You are watching Africa 54, your daily news and feature magazine-style program, from the Voice of America. Host Esther Githui-Ewart and a team of correspondents zero in on the big stories making news on the continent and around the world with context and analysis.

Top Stories:

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that travel restrictions imposed over COVID-19 that isolate any one country or region as "not only deeply unfair and punitive - they are ineffective."

A South African music festival was canceled on Wednesday after 36 at the site tested positive for COVID-19 - while elsewhere tourism-dependent businesses lamented travel restrictions imposed over the Omicron variant.

Amid growing concerns over the new omicron COVID-19 variant, the Biden administration is supporting efforts by the World Health Organization to establish a new international agreement on future pandemic preparedness and response — the so-called pandemic treaty.

The United Nations appealed on Thursday (December 2) for $41 billion to provide life-saving assistance next year to a record 183 million people worldwide caught up in conflict and poverty. Famine remains a "terrifying prospect" for 45 million people living in 43 countries, as extreme weather caused by climate change reduces food supplies, it said in the annual appeal

Footage broadcast on state-affiliated television in Ethiopia has shown Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed calling on Tigrayan forces to surrender and claiming that his enemies have been defeated. David Doyle has more.

In Kenya, refugees and their supporters have welcomed a new law that gives the country's half a million refugees better access to education and work. But the law comes as Kenya plans by July to close two of the region's largest refugee camps that are home to more than 400,000 people who fled conflict in Somalia and South Sudan.


South Africa's teenage pregnancy rate jumped 60% during the COVID-19 pandemic, an increase affecting the education of many young women and their hopes to escape the poverty cycle. Even though South Africa has introduced sex education in schools, parents have resisted as Franco Puglisi reports from Johannesburg.

An estimated 16.6 million children in sub-Saharan Africa alone are forced into illegal labor according to the U.N. And despite being outlawed, advocates say child labor is on the rise. Globally, 1 in 10 children is now believed to be involved in some form of child labor. In this report from southern Burkina Faso, reporter Henry Wilkins looks at why child labor is such a persistent problem.

#UN #Omicron #SouthAfrica #COVID19 #AntonioGuterres #Biden #WHO #ethiopia #Kenya

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