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.

Pressure piles on World Bank and IMF to steer countries to low-carbon transition at spring summit

Governments of wealthy countries must pledge hundreds of billions more in overseas aid payments channelled through the World Bank to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis, civil society experts and economists have said.

The International Development Association fund, the arm of the World Bank that disburses loans and grants to poor countries, is worth about $93bn (£b75n) but that figure must be roughly tripled by 2030, according to economic experts .

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.

Many low-income nations are having to spend more on interest payments than vital sustainability goals. That needs to change

Blighted by the effects of global heating, beset by food insecurity and rising poverty, and hobbled by dollar-denominated debt that leaves no fiscal room for manoeuvre, some of the world’s poorest nations are enduring a perfect storm. In the wake of Covid and then the war in Ukraine, inflation and high interest rates have tipped many over the edge: between 2020 and 2023 there were 18 sovereign defaults in 10 developing countries – more than in the previous two decades. Others are either in debt distress or close to it.

As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund hold their annual spring meetings in Washington this week, this dismal state of affairs should be at the top of delegates’ agendas. Prior to the pandemic, the 2020s had been earmarked as a transformative decade – one in which developing nations would make vital progress towards climate targets and eliminating extreme poverty and hunger. Instead, due to events beyond those countries’ control, there has been what a World Bank report this week described as a “great reversal”. In countries classified as eligible for grants and loans from the bank’s International Development Association (IDA), a quarter of the population is now surviving on less than $2.15 a day – the global definition of poverty.

Between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans were​ massacred in 100 days between April and​ June 1994.​ The ethnic genocide by Hutu militias ended with the seizure of power by the​ Tutsi troops of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, who has now been president for 24 years.

In Kigali last year, French photographer Julien Daniel collected testimonies of some of the city’s young people born since the genocide and who have grown up knowing only one leader

• Photographs by Julien Daniel/MYOP

More than 80,000 Nigerian women died from pregnancy-related complications in 2020, a statistic activists say reflects a lack of political will to fix a broken medical system

Despite having the largest economy in Africa, Nigeria also loses more women to death in childbirth than most other countries in the world. In 2020, about 82,000 Nigerian women died due to pregnancy-related complications, a slight improvement on the previous year, but an increase on previous decades.

The causes of death included severe haemorrhage, high blood pressure (pre-eclampsia and eclampsia), unsafe abortion and obstructed labour. Doctors and activists say high maternal mortality rates reflect a lack of trust in a broken public healthcare system and little political will to fix it.

Lawal Arinola being brought up to surgery at Lagos Island maternity hospital

Humanitarian work in Afghanistan and Yemen now classified as climate finance, FoI request reveals, as £11.6bn pledge slips

The UK government has been accused of double counting £500m of overseas aid as climate finance in an attempt to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement .

Money for humanitarian work in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia is now being classified as climate finance, according to documents released under a freedom of information request by the website Carbon Brief .