Writer
I am an award-winning freelance writer, journalist, editor, and former research scientist. I specialise in health, global development, and science in society. My work has been published in The Guardian, Nature, The Continent, British Medical Journal, Huffington Post, Hakai Magazine, and The Republic among others.
International Center for Journalists
ICFJ awards Health Innovation Fellowships to writers and journalists to conduct innovative storytelling in health-related journalism.
Recent clips…
More cocaine was seized in the first three months of 2019 in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde alone than in the entire African continent between 2013 and 2016. That is because coastal West African countries – stretching from Senegal, through Gambia and Guinea-Bissau to Guinea – are now a major corridor for cocaine from Latin America en route to end markets in Europe. That was not always the case, but the “war on drugs” in the Americas is pushing drug producers and traders to seek more remote areas of operation. West Africa is very well suited to this, as it is both coastal and deeply forested.
— Global policies on illicit drugs fuel climate injustice in West Africa The Continent
To much fanfare, 100 Cuban doctors arrived in Nairobi in 2017. They were part of an exchange programme between Cuba and Kenya: Cuban doctors were sent to fill in some of the gaps in Kenyan healthcare, and Kenyan doctors would get training in Cuba. Now, six years later, Kenyan health authorities have decided to cancel the arrangement. Kenya’s healthcare system suffers from a mismatch between patient needs and the care that its diminishing and ill-equipped workforce can provide. A study in 2017 found that there were not enough chest specialists, physicians and emergency care nurses in the country. A 2018 assessment of health facilities reported that just 12% of all doctors in the country had the standard items needed to prevent infections, such as gloves, infectious waste
storage and disinfectant. Cuban doctors were billed as the answer to this malaise.
— Bad Medicine: Kenya has cancelled a controversial doctor exchange programme with Cuba The Continent
When a group of around 2000 retirement age Swiss women, the KlimaSeniorinnen, took the Swiss government to court for their inaction over climate change, the government argued that those women could not possibly be victims of climate change because they are unlikely to still be alive by the time global temperatures reach an increase of 1.5°C. All claimants in the court case not only hope, but are expected to be alive at that time.
Across Europe, over the last 50 years, life expectancy has increased considerably. Europe is getting older, and people are living longer. By 2050, those aged 65 and over are expected to make up one quarter of the population in Europe. Most babies born since 2000 in France, Germany, Italy, and most developed countries will live to celebrate their 100th birthdays. The projected population pyramid, as a result, will look top heavy. As such, the health challenges faced by the population is going to see a dramatic shift.
— Europe is getting older but who cares? EU Observer
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“For Africans who can’t afford to jet off to doctors overseas – most of us, in other words – the next option is the private sector, which has seen huge investment in recent years. More often than not, external European development finance institutions are a source of funding for such quality private healthcare. Research from Oxfam UK found that between 2010 and 2022, the four principal development finance institutions made a total of 358 direct and indirect investments in private health companies in low- and middle-income countries – of which more than half (56%) were in for-profit hospitals or other for-profit healthcare providers.”
— Africa’s reliance on private healthcare is a hazard The Continent
“The main criteria and methods used in global university rankings reflect perspectives and standards that are biased towards wealthier, older, larger, and more research-intensive universities in the Global North,” says David McCoy, a research lead and professor at United. "Crucially, none of the major rankings apply methods that control for the resources available to a university or that adjust for challenging and unstable social and political contexts, for example.” Additionally, universities can only gain a higher placement if other universities lose theirs. This system of winners and losers negates the notion that standards can rise across the board, incorrectly implying a finite amount of good quality education and research that universities must compete over.
— Global rankings don’t give African universities enough credit The Continent
What is missing though, is an early warning system that links such surveillance systems to public health action. “Parallel to surveillance, is forecasting meteorological conditions which can be predictive of climate sensitive infectious diseases. We have to remember that in some cases risk from vector borne diseases results from cascading climate events that trigger secondary events” explains Prof Shlomit Paz, a climatologist at the University of Haifa in Israel. Weather conditions strongly influence those infectious diseases being monitored, meaning surveillance needs to include those weather conditions.
— Europe’s surveillance problem with infectious diseases EU Observer
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In a GP surgery in Pimlico, London, Cornelia Junghans-Minton meets with a small group. The subject under discussion is their community: chiefly, residents who need health services but often don’t engage with the health system. “At the moment [health] services rely on people to reach out to get help,” says Junghans-Minton, a GP—“but a lot of people are not even aware that they have a problem, or they find it really difficult to reach out. And so, everything we do is at a late stage when it’s already in crisis, and it’s expensive to fix.”
— Could Brazil’s community health model ease pressure on NHS general practice? British Medical Journal
In the decade between the two reports, opportunities were missed due to such lack of data, says Neena Khadka, senior newborn health advisor at the charity Save the Children US. “Anyone who has a newborn needs attention, because that’s the basic requirement, and they were not getting it.” Twenty years ago most births globally took place at home, but “we didn’t even have data to tell us what was happening to the newborn,” she says. “So we spent two decades focusing on newborns that are born at home.”
— ‘No progress’ in tackling premature births – UN SciDev
“The story of hydrogen will be a success only if it’s a story about innovation,” says José Miguel Bermúdez Menéndez, an energy technology analyst for hydrogen and alternative fuels at the Paris-based International Energy Agency. To get to net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, a target that the European Commission committed to as a party to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, hydrogen technology needs to be feasible for widespread use in shipping and aviation, he says. The Pathfinder Challenge aims to do more than just hand out grants. Each project has an innovation manager tasked with investigating how to commercialize intellectual property resulting from the research.
— European Union appeals for interdisciplinary collaboration in new funding model Nature
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Somewhere in a nondescript hotel conference room a company is suing a sovereign nation. Arbitrators sit at one end, claimants to the right and respondents to the left. At the end of the private hearing it will be these three arbitrators who rule on the outcomes of the case. More often than not, the country ends up paying the company. The details of the settlement are often kept secret, but still enforceable by international law.
— The secretive colonial tribunal crushing Africa’s reforms The Continent
In Chinua Achebe’s An Image of Africa, the author recounts a meeting in 1974 with an older man on his way from university. The older man, surprised that Achebe taught African literature—confusing it with African history—remarked that he ‘never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff’. The ‘stuff’ being written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit. The confusion with African history is the telling part.
— A New Image of Africa’s Future The Republic
Some African activists fear that this year will bring more of the same frustrations. “I’m very interested to see how that’s going to pan out,” said Heizal Nagginda, a Ugandan youth climate activist. “COP is so Western, if I’m being honest. Nothing really happens at COPs.” Moses Mulindwa, another Ugandan activist, said that while the negotiations do produce solutions, they “are very slow and made by people not experiencing what is happening on the ground”.
— Is an ‘African perspective’ on climate change useful? The Continent
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Speaking to The Continent, Attiya Waris, a professor at the University of Nairobi and a UN independent expert on foreign debt, said these markets do not have the regulation that government debt would usually have. So anything goes. And when an investor buys up that debt, there is no international debt court to regulate their claims if a country does not pay up. This is what happened to Zambia and the lawsuit from Donegal International. Ben Grossman-Cohen, director of campaigns at Oxfam America told The Continent that investors sell their debt when countries look like they might struggle to pay it back. The new buyers pay “pennies on the dollar” but then use the New York legal system to get the full amount back.
— Why a court in New York is deciding the future of African debt The Continent
In 2007, Yahya Jammeh, then the president of Gambia, announced a cure for HIV/AIDS. In 2013, one in three South Africans were habitual drug users. In 2013, the most expensive South African film ever made, the Idris Elba-starring Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, sustained 12,000 jobs over two years. 70 per cent of Zimbabwe’s men are raising someone else’s children, while, confoundedly, Zimbabwe’s condom use per person is the highest in the world. Tap water in every African country is unsafe for human consumption. Usain Bolt can outrun a mosquito. The foregoing are ‘facts’ about Africa you can find in popular mass media. Except these facts are all false.
— The Rise of Africa’s Fact checkers The Republic
By 2020, while Zimbabwe was fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, the Zimbabwe Nurses Association, which has more than 16,000 members, called for industrial action to force President Emmerson Mnanagwa’s government to pay them better salaries. With salaries significantly lower than the living wage, a wage increase was a necessary step to equitable work conditions. Little, however, has improved. This year, the Zimbabwean Nurses Association claims that most nurses earn $53 a month (for perspective, the World Bank’s official poverty index is $1.9 per day).
— The Scramble for Africa’s Healthcare Workers The Republic
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T-shirts handed out by aid workers in Haiti read “Kolera, li se pa fini”—creole for “Cholera, it’s not finished.” For its entire known history, the small island state of Haiti had never seen a single case of cholera. In 2010, that all changed. On Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 4:53 p.m., a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just outside the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. The quake killed 230,000 people and displaced two million more. In the wake of the disaster, aid—and aid workers—flowed into Haiti. And they brought cholera—and the diarrhea, vomiting, and deadly dehydration it causes—with them.
— Five Years On, Cholera Threatens to Become Endemic in Haiti Haikai Magazine
When Zimbabwe's most famous poet and musician, Albert Nyathi, decided to get circumcised, everyone had an opinion. For Albert, poetry has always come first, but now he acts as a local champion of voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC), hoping to inspire the men of his country -- both sons and fathers alike -- to undergo the procedure. When he was growing up, his father and uncle were polygamists, a characteristic of a much older society and one that flies in the face of a global HIV/AIDS epidemic.
— Selling Circumcision for HIV Prevention at the Epicenter of the Global Epidemic Huffington Post
Winter is probably the only time people will forgive you for talking in hyperbole. Such quips as "struck down by flu", "a fate worse than death" and "lying on their deathbed" are only really tolerated with sympathy at this time of year. Some of you may even be reading this from your very own sickbed: as the news about oysters reminds us, 'tis the season to be sick. More specifically, to catch norovirus – and you don't have to eat seafood to fall ill. The commonly known "winter vomiting bug" is the leading cause of food-borne disease outbreaks and non-bacterial gastroenteritis worldwide. It accounts for 3m cases and 130,000 GP consultations annually
— ‘Tis the season to catch norovirus The Guardian
Write to liberate ideas rather than to avoid scrutiny.
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