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In the small rural town of Chivhu, Zimbabwe, 10-year-old Grace Zvarebwa is training for a pan-African schools chess tournament in Liberia. Chess is an activity normally reserved for the country’s elite schools, but the sport has transformed the lives of rural school girls like Zvarebwa.

Korogocho is one of Nairobi’s most dangerous slums, where rape and robbery are common. Beatrice Nyariara is helping women aged 55 to 90 to fight back.

A psychiatric facility in Freetown has stepped away from its colonial past and removed these ‘shackles’ from their patients.

Scores of women in Argentina could be facing life in prison for what health experts say are obstetric emergencies such as miscarriages.

A combination of failures by the municipal, provincial and national government left a hospital in the south of Johannesburg without water or electricity for parts of November. Find out what’s behind the chaos.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation’s digital campaign Treasure Your Pleasure is using an evidence-based sex-positive approach to educate young Africans about safe sex.

The government is investing in monitoring lead levels in paint, but experts and industry groups say that there’s no plan for dealing with offenders.

Many women in South Africa resorted to sex work in order to survive the COVID recession. Male “blessers” were happy to pay, contributing to the spread of HIV.

Nokwazi Mbambo watched her life wash away in April, and little has changed 6 months later. Read more on how the climate change induced floods that destroyed her home.

The Umthombo Youth Development Foundation provides bursaries and mentorship to health science students from poor, rural backgrounds. Despite humble beginnings, these students are achieving exceptionally high pass rates. Here’s why.

Tens of thousands of community health workers in Rwanda are driving a powerful vaccination programme in the country that could make the East African nation the first country in the world to eliminate cervical cancer.

A vasectomy is a permanent form of contraception for men. During this surgical procedure, the tubes that take sperm from the testicles to the glands that make semen are cut — in about the time of a lunch break.

Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela leads the country’s medicines regulator, the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra), a public entity few people knew about until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. COVID triggered a noisy scramble for vaccines, tests and treatments that needed to be approved — often embroiled in politics.

Codeine is found in mild painkillers and cough syrups, and is sometimes mixed with Sprite or alcohol to make a drink called “lean”.

In the hospitals of 1980s South Africa, Naeemah Abrahams saw how often women showed up battered and bruised, a phenomenon her colleagues didn’t make much of. Three decades later, she’s one of the researchers turning the tide on gender-based violence.

Lesbian teenagers have a lower chance of getting a sexually transmitted infection, but the threat remains. Even though South Africa’s sex education curriculum includes all the right lessons to help pupils of all sexual identities have safe sex in theory, the information that filters through to them is still up to individual teachers.