At a meeting in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh this month, China promised to double the aid it gives to Africa and even forgive the debt of some of the continent’s poorest countries.

We’ve known for some time that Chinese are migrating to Africa to exploit business opportunities. But it’s perhaps less known that growing numbers of Africans are also moving to China to live and work.

One of the most visible is Vimbayi Kajese, a 28-year-old Zimbabwean who reads the news on China Central Television - or CCTV - and is the country’s first African news presenter. 

CCTV 9, also known as CCTV International, is China’s state-run English language channel. As well as China, it’s available in more than 80 countries, of which six are in Africa — an increasingly important audience.

“I’ve been in China for over 3 years now,” Kajese told Reuters Africa Journal. “I came after I graduated from the U.S., and the reason why I came to China was because China is the next upcoming emerging market and definitely is the place to be.”

Kajese is one of an increasing number of young Africans heading to China, where a booming economy and ever-closer ties with Africa are creating opportunities as tempting as any in the West.

Tebogo Lefifi left her job as the CEO of a South African mining and property development firm and came to China. Now on a Chinese-funded scholarship to study Chinese economics, the 34-year-old wants to make sure Africans make the most of China’s growth. But some of that may have to wait until she’s mastered the language.
   
Lefifi is setting up an organisation for China-Africa discussion and networking in Beijing. Young African Professionals and Students, or YAPS, will eventually help African professionals and companies trying to get ahead in China.

There are also less formal opportunities. Frank Baelongandi, AKA DJ Kefra, has been playing in Beijing clubs for six years. He’s even been pronounced the capital’s best DJ. The 27-year-old from Kinshasa in the DRC originally came to study business, before taking up a residency at Vic’s, one of the capital’s biggest clubs.    

“I felt the energy, the opportunity, and I felt the magnitude,” he said. “So I just decided ‘OK I think that’s the place I should stay.’”

China’s African community has grown dramatically in the last decade. Experts estimate as many as 250,000 Africans are in the country at any one time, most of them traders in the thriving south. So it looks like ambitious young Africans are likely to keep heading out of Africa, and into China, in the years to come.

Five-year-old Onarietta Remet is Nigeria’s most popular child painter. She’s been painting for four years now and has even sold some of her pieces.

Her father, Pius Remet, says everybody in the family is into painting and other artistic pursuits.

“When I grow up, what I want to do is paint,” Onarietta told Reuters Africa Journal in Lagos.

Art critic Dapo Adeniyi says talent such as Onarietta’s should be nurtured. “It’s a plus for us as a country that such energies are coming out.”

Onarietta showed an interest in painting when she was just 18 months old. Her parents have since encouraged her and even organised five exhibitions to show her work.

Onarietta has now done more than 150 paintings. Her parents say one of them has been sold to an international collector for $10,000, although most of her work is not being put up for sale.

How do you rate Onarietta’s paintings?

Kenya’s Maasai warriors are known for being fearless lion killers but times have changed and the country’s lion’s population is in danger of being wiped out. Now the Maasai in southern Kenya are taking part in an initiative to preserve the big cats.

For thousands of years the Maasai co-existed with huge herds of wildlife. Their lion-killing rituals kept down the number of lions preying on the game while their fearsome reputation as warriors kept the herds safe from other humans. The result, Kenya’s wildlife heritage is a wonder of the modern world.

But Kenya’s lions, a huge tourist attraction, are being decimated. From tens of thousands, only around 2,000 survive.

Lion researcher Amy Howard told Reuters Africa Journal that Maasai are now being recruited as Lion Guardians: “The problems are that these lions are coming into bomas, they’re attacking livestock, goats and cows and the communities are getting angry about this. In the past they used to go out on hunting parties and try and kill the lions in revenge and also as a rite of passage for the warriors.

“So what we are doing is we are employing warriors here to conserve the lions. They go out and track them and tell their communities where they are so they know not to herd there. So we’re tying to reduce the amount of conflict that we’re getting between the livestock and lions.”

Lion Guardians use an electronic device that will help them track a dozen or so lions that they and the researchers have been able to collar.

The Guardians often walk huge distances to pinpoint the exact location of the collared lions. But while the tracking device helps them locate collared lions, uncollared lions still require traditional tracking skills.

The Lion Guardians work alongside other conservation efforts in the area. The Maasailand Preservation Trust oversees a programme that compensates herders when they lose livestock to lions, hyenas and other predators.

But not everyone is happy, as cattle owner Solomon Lotobulua explains: “We are told to simply watch when lions attack our animals, that we would be compensated. The agreement we reached was that for one cow attacked we would be paid $200. But now we’re only paid $160. So we are saying that unless things change, by the end of the year, we will chase away the lion projects.”

The Maasai are in a difficult position, caught between the need to conserve Kenya’s wildlife and a historical animosity towards anything that might kill their cattle. But as Lion Guardians they are helping their community reclaim a place at the centre of Kenya’s conservation efforts.

Africans living in the United States are twice as likely to graduate from college as the average American.

These African students often come from families who value education as a way to get on in life and place a high value on working and studying hard.

Sara Tsegaye, a straight-A student at UCLA, is one example of that success. Her parents fled Ethiopia in the late 1980s, first to Sudan and then, when Sara was one year old, they moved to San Jose, California.

Sara’s father works on a mobile ice cream truck in San Jose and her mother used to be a factory worker before she got laid off.

“We manage to pay for school because I’ve been working since I was 11,” Sara told Reuters Africa Journal. “I’ve been working with my dad on his ice cream truck, he’s been paying me and I’ve been saving the money. Also I had two jobs in high school and I saved up a lot of money. I understand the value of money.”

Sara wants to work with an NGO or a non-profit organisation after she graduates. She wants to travel and she wants to make a difference in the world. Other African students say they want to go home once they get a bit of experience in their careers.

But Africa is suffering from a massive brain drain just now and it’s questionable whether enough of those highly motivated students from America will return home in large enough numbers to really make a difference.

When Hillary Clinton visited the Democratic Republic of Congo in August, she spoke out against rape and said women should not be used as “weapons of war”.

The Secretary of State wanted Congo’s government to do more to stop sexual violence and prosecute offenders in an area where armed groups still use rape to terrorise local people seven years after the war was meant to have ended.

In Kiwanja in eastern Congo, counsellors are trying to rebuild the lives of rape victims, both women and men.

A 62-year-old widow, who does not want to give her real name, says she was attacked and repeatedly raped by a group of youths, who also killed her 20-year-old son.

“Esther” has already received medical help at a local hospital and is now being treated for psychological trauma.

Counsellor Mariette Paluku Nzaira says it is vital for rape victims to seek help.

“The advantage of counselling centres like this one is that when someone faces these kinds of problems they feel unworthy,” she told Reuters Africa Journal. “Often when the husband finds out he chases his wife away.”

For men such as “Francois” who have been raped, counselling is also important if they are to make sense of what has happened to them.

“Men who are raped have a feeling of anger. They are wondering how this could have
happened to them,” said counsellor Katungo Kilauri

“It is important for victims to go for counselling because when you have a problem and you don’t speak to someone about it, you can die. When you let out what is in your heart, the bad feelings go away.”

These counsellors are trying to raise awareness of sexual violence by encouraging more people to talk about it.

But is that enough? Human rights groups say hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped in Congo in the past decade by government forces and rebels. The perpetrators are almost never brought to justice.

Is the soaring gold price a ticket to a better life for struggling freelance miners in Burkina Faso?

The impoverished West African country is trying to revive its gold mining industry, spurred by the global financial crisis and the need to reduce the economy’s dependence on cotton.

Near the village of Mogen in northeastern Burkina Faso, artisanal miners are engaged in a dangerous hunt for gold in hand-dug pits.

Landslips kill miners almost every year, although mostly during the rainy season. When it’s dry, children help sift the soil in search of the nuggets that pay for food and school fees.

On a good day, a miner will unearth around five milligrams of gold, which earns about $10. But often they come up empty.

Jeremi Nacanabo, who helps run an association of informal gold miners, told Reuters Africa Journal: “We don’t have the technology to take out the gold. Right now we’re working in a traditional way, which creates enormous problems and causes many accidents.”

But gold mining in Burkina Faso is experiencing a revival after a halt in the late 1990s caused by poor management and inadequate capital.

Analysts say poor prices for cotton, the country’s main export, have rekindled interest in mining. The financial crisis is tempting investors to buy low-risk assets such as gold, which is now selling for about $1,000 per ounce.

Burkina Faso revised its mining codes in 2003 to attract foreign investors with tax breaks.

The goal is to join the ranks of Africa’s top producers — South Africa, Ghana and Mali — within the next three years.

In the dusty northeast of the country, the Taparko-Somita mine, which is run by the
Canadian-listed, Russian-controlled company High River Gold, is the first of four gold mines that have begun operating in the past two years.

Together they produced 5.5 tonnes in 2008 and they are heading for more than that this year. The government takes a 10 percent free stake in each mine.

Local miners, who once worked for themselves, are finding jobs with the mining companies. They earn a salary, work in safer conditions and are given training.

But even with the recent gold rush, Burkina Faso is still struggling to revive its economy and provide basic services for its 13 million people.

Of course everyone can’t be part of the gold mining revival, but global demand for Burkina Faso’s natural resources could at least provide some trickle-down benefit for the economy.

Millions of years ago, Madagascar separated from the other continents and evolved separately. Today it has about 12,000 plants most of which can be found nowhere else in the world. Many of these plants have medicinal properties, but their habitat is under threat.

In the town of Tolear, people rely on herbs as the nearest hospital is far away. Traditional healers combine plants and a little bit of magic to cure patients.

“The forest helps us to cure all illnesses,” Dimbiraza, a traditional healer, told Reuters Africa Journal. “So we need to preserve the forest everywhere in the world, not just in Madagascar, in the world because the forest is nature. It’s our second God. There’s God up there and the forest is our second God.”

The forest around Tolear is like a huge natural pharmacy.

Malagasy companies such as Homeopharma manufacture plant products for sale at home and for export to Europe and the United States.

Claude Ratsimivony, the company’s chairman, says the market is seeing growth rates of 30 to 40 percent and there are still medicinal plants to be discovered.

“We still have not discovered everything. We know that there are about 12,000 species, but Madagascar is a country that is mysterious in the respect that it still guards the secrets of its traditional healers.”

But some of Madagascar’s plant secrets may be lost before they can even be found as forests are being cut down for charcoal and farming.

The government has initiated several conservation projects and wants to do more to preserve the plants that contribute to both modern and traditional medicine. It will be interesting to see if they can keep ahead of the slashers and burners.

A project in Ethiopia that helps destitute women become self-reliant by providing them with paid employment has attracted a lot of attention from politicians visiting Addis Ababa for an international get-together.

Alem Abebe is a 14-year-old girl who left home three years ago and made her way to the capital. She now earns 50 US cents a day working at the Abebech Gobena project in one of the city’s slums. It’s not enough to send money home, but enough to survive — and to pay for night school.

But by the World Bank definition, Abebe and other women working at the project are still extremely poor: they earn much less than the daily income of $1.25 or roughly one euro that’s now used to measure poverty.

But the whole point isn’t to hand out money for free: but to help women who would be on the street get a job, an education - and a future.

It’s a departure from previous aid models, which saw large sums handed over by the West to African countries, a system that some say hasn’t really helped the world’s poorest continent.

“The model that’s coming up or that I’m proposing is essentially a model where Africa and Africans become equal partners with the rest of the world, not one where there’s a donor and a recipient where Africans are viewed as secondary citizens,” Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian author, told Reuters Africa Journal.

“This is really an environment where Africans are getting something, they’re getting paid for doing something, for being entrepreneurs, for generating something, for building products, for establishing infrastructure. It’s not the aid model where you get money for nothing,” said Moyo, whose book Dead Aid argues that Western generosity often doesn’t actually help in the long run.

Today the global financial crisis means that Western countries are trying to save their own economies and are no longer prepared to spend so much on aid. So is direct aid still a solution. Or are small projects that generate employment better at fighting poverty?

The people of Karamoja in north-eastern Uganda have made ritual sacrifices for as long as anyone can remember, slaughtering their precious animals to ask for rain.

But even this age-old belief hasn’t been able to protect the Karamajong from a drought that has now gone on for 4 years. They still sacrifice because they have nowhere else to turn.

“I don’t know why the rains have disappeared. We believe it is God who has stopped the rain. God is punishing us for our sins, so we must unite and pray that God will listen to us,” clan elder Laurien Lokwareng told Reuters Africa Journal.

Environmentalists blame the situation here on climate change. Forest cover is decreasing around the world and populations are growing. High carbon emissions from industries and big cities are contributing to global warming.

Today, unusual weather has become commonplace — storms, longer drier spells and fluctuating temperatures.    

Africa only contributes 4 percent of global carbon emissions; the United States and China together contribute almost 40 percent. But regardless of emissions, the effects are felt most by poor communities because their resources were already stretched before the weather started changing.

The U.N. World Food Program provides food aid to at least 970,000 of Karamoja’s 1.1 million people.
Karamoja is mostly populated by pastoralist communities who keep livestock and migrate in search of pasture. Because of the drought, their animals have to move further and further to find food, and many are dying of hunger. The migrating herds also catch and spread new diseases as they move into different areas.

In places like Karamoja — already plagued by violence due to armed cattle raids between ethnic groups — less water is likely to make insecurity worse. Over the years, residents here have been forced to diversify into farming. But the crops are failing and there is widespread hunger. A recent report by British charity OXFAM predicted hunger is likely to deliver “climate change’s most savage impact on humanity in the near future”.

Experts warn Uganda will lose its entire forest cover in the next 50 years if the
government does not stop the rapid deforestation. The Karamajong are now being encouraged to plant trees and receive seedlings from charities.    

But the problems affecting the Karamoja are too big for them to solve on their own.

Without the commitment of the world’s biggest economies and industries to take drastic measures to reverse the effects of climate change, traditional communities like these may cease to exist, and future generations will inherit a world that was destroyed by those who came before them.

In a small courtroom in eastern Burundi, state prosecutor Nicodeme Gahimbare waves a bone at the judges and the eight men lined up in front of them, as he states his case.

It’s a human bone.

The eight men are on trial for murdering albinos and trying to sell their body parts across the border in Tanzania, where some people believe that using albino body parts in witchcraft can bring wealth and good fortune. Some of the body parts found are now on display for all to see.

The grisly case shocked people far beyond the courthouse in the Burundian town of Ruyigi, where three of the men got a life sentence and the other five got 20 years in prison for aiding and abetting.

For Kazungu Kassim, a spokesman for Burundi’s albinos, the sentences were a victory. “It gives the Burundi Albinos Association a lot of courage because it shows that the government is on our side,” he told Reuters Africa Journal after the trial. “I think it could reduce the amount of attacks on albinos and I also think it might discourage anyone who was intending to endanger the life of an albino in our country.”

It was the first in a series of cases in which the governments of Burundi and Tanzania are finally trying to bring some of those behind the albino murders to justice. More than 50 albinos — who lack pigment in their skin, eyes and hair — have been killed in the two countries, presumably to fuel the cross-border trade in their sought-after body parts.

Tanzania opened five new cases last month, and Burundi passed down another sentence on July 23, condemning one more person to life in prison.

Both countries are also trying to convince ordinary citizens to help in the arrest of those responsible. But it’s little consolation for those who have already lost a loved one in such a brutal and horrific way.

Outside her hut, Leonie Kabura cradles her baby twins. They’re all she has left. Until a few months ago, her 16-year-old daughter helped to care for them. But she was albino, one of the 11 who was murdered in Burundi.

Her husband had left her because of the stigma attached to albinism here.

“Those people who were arrested should rot in prison,” says Leonie bitterly. “If the
government can kill them, then they should, because they are the reason for my hunger.”

Many albinos in this region still live in fear of being attacked and killed, and in Ruyigi town, the government has rented a safe house guarded by the police, where about 25 albinos have found shelter.
“We used to get along well with everybody,” says Godefroid Hakizimana. “That’s changed now. We’re being told that they’re going to kill us to earn lots of money.”

Africa is thought to have the highest concentration of albinos in the world. Only about 200 live in Burundi, but an estimated 200,000 live across the border in Tanzania. 

In the main city Dar es Salaam, people were horrified by what’s been happening.

 “I want to tell my fellow Tanzanians not to get conned by these witchdoctors,” says Catherine Nguni. “They themselves are looking for wealth, so how can they make you rich?”

Pamela Mcheka, also a Dar resident, is herself an albino. “My family tells me to be careful at night and that I should stay indoors,” she says. “I just hope God will watch over us.”