A South African activist said in radio interview that a quarter of girls and 17% of boys would be sexually abused before their 18th birthday. This turned out to be an underestimate.
Great fact-checks puncture myths with rigour, but also in a way that reshapes the public debate by focusing on the true scale of a particular issue, argues our head of health and information service, Vinayak Bhardwaj. He presents his three “favourites” from 2016.
A picture of little Jake Amo drawing in his Ghanaian classroom has flooded the internet as a meme. Not everyone is amused, though.
A much circulated statistic claims that a child goes missing every 5 hours in South Africa but it is based on outdated data.
A number of small studies have been conducted in African countries on the effect of menstruation on girls’ school attendance. But the situation across the continent remains unknown.
An old figure quoted by the UK’s Guardian newspaper overstates the share of HIV+ mothers transmitting the virus to their babies in South Africa.
Earlier this year a science news website claimed that an African child dies of malaria every 30 seconds. But the latest and best estimate shows that it is just under every two minutes.
A post shared on social media warns that in South Africa crying children are being used to lure unsuspecting victims to criminals. Is this a legitimate threat?
Reporting on a 12-year-old girl falling pregnant with a 15-year-old boy, South Africa’s biggest tabloid said children older than 12 can have sex as long as it is consensual. But the statement is misleading.
Africans are being blamed by doctors for bringing the mosquito-borne zika virus to South America, where an increase has been recorded in babies being born with an underdeveloped brain. Is that plausible?