Africa

The 2006 election in the Democratic Republic of Congo was supposed to usher in a new period of peace and stability for the beleaguered, exhausted Congolese people. Instead, it made one of the country's most intractable problems worse. After the election, the small but powerful Tutsi community in Eastern Congo...

After six years of failed peace initiatives and continuing violence, displaced communities of Darfur are ready to fight.

Every year, thousands of women and young girls migrate from Ghana’s poorer, Muslim north to the major cities of the Christian south. Known as Kayayo, they travel to work as porters in city markets, and spend their days carrying heavy loads for meager wages. Due to a shortage of employment opportunities and money for housing, many end up sleeping on the streets or being coerced into sexual servitude in exchange for shelter.

Twenty-five years ago Abdullahi Tijjani had a vision for Kuki, a village in the north of Nigeria he became chief of at age 14: "Hunger will become a thing of the past once we marry modern technologies and traditional farming," he told reporter David Hecht when they met in...

Ug99, a virulent fungal disease, could create a major food security crisis by attacking the world's second largest crop, wheat.

Northern Sudan is a region that has largely been ignored, eclipsed by rebellion in Darfur and a civil war in the south that lasted two decades. But in villages along the Nile in the Nubian desert, far from the conflicts in other parts of the country, Sudanese people are...

In almost three decades of rule, Robert Mugabe's evolution from liberator to tyrant led Zimbabwe from democratic independence and its status as South Africa's breadbasket to a one-party state with an inflation rate over 231 million percent. Mugabe met early electoral wins by the opposition party Movement for Democratic...

Two rounds of civil war have engulfed Sudan for the last half century, killing two million people and displacing four million others. A fragile peace agreement signed in 2005 that gave autonomy to the south for six years is currently keeping Khartoum from attacking again, but many predict that...

In Ethiopia and Kenya, dry seasons grow longer and tribal conflict over access to water is on the rise, exacerbated by the proliferation of arms from Somalia. With clean water access scarce, the burden of securing a daily water supply has become a daunting task.

In December 2006, Ethiopia toppled Somalia's Islamic government, opening up another active front in the War on Terror. The Bush administration provided the invading troops with intelligence and diplomatic support, in an attempt to capture or kill three senior al-Qaeda operatives thought to be living under the protection of...

Reporter Ruthie Ackerman and photographer Andre Lambertson travel from Staten Island to Liberia, investigating the lives and struggles of Liberian youth after the 14-year civil war.

Seven years ago, Milton Ochieng' became the first person from his village in Kenya to receive a college scholarship in the United States. There was only one problem: His family could not afford the airfare. So neighbors in Lwala sold their cows, took out personal loans and raised nine hundred...