Parents of more than 300 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren could only wait for news Saturday, as more than 40 others seized elsewhere 10 days ago were freed.

About 60 percent of students in primary and secondary schools drink alcohol and more than a third have consumed marijuana, cocaine, and other prohibited drugs and substances, a new report by Makerere University School of Psychology has revealed.

It was 1953 when the white colonials came for her in Babadi, a village in the Kasai region of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), then a Belgian colony. She was four, the child of a Black Congolese woman and a white Belgian colonial agent. Because she was mixed-race, she would be forced to leave her family and live at a Catholic mission. If she stayed, there would be repercussions: the men – farmers, hunters and protectors of the village – would be forcibly recruited into military duty and taken away. When the time came to leave, her mother was not there to say goodbye. She had left, unable to watch her daughter go.

In a remote corner of Sierra Leone, a man caught a glimpse of 16-year-old Marie Kamara as she ran past his house. Soon after, he proposed to her.

The outbreak of conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region has left some 2.3 million children in urgent need of assistance and thousands more at risk in refugee camps, the UN children’s agency said Friday.

Thursday morning saw a dark cloud of tragedy hang over the Regional Hospital of Kumba, Cameroon as many gathered to mourn seven students shot in cold blood by armed men at the College St Mother Francisca a week ago.