Uwagbale Edward-Ekpu

As African food become global it is vital that the rich history and the stories behind African dishes be shared to the world as well.

Kenyan drugmaker Universal Corporation Ltd (UCL) has received WHO pre-qualification for a malaria medicine it markets as Wiwal.

Hi Quartz Africa members,

As countries across the world are easing or removing their covid-19 restrictions to open their economies and return to a normal life, countries in Africa are increasingly following suit, despite low vaccination rates.

If you are a Ghanaian boy of Akan origin who was born on a Sunday, it is very likely that you are named Kwasi. You share the same name as a bitter medicinal plant whose importance in the food and beverages sector is unrivaled – as far as bitters go. If you have ever had a beer, tonic water, bitter lemon soft drinks, bitters, aperitif liqueurs, or even marmalade or  dairy desserts, you may have already tasted the bitter flavor of Quassia Amara.

Unbeknownst to many, the origin of one of their favorite Latin dances—rumba—is actually the ancient kingdom of Kongo, that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring Congo-Brazzaville. This genre that was popularized in Cuba—and has since the beginning of the 20th century spread to countries in Latin America, Europe as well to Africa—has spurred several other music and dance genres across the globe.

In 2014, the British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver published his recipe of experimental jollof rice on his website which the site said was just a “Jamie’s twist” of the dish. This twist resulted in outrage among Africans in the continent and diaspora with thousands of comments on social media and Twitter hashtags such as #jollofgate.

The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), this week, has recommended Crizanlizumab, a medicine developed by Novartis pharmaceutical company, as a treatment for preventing recurrent pain crises in individuals aged 16 or over living with sickle cell disease.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has added its weight behind RTS,S vaccine (also known as Mosquirix), recommending it to be used widely for the prevention of malaria in children in Africa. The public health body says the recommendation is based on results from an ongoing pilot program in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi where more than 2.3 million doses of the vaccine have been administered to more than 800,000 children since 2019.

Scientists at the University of Oxford who were behind the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine have launched a phase 1 trial to test a new vaccine against plague. Centuries after causing one of the worst pandemics in history, the infectious disease (sometimes referred to as “Black Death” or pestilence) continues to afflict parts of Africa, which today accounts for 90% of all reported cases.

Following the remarkable success recorded for the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, BioNTech has announced the launch of a project aimed at developing the first mRNA-based malaria vaccine with the clinical trial planned for the end of 2022. The German biotech company—which together with its US partner Pfizer developed the first-ever approved mRNA vaccine—now plans to use this technology to address this killer disease.

In 1472, during one of the Portuguese voyages along the coast of west Africa, the Portuguese explorer, Ruy de Sequeira arrived on the coast of the Niger delta in present-day Nigeria. It was an area controlled by the powerful kingdom of Benin located in the hinterland north of the delta. The kingdom was not known to Europeans at the time, and this was the first time any European has ever reached this area.

When news broke out this past week that the EU’s new vaccine passport system would not let in recipients of the Indian-made version of the AstraZeneca vaccine, called Covishield, public backlash was swift.

After several months of working with China, Egypt is close to producing the first Chinese Covid-19 vaccine manufactured in Africa. It has received the first batch of the raw materials to make the shot, called Sinovac-Vacsera, and announced it will start producing the vaccine in June, according to Egyptian local media.

Last August, president Xi Jinping reportedly promised in a phone call with Morocco’s King Mohammed VI that China would prioritize delivering a Covid-19 vaccine to African nations once it had created one.

A global group of researchers recently released a preliminary study reporting that their malaria vaccine showed up to 77% efficacy in a one-year preliminary clinical trial involving 450 children in Burkina Faso.

Since the first approval of a Covid-19 vaccine for use by China in June 2020, more than 526.8 million doses of different vaccines have been administered worldwide. But there is a striking divide between continents, with vaccination rates in Africa among the lowest in the world.

Concerns have been raised that African countries may struggle to effectively deploy Covid-19 vaccines at the unprecedented scale needed to counter the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon’s new chief executive, who took over the company on July 5, 2021, made his name by launching one of the retail behemoth’s most profitable businesses—from South Africa. Andy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 as a technical assistant to Jeff Bezos, and started Amazon Web Services (AWS), of which he later became CEO. The web service business ushered in the era of cloud computing and now accounts for more than half of Amazon’s operating profit.

The new Covid-19 variant discovered in South Africa and found to be more infectious is becoming a dominant variant in the country and has driven the numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths to an all-time high leading to hospitals being overwhelmed.

The coronavirus pandemic in South Africa has reached a record new level driven by the more infectious novel Covid-19 variant—the 501Y.V2—discovered in the country on Dec. 19 and now set to be the dominant variant, according to local scientists.

As more African countries record the second wave of coronavirus infections, and some record novel and more infectious variants, African governments are turning toward Covid-19 vaccines produced by Russia, India, and China despite skepticism about some of these vaccines.

During the police brutality protests in Nigeria in October, bitcoin saved the day when the government shut out protesters from using local payment platforms for collecting donations to support it.

This month scientists successfully used gene editing for treating sickle cell disease, a hereditary disease common among people of African ancestry. This was done by identifying and cutting out a gene that instructs the production of the defective sickle-shaped cells in people with the disease.