Medical studies and experts recommend that we get a certain amount of moderate exercise each week. But, what exactly is moderate exercise? How can we tell if the exercise we’re incorporating into our routines is enough? Everyone is different, that’s a given. So exercise guidelines are exactly that – guidelines. They’re not hard and fast rules, but something to use as a marker. Are you exercising for your health? For competition? To improve how you look? Just for fun? These all play a role in what kind of exercise you do, how often and for how long. 150 minutes per…

Five-year-old Kenyan student Miguel Munene sits between his parents, holding their hands as he watches cartoon characters teaching him to pronounce “fish”. The television has replaced Munene’s teachers and classmates after the government shut schools indefinitely in March to curb the spread of novel coronavirus. They are closed until at least January. Many children don’t have the option to learn online - United Nations children’s agency UNICEF says at least half of sub-Saharan Africa’s schoolchildren do not have internet access. So some, like Munene, watch a cartoon made by Tanzanian non-profit organisation Ubongo, which offers television and radio content for…

In our series of letters from African journalists, Ghanaian writer Elizabeth Ohene looks at the fraught relationship between Ghana and Nigeria, which underlies the current tensions over the closure of some Nigerian-owned shops in Ghana. We see them as too loud, and abrasive and chaotic and we believe they think they can outsmart everybody, especially Ghanaians. They think we are too submissive, not very smart, always punching above our weight and nothing upsets them more than Ghana defeating Nigeria, in anything. The Ghana-Nigeria rivalry has been around for as long as both countries have existed. When I was a child,…

Scotti Kele was one of the lucky ones: he had managed to find a rusty old wheelchair in which his four-year-old daughter could rest from the boiling sun. That, and a filthy babygrow they picked up on the street, are now their only belongings, beyond the clothes they're wearing. They lay beneath a makeshift shelter on the side of the road, beside some of 13,000 others who had streamed out of Moria as Europe's largest migrant camp burned to the ground on Tuesday night. "We are dying of hunger here, we have nothing," Scotti said. "When I was in my…