Few economic and social benefits will come to Africans if processing is all done overseas, says Wanjira Mathai

Africa must take greater control in the industries it supplies with raw materials to lift its people from poverty and seize its own destiny in a low-carbon world, one of the continent’s leading environmentalists has urged.

Wanjira Mathai, the managing director for Africa and global partnerships at the World Resources Institute thinktank, said much more of what the continent produced must be processed and made use of close to where it is produced, if the world is to shift to a low-carbon footing.

Human Rights Watch demands investigation into killings in two villages just weeks after Russian troops fly in, amid intensifying conflict

Burkina Faso’s military summarily executed 223 civilians, including at least 56 children, in a single day in late February, according to an investigation into one of the worst abuses by the country’s armed forces for years.

The mass killings have been linked to a widening military campaign to tackle jihadist violence and happened weeks after Russian troops landed in the west African country to help improve security.

Home secretary visits Lampedusa in Italy as National Audit Office says scheme could surpass £580m by 2030

Several flights a month will deport asylum seekers to Rwanda “indefinitely”, the home secretary has said, as he argued that the £1.8m a person cost of the scheme was justified.

James Cleverly, in his first interview since the government’s plan was approved by parliament on Monday, said he had booked a succession of initial flights and was preparing to order the detention of people seeking refuge in the UK so they could be sent to east Africa.

As militias targeted the Masalit community in a wave of ethnic violence, one man offered shelter and an escape route across the border

Every night, for weeks at a time last year, Saad al-Mukhtar put a small group of people in the back of his Toyota Land Cruiser and drove them under the cover of darkness from his home in the Sudanese city of Geneina across the border and into Chad.

The operation was an extraordinary act of bravery and selflessness: Mukhtar is an Arab, and the people he was smuggling to safety were members of the darker skinned Masalit community who were being targeted in a vicious wave of ethnic violence perpetrated by Arab militias.

Westerners see elephants as pets, said Mokgweetsi Masisi, whose government threatened to send 30,000 elephants to Germany and the UK to demonstrate their dangers

Many Europeans value the lives of elephants more than those of the people who live around them, the president of Botswana has said, amid tensions over potential trophy hunting import bans .

Botswana recently threatened to send 30,000 elephants to the UK and Germany after both countries proposed stricter controls on hunting trophies. The country’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, said it would help people to understand human-wildlife conflict – which is among the primary threats to the species – including the experiences of subsistence farmers affected by crop-raiding by the animals.

Paul Kagame flew to UK for Champions League match while national police told citizens to restrict activities including football

The president of Rwanda, whose police force has asked the country’s populace to restrict football-related activities during the 30-year anniversary of the Rwanda massacre, is facing questions after flying to the UK and watching Arsenal play Bayern Munich.

Paul Kagame visited on Tuesday 9 April to watch the Champions League match in north London. Before the match, he visited Rishi Sunak at No 10 Downing Street, after giving civil servants just a few days’ notice of his visit. They discussed the UK’s deportation deal, which aims to send asylum seekers to Kigali to be processed there.

Satellite data indicates growing number of airstrikes on settlements, in a war that has already killed thousands

The number of villages in Sudan that have been destroyed or severely damaged by fire has risen sharply in recent weeks, suggesting the country’s conflict is intensifying as it enters its second year.

Satellite data revealed the number of Sudanese settlements set on fire in March increased to 30, the highest monthly total recorded since fighting broke out between the country’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last April.

The campaign that came to prominence when 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from their classes in 2014 has had an impact beyond its first rallying cries

It was a kidnapping that changed Nigeria’s image internationally. For many, the first inkling of what was going on in the country’s north-east was after April 2014, when 276 girls were snatched from a school in Chibok by the Islamist militia group Boko Haram. It came from social media postings from the then US first lady, Michelle Obama, from the actor Angelina Jolie and Pope Francis, holding up #BringBackOurGirls signs . That became the name of a movement, and a rallying cry for the girls’ release. Ten years on, the girls are not all back home. But some things have been achieved.

The Nigerian government, under President Goodluck Jonathan, saw the new movement as opposition. The actual opposition, the All Progressives Congress (APC) party, was smart enough to ally itself with #BBOG, quickly embracing the message. It was partly due to the movement’s ability to mobilise its increasingly vast online following to vote for the APC’s candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, that Jonathan lost the 2015 election – the first time in Nigeria’s postcolonial history that an incumbent had lost a re-election bid.

Two endurance sailors’ perilous voyage is supposed to lead them to empathy for refugees’ plight – but they sure take their time discovering that

Here is a well-intentioned but brief, unsatisfying and oddly structured documentary, supposedly about refugees and boat people … although the refugees’ experiences are only discussed in the final 10 minutes or so. The film is actually about two Egyptians, Omar Nour and Omar Samra, energetic and prosperous young entrepreneurs who in 2017, in a spirit of adventure, took on the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, a well-established annual endurance event with a good safety record in which participants journey in a rowing boat across the Atlantic from La Gomera in the Canaries to Antigua; it is a 3,000-nautical-mile, 40-day ordeal in treacherous seas.

After just nine days, these two guys got into terrible difficulties, perhaps as a result of their relative inexperience. Their craft capsized and they had to be dragged out of the water by a Greek cargo ship, a chaotic rescue that itself could have gone fatally wrong. It all sounds very tense, although as the two men are here being interviewed after the event, we know that they survived. So what was the point of this fiasco? Did they put their families and friends through an agony of worry, just for a macho ego trip? Well, around an hour in to this 70-minute film they tell us that they now appreciate the sufferings of boat people and refugees – some of whose testimonies are duly tacked on to the end of the film.