Since our last Digest in early March, it’s fair to say that the world has changed quite drastically. But events beginning in January were already signaling that this would be anything but a normal year. On January 12th, China publicly shared the sequence of COVID-19, a new variant of the coronavirus first identified in December 2019 among patients in the province of Wuhan who appeared to be suffering from a form of pneumonia. By January 30th, the World Health Organization (WHO) would declare the novel coronavirus disease, “a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.” Through its Director General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the agency began urging countries, small and large, to take immediate steps against the spread of the disease.

Mawazo marks International Women’s Day with a dive into some of the issues affecting women in science. Celebrated annually on March 8th, this year’s International Women’s Day is being held under the theme, “I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights for an Equal Future,” The theme was chosen to align with the United Nations new campaign, “Generational Equality,” a visionary campaign which seeks to make tangible headway on women’s equality in all aspects of human life; from equal pay to an end to sexual harassment.

We know it’s been a while since you heard from us at the Nairobi Ideas Digest, and we’re back to help you break down the big ideas in science and show you how the region is moving these conversations forward. In 2019, we saw a wave of climate change protests around the world coupled with major global convenings, including the 25th Conference of Parties (COP), where signatories of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meet to discuss new measures to mitigate the steady increase of the earth’s temperature. 2020 seems set to amplify the voices calling for urgent climate action as the year opened with extreme wildfires in Australia reported to have killed an estimated one billion animals so far.

As we roll out our first digest, we are taking a closer look at, and exploring ongoing discourse around environmental conservation on the African continent, starting with a dive into plastic waste. To help bring the conversation home, we began by addressing Kenya’s plastic bag ban, which turned two this September. Data from an Our World in Data report on global plastic pollution published in September 2018 asserts that while high-income countries produce significantly more plastic waste, low to middle-income countries have much worse waste management systems, and thus contribute more highly to plastic pollution in the oceans.