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Africa Uncensored

In Kenya’s Bungoma County, girls are growing up holding babies instead of books

Sharon sits on the edge of a wooden bed in Bukembe, gently rocking her infant to sleep. She is 16. Her baby is seven months old. She became pregnant in Grade Six. Her mother, the family’s sole breadwinner, died in October 2025. Her father, James, is old, partially blind, and unemployed. The boy who impregnated her, a 17-year-old, still walks freely in the village.“I was supposed to be in school,” Sharon says softly, adjusting the baby’s blanket. “Now I stay home.”Her story is not an anomaly. In Bungoma County in western Kenya, teenage pregnancy, HIV infections, and gender-based violence are rising together, feeding off poverty, silence, and a protection system that repeatedly fails the girls it is meant to serve. Health officials and legislators now call it a “Triple Threat”.On November 21, 2025, at an engagement forum in Mt. Elgon, the Kenya Women Senators Association (KEWOSA) declared Bungoma’s adolescent health crisis a national emergency, citing rising teenage pregnancies, persistent sexual violence, and new HIV infections among young people. With 66 per cent of the county’s population under 24, nearly 30 per cent are aged between 10 and 19.Senator Veronica Maina said the forum identified three urgent failures: stalled funding for adolescent health programs, weak follow-up on defilement cases, and limited youth-friendly health services in rural areas. “Declarations are meaningless without budgets and timelines,” Maina said, committing KEWOSA to push for ring-fenced funding for adolescent health, stronger oversight of the Children Act (2022), and parliamentary scrutiny of defilement prosecution rates.County officials present pledged to expand youth-friendly services and strengthen community reporting mechanisms. No public timelines or budget figures were issued. KEWOSA said it would pursue both through Senate committees.For Sharon’s family, the distance between political commitment and daily reality is not abstract. James reported his daughter’s case to village elders, the assistant chief, and local administrators. Each time, he was told to handle it at home.“No one wanted to record a statement,” James says. “They told me the boy is also young, that the court will only bring shame.”The case never reached court. Sharon was quietly withdrawn from school. No social worker followed up. No education officer intervened.In 2024, Bungoma reported 192 new HIV infections among adolescents, with an estimated 2,800 youths living with HIV. Adolescent pregnancies remain high, with 122,003 cases recorded between 2016 and 2024, and one in five girls attending their first ANC visit in 2024 is an adolescent. Cases of SGBV among adolescents surged from 32 in 2016 to 805 in 2024, with 41 per cent of cases affecting young people. Socio-economic vulnerabilities, including high poverty, early sexual activity, and alcohol use, further intensify the crisis.Community leaders trace the resurgence of the crisis to the withdrawal of donor funding that once supported HIV awareness, school outreach, and survivor services. Programs run by NGOs that operated between 2010 and 2018 ended without transition plans or county takeover.County budget reviews from recent years show adolescent health often bundled into general health allocations, with no clear line items for outreach, counselling, or school-based prevention. Former NGO workers say awareness campaigns stopped abruptly when grants expired, leaving trained peer educators idle and communities uninformed.Ann Barasa, Director of Gender at the Bungoma County Commissioner’s Office, traces the crisis to overlapping causes. “Poverty is part of it, culture is part of it, awareness level is part of it,” she says. “If you put all those things together, the result is a higher level of GBV.”In Mt. Elgon specifically, Barasa points to the legacy of community violence. “When children are exposed to trauma, they grow up with it. Girls are used for sex when they go to fetch firewood in the forest.”She also names cultural practices that create specific vulnerabilities. During Bukusu circumcision ceremonies, she says, adolescent girls face heightened exposure to sexual activity. Girls raised by stepfathers after their mothers remarry face elevated risks of abuse and incest within the home. “So we have a lot of incest cases here,” Barasa says.“Amina” not her real name,  is 15. She was attacked while collecting firewood last year. Her family never reported it.At Korosondiet S.A. Primary School in Mt. Elgon, headteacher Martin Napwora has watched the crisis grow. Teenage pregnancies in his school are not new, he says, but numbers have increased compared to five years ago — a deterioration he links directly to the collapse of donor-funded programmes.“When NGOs left, nothing replaced them,” Napwora says. “Schools try to invite health workers to teach life skills under budget challenges.”Programmes that ran between roughly 2010 and 2018 ended without transition plans or government takeover. Peer educators trained under those schemes were left idle. Awareness campaigns stopped when grants expired.

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CIO Africa

Digital Finance For AI-Driven Economies: Africa’s Role In The Next Phase Of Cross-Border Commerce

Africa’s relevance to the evolution of global finance is significant. The continent’s experience, particularly in cross-border payments, provides a glimpse into what tomorrow’s increasingly digital, data-driven global financial system could look like.As artificial intelligence (AI), automation and real-time data reshape how businesses make decisions, manage supply chains and deploy capital, the infrastructure that moves money across borders must evolve too. The question is no longer simply how quickly a payment can move. It is whether financial infrastructure can provide the intelligence, interoperability, liquidity and trust required to support an increasingly real-time global economy.Africa is already confronting many of these challenges. Its financial landscape spans more than 50 economies, multiple currencies, regulatory regimes, payment systems and levels of digital maturity. That complexity creates friction, but it has also made the continent an important environment for financial innovation.Mobile money, agency banking, digital identity and alternative payment solutions demonstrate how innovation in response to local needs can achieve much wider relevance. The next opportunity is to connect these innovations across borders in ways that support trade, inclusion and trusted financial participation.Initiatives such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), SADC regional clearing arrangements and interoperability programmes in East and West Africa are already creating opportunities to reduce friction and connect markets. But building more payment rails is only part of the answer. The next phase of digital finance will depend on making different rails work intelligently together.For Absa CIB, operating across and connecting clients into diverse African markets provides a close view of this evolution. Our experience suggests that solving for cross-border commerce requires more than technology alone. It requires the combination of regional connectivity, local-market knowledge, liquidity capability and trusted financial infrastructure to help clients navigate different currencies, regulations and payment environments.African clients increasingly expect to know where a payment is, what it will cost, when it will arrive and what is required to complete it successfully. As payments become faster and increasingly instant, those expectations create new challenges for banks. Liquidity has to be managed more dynamically, fraud must increasingly be prevented before a transaction takes place rather than detected afterwards, and payment data needs to become richer and more useful. Institutions must also make decisions across multiple currencies, markets and regulatory environments in real time.This is where AI and intelligent automation have an increasingly important role to play. Better use of data can support predictive liquidity forecasting, transaction monitoring, automated exception management and proactive fraud prevention. Standards such as ISO 20022 can provide richer transaction information, while APIs can connect payment, treasury and client platforms more effectively.But the real opportunity is not automation for its own sake. It is combining intelligent technology with trusted financial infrastructure.That distinction matters. In financial services, speed cannot come at the expense of governance, compliance or security. AI may help institutions make faster and better-informed decisions, but those decisions still need to operate within strong regulatory and risk frameworks. This is particularly important as instant and increasingly irreversible payments require fraud controls to move from detection and recovery towards prediction, prevention and real-time intervention.The future of cross-border finance is also unlikely to be defined by one winning payment technology. Traditional correspondent banking, instant payment systems, regional settlement networks, tokenised deposits, regulated stablecoins and potentially central bank digital currencies could coexist for some time.The challenge is therefore interoperability. A payment system that is exceptionally fast within one closed network but difficult to connect to another does not solve the wider problem of cross-border commerce. Financial institutions need to connect different systems while managing liquidity, foreign exchange, settlement risk, regulation and financial-crime controls.This means correspondent banking is not necessarily disappearing. It is being reinvented.The correspondent bank of the future is less of a passive intermediary and increasingly a trusted connector across financial ecosystems, helping clients navigate multiple payment rails, currencies and jurisdictions while providing liquidity, market access, transparency and regulatory confidence. This is particularly relevant in Africa, where local-market knowledge remains critical even as financial infrastructure becomes more digital.For businesses, the significance of this evolution extends well beyond moving money faster. Many multinational organisations operating across Africa have traditionally maintained multiple banking relationships, prefunded local accounts and held significant working-capital buffers because of uncertainty around payment timing, liquidity and currency availability.

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The Sun

Burnham says ‘all together now’ but the problem is he will ALWAYS put what Labour wants above what Britain needs

PM’s far too hopey clappy ANDY Burnham’s message to unite the country yesterday was: “All together now.” The problem is the Prime Minister will always put what the Labour Party wants above what Britain needs. His first conference speech as leader and PM was designed to delight the faithful. There was plenty of Left-wing tub-thumping about...

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Citizen Digital

FBI official tells hackers to get in touch, says 'we know how to find you'

FBI Assistant Director Brett Leatherman ​said the recent arrest of a Dutch man in connection with ⁠the ShinyHunters investigation should serve as a warning. FILE - An FBI seal is displayed on a wall in Omaha, Nebraska, Aug. 10, 2022.A senior FBI official has made an unusually public ‌request to the hacking group ShinyHunters, telling the cybercriminals on Tuesday they should get in touch following a wide-ranging breach of the bureau's job site.In a video address ​posted to X on Tuesday, FBI Assistant Director Brett Leatherman ​said the recent arrest of a Dutch man in connection with ⁠the ShinyHunters investigation should serve as a warning."Other groups believed anonymity ​or their friends would protect them, and they were wrong," said Leatherman, ​who leads the FBI's Cyber Division. "You know how to find us, and we know how to find you. I suggest you reach out first while the choice ​is still yours."Although couched as a threat, Leatherman's request to open ​a channel of communication between law enforcement and the hackers is the latest indication ‌of ⁠just how seriously the bureau is taking the breach, which has compromised sensitive medical records, Social Security numbers, family information, and intelligence-related details of named FBI staffers.An internal memo distributed across the FBI said ​officials were operating ​under the assumption ⁠that every employee had been e...

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Citizen Digital

Football overload leaves players near 'breaking point', warns Tebas

The Spaniard told a performance and health summit in London, co-hosted by global players' union FIFPRO, it is vital that governing bodies such as FIFA and UEFA take firm action. France's forward #10 Kylian Mbappe reacts after picking up an injury following his team's first goal during the UEFA Nations League (League A, Group 1) first leg football match between Turkey and France at the Kocaeli Stadium in Izmit, on September 25, 2026. (Photo by FRANCK FIFE / AFP) Related contentLa Liga president Javier Tebas has warned that footballers have a "breaking point" as he highlighted the injury risks of an increasingly packed global calendar.The Spaniard told a performance and health summit in London, co-hosted by global players' union FIFPRO, it is vital that governing bodies such as FIFA and UEFA take firm action.He highlighted the expanded Club World Cup, first held in 2025, and the inaugural 48-team World Cup, staged in North America this year, as events that added to an already heavy workload."Some players can still cope more or less, but ultimately there's a breaking point that's unstoppable," Tebas said on Tuesday."If we don't stop, and in my view, if we don't put it into reverse, the overall system is going to be much worse, because it's impossible."Now they've announced a World Cup with more national teams, they've announced a Club World Cup with more clubs, more summers spent...

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