for more funding to stop the outbreak.

Armed violence. Drought. Floods. In Burkina Faso, these three factors have forced nearly half a million people – three-quarters of whom are women and children

Djamilou Abdoulkarim, a Central African Republic national, leads a team of World Health Organization (WHO) logisticians supporting the Ebola response in Butembo, a city in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. He took up the job in April 2019, heading a 49-member team. Mr Abdoulkarim first stepped into the logistics and operations world in 2005 and has worked in eight African countries, including his own.

Astou Dieng recently joined a savings group cooperative with many other women farmers that is changing her health and the health of her family.

These women in Senegal’s Kaffrine region are doing something novel with their agriculture – they are accessing health care.

By working together to raise and sell crops, they can access new markets with the greater volume that they collectively produce and thus they earn greater income from their fields.

Zvandiri is a life-changing peer-to-peer programme of Africaid that started in Zimbabwe and is helping to improve adherence to antiretroviral medication among children, adolescents and young people and thus promoting viral suppression.