It’s close to midnight on a Sunday and the skies of Lagos hang dark over the glittering lights of the city’s 17.5 million residents. One of those lights is small fire in a field in Ikeja, the capital of Lagos State, where 24-year-old John stands, tossing cables into the flames.

When 27-year-old Peter Moll was young, his grandmother told him tales of the landscape and animals. From the semi-nomadic Maasai indigenous community in Kenya, his upbringing was closely tied to the environment.

But then he learned about deforestation, poaching, resource extraction and pollution. With environmental conservation rooted in his heritage, he felt compelled to act.

Volunteering every weekend with humanitarian organizations is not for the faint-hearted. For Mani Yezid, a water and sanitation student in Burkina Faso, the work has been hard, but rewarding.

“I really wanted to make a difference in my community,” he said. “I saw the great difference that our work made, and I wanted to continue helping others in my capacity as a student studying water and sanitation issues.”

The global transport sector accounts for almost one quarter of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, and this proportion is rising.

Living atop a hill in Malindza, a tiny county in eSwatini’s lush east, 56-year-old Ntombi Ndzimandze is the matriarch of her household of 11 women and children.

“The smell alone when you cross the bridge tells you something’s wrong,” says Renison Ruwa, deputy director of the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute.

The bridge in question is Mtwapa bridge, which straddles Mtwapa Creek in Mombasa, Kenya. And the smell to which Ruwa is referring stems from this very creek, into which waste from the nearby Shimo la Tewa prison—and indeed many other places—is directly dumped.

In the two years since Mariama Mamane won the Young Champions of the Earth prize back in 2017, she has taken great strides in her mission to provide people in Burkina Faso with energy.

In mid-February, government representatives from across the African continent will come together in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo to work towards a safe chemicals and waste future. Read on for more about the process and what it means.

What is the Bamako Convention?

With a population of close to 400 million people, the West African region has one of the fastest growing vehicle fleets in the world. As in most African countries, the bulk of vehicle imports into the region consists mainly of used vehicles. Regulation to restrict the quality of cars being imported into the region is weak.