Category: Medical

Zimbabwe resumed in-classroom teaching this week, but thousands of teachers are protesting salaries that are below the poverty level and a lack of personal protective equipment against COVID-19.

Zimbabwe’s Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union says it will only call off the strike when the government addresses the concerns.

“And there is negligence on the part of the authorit(ies) to make sure that there is enough safety to guarantee our teachers and learners from the pandemic,” said Robson Chere, secretary general of the teachers union. “They should have been providing adequate water supply, enough PPEs. Arcturus Primary School, which is down here, hasn’t even water. It’s messy. It’s a disaster. We are sitting on a time bomb for both learners and teachers.”

Authorities did not allow VOA into Arcturus Primary School, which is about 40 kilometers east of Harare.

Some students around Harare have been going to school since Monday to try to learn among themselves, as there are no teachers.

The teachers union warns that classrooms may turn into COVID-19 superspreaders. But Taungana Ndoro, director of communications and advocacy at Zimbabwe’s Education Ministry, says the government has been working to ensure classrooms are safe.

“We have been putting in new infrastructure to ensure that we decongest the existing infrastructure to ensure that there is social and physical distancing for the prevention and management of COVID-19,” Ndoro said.

“We have also made sure that our schools have adequate supplies of sanitizers and water. So, it is looking good. We have got single-seated desks now, instead of two- or three-seated desks. This is to encourage social distancing. We do not have bunk beds anymore in our boarding schools. We have got single beds and spacing of at least one-and-half to two meters. So, it is encouraging.”

UNICEF Zimbabwe has been helping students and the government during the COVID-19 lockdown.

“The two-key approaches were, one: How we can support the loss of learning as a result of school closure. The second one was: How to keep the school safe and ready for children to return to school,” said Niki Abrishamian, UNICEF Zimbabwe’s education manager. “We managed to produce more than 1,600 radio lessons as part of alternative learning approaches. We had to look at how to take learning to the children, especially when they were at home and did not have access to schooling.”

Zimbabwe’s teachers hope such organizations can assist the government and supply the resources they require — adequate PPEs against COVID-19 and salaries that allow them to live above the poverty line.

Zimbabwe currently has 124,773 confirmed coronavirus infections and 4,419 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the global outbreak.

Source: Voice of America

A Congolese military court has upheld the rape convictions of eight policemen and 11 soldiers, a court official told AFP Tuesday.

The judgment, which was handed down on Monday, means they will serve between 12 months and 20 years in jail.

The rapes were committed mainly against minors, according to the court in South Kivu province, in the troubled far east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The defendants were also ordered to pay damages and interest, sources said.

“This appeal trial has been exemplary for women’s rights,” Innocent Mayembe Sangala, a top official of the South Kivu military court, told AFP.

Congolese justice was “extremely rigorous regarding rape, especially the rape of children,” he said.

Victims included children ranging in age from 3 months to 17 years, Sangala told AFP, adding that they included “women who were torn away from their husbands or raped in front of their brothers or children.”

The atrocities were “so savage” that the court could not be lenient, Sangala said.

The rapes were committed between 2016 and 2021 in several South Kivu towns.

Source: Voice of America

Kenya is stepping up its COVID-19 vaccination campaign by setting up inoculation centers in public spaces like malls, markets, and bus stops. Authorities hope the extra convenience will lift a vaccination rate that stands at just 2%.

At a bus terminal in Nairobi, hundreds of people wait to get vaccinated. It’s an exercise that has saved them long-distance travel to the designated vaccination centers.

Walter Juma, a public bus conductor, is getting ready to receive his first COVID-19 jab. He said because of the demanding nature of his job, he could not find the time to go for vaccination at the health facilities.

“The vaccination is now near my place of work and home,” Walter said. “This has helped a lot. There are other people who cannot walk for long, the elderly and some are sick.”

Health officials said the number of people turning up for their vaccinations has doubled since more inoculation sites opened a month ago. Jackline Kerubo is a sub-county medical officer.

“We’ve decided to come to the community because usually we give Monday to Friday at our public health facilities, but you find most people don’t have time to come, so we decided to come to the community so that we increase accessibility to the vaccine,” Jackline said.

Kenya is receiving more vaccine doses from the U.S. government and other nations, so the supply is much better than during the first phase of the vaccination program.

With its new vaccination strategy, Kenya’s vaccination taskforce chairman, Dr. Willies Akhwale, says they are hoping to vaccinate at least 10 million people by the end of the year.

“We are now using about 800 centers, and we are going to gradually increase this to 3,000 centers by December,” Willies said. “Increasing them means you are reaching people; you are opening vaccination center closer to where people are.”

So far, 2.5 million people have received the first dose of the vaccine in Kenya.

Source: Voice of America

BERLIN— African leaders attending a summit in Germany renewed calls for Covid-19 vaccine patent waivers, saying the decision would allow countries access to affordable jabs.

Africa has administered the least vaccines of any continent while some richer countries have inoculated nearly their entire adult populations.

African countries have mostly relied on multilateral and bi-lateral donations. Activists have called the inequity vaccine apartheid.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called the unequal access to vaccines ‘not fair’.

“We expressed our disappointment, we expressed our unhappiness, and said that it’s not fair that Africa has only vaccinated only 2% of the entire population of the 1.3 billion population and yet, the more developed countries in the north have vaccinated up to 60%,” Rampahosa said

German Chancellor Angela Merkel who has rejected calls to waive vaccines patents said it was a ‘dramatic injustice’ that Africa’s vaccination rates remained low.

“The availability, as well as the production of the vaccines, is linked to the economic wellbeing of the African continent and when we see today that we have vaccinated more than 60% of our population and that it is 2% in Africa, it is, of course, a dramatic injustice which we need to overcome, we talked about that honestly today,” she said.

On Friday, German laboratory BioNTech announced that it was aiming to set up vaccine production centers in Rwanda and Senegal next year

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

ACCRA, Ghana has received a sum of 1 billion U.S. dollars from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to boost its post-COVID-19 economic recovery, the Ministry of Finance said.

The package is part of the fund’s 650-billion-dollar package approved to support the post-COVID economic recovery in IMF member states.

“The new allocation will meet the additional financing needs of the country, caused by the impact of the pandemic on public financing,” said the release on Friday.

The gesture from the IMF “provides additional policy space to support Ghana’s efforts to counter the impact of the pandemic on lives and livelihoods,” Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said.

He added that the government would follow all statutory requirements in spending the IMF support funding.

In 2020, Ghana received an initial package of 1 billion dollars from IMF to support its fight against the pandemic.

Source: NAM News Network

A World Health Organization official said Thursday that the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on the continent appeared to be stabilizing, but numbers of infections are still very high, with almost 248,000 new cases reported in the past week alone.

During a virtual briefing on the status of the pandemic in Africa, WHO Africa Regional Director Matshidiso Moeti said that 24 countries were seeing a resurgence of infections and that deaths were rising in eight countries.

She said, “This is a preventable tragedy if African countries can get fair access to the vaccines.”

Moeti said the good news was that 13 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the past week, triple that of the previous week. She said many of the doses came from donations and sharing arrangements through the WHO-administered COVAX vaccine cooperative.

She said 117 million doses were due to arrive in Africa in the coming month. But to meet the goal of having at least 10 percent of the continent vaccinated by the end of September, she said, another 34 million doses will be needed.

The WHO Africa director urged nations with ample supplies to keep sharing doses. She said, “With international solidarity we can protect those at highest risk of COVID-19 in all countries in the world.”

She also encouraged African governments to ensure that staffing and financial resources were available when shots arrived “to get vaccines into the arms of our populations. No precious doses should be wasted.”

Source: Voice of America

Hundreds of Boko Haram militants attacked a military post in southern Niger overnight, killing 16 soldiers and wounding nine more, the defense ministry said on Wednesday.

About 50 of the Islamist militants were killed in the resulting combat in the West African country’s Diffa region and significant quantities of weapons were recovered, the ministry said in a statement.

The Boko Haram insurgency broke out in northeastern Nigeria in 2009, but violence frequently spills over into neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon in the Lake Chad Basin.

In December, an attack blamed on Boko Haram killed 28 people and burned 800 homes in the Diffa region.

Source: Voice of America