Digital mental health surveillance promises to guide resource allocation and policy in low-and middle-income countries, yet its architectures can systematically exclude entire regions, rendering populations invisible. This Perspective introduces cyber-epidemiology as a critical framework for examining how digital surveillance systems shape population visibility and produce structural inequities. Using the WHO World Mental Health International College Student (WMH-ICS) Initiative as a sentinel case, we identify the absence of West African countries from published participation reports despite more than 100,000 students being surveyed globally. This exclusion is not merely a data gap but generates what we term the Surveillance Exclusion Triad: epidemiological distortion (biased global prevalence estimates), resource allocation distortion (funding flows that reinforce existing infrastructure) and policy translation distortion (interventions lacking contextual validity). These distortions create self-reinforcing cycles of invisibility, underfunding and neglect. We argue that cyber-epidemiology must treat absence as data, interrogate platform architectures for exclusionary design and triangulate multiple data sources to make invisible populations visible. The implications extend beyond surveillance into Population Health Intelligence; the systematic conversion of population-level data into actionable health system intelligence, where representational inequities propagate into prediction, prioritisation and policy decisions. Without deliberate attention to who is counted and who is excluded, digital transformation risks deepening the very health inequities it aims to address. We propose five principles and an operational framework to advance more equitable global mental health surveillance.

Women in West Africa experience unique vulnerabilities to food insecurity due to structural and cultural drivers rooted in gendered social norms. We aimed to systematically review and synthesise available evidence describing the extent of food insecurity among women in West Africa, focusing on prevalence, drivers, and gender inequalities. Global Health, MEDLINE, Web of Science, Academic Search Complete, and Scopus were searched from year 2000 up until 2023 for quantitative and qualitative studies reporting data on the prevalence or drivers of food insecurity among women (independently of or in comparison to men) in West Africa. Thirty-two studies identified from four West African countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin) met the inclusion criteria. About 24% of women experienced food insecurity in Côte d’Ivoire, 33–52% in Ghana, and 23–75% in Nigeria. In Benin, a study using the Household Food Insecurity Experience Scale (HFIES) reported a mean score of 3.2. Female-headed households had a higher prevalence of food insecurity than male-headed households. Key drivers of food insecurity among women included age (mixed findings across studies), low education, larger households, women’s income level, adhering to traditional gender roles, being single or widowed, assets owned, access to and control over productive and agricultural resources (land, capital), and autonomy. Food insecurity among women in parts of West Africa is high in prevalence, with significant gender inequalities. Targeted interventions to improve women’s access to resources, education, and economic opportunities, while addressing restrictive gender norms, should be prioritised.

The renewed interest of constitutional scholars in the role of the armed forces in West Africa is so far focused on the francophone countries in the region. This article shifts the attention to anglophone West Africa by analysing the military’s position and interdependence in the constitutions of the Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Building on the idea of including the armed forces in a framework of separation of powers, it appreciates the military’s constitutional position beyond its executive role as a separate constitutional actor and makes visible its interdependence also in relation to the other branches of government. As becomes clear through such a perspective, the military’s constitutional entrenchment in anglophone West Africa continues to be shaped by a number of “secured benefits” of past military regimes. In addition, some further vulnerabilities become visible that demand constitutional reform.

Traditional conservation monitoring often relies on morphological abundance, which can mask critical underlying genetic erosion. This study investigates the ‘Abundance Paradox’ in Southwest Nigeria through a combined morpho-molecular assessment of the Piper and Pterocarpus genera – taxa of significant ethno-medicinal and timber value. We employed a robust integrated approach combining 31 vegetative descriptors with chloroplast Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR), nuclear SSR and Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) markers to assess genetic diversity across a Lowland Rainforest-Derived Savanna gradient. Sampling covered five distinct land-use types: Primary forest reserves, degraded secondary forests, smallholder farmlands, institutional gardens and sacred groves. Analysis revealed that while Piper guineense appears locally abundant in farmlands, it suffers a significant 12% reduction in expected heterozygosity (He) and shows clear signs of a recent bottleneck (P < 0.05). In contrast, Pterocarpus erinaceus demonstrated high genetic differentiation (FST = 0.24), leading to the identification of three distinct evolutionarily significant units aligned with regional ecological zones. Sacred groves were found to maintain biodiversity levels comparable to primary forests, outperforming degraded areas. These data demonstrate that high phenotypic frequency is a misleading proxy for genetic health, and that morphological plasticity in disturbed habitats masks underlying genomic erosion. We provide actionable recommendations for the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan 2025–2030, emphasizing the need for molecular auditing to safeguard the adaptive potential of underutilized tropical genetic resources.

This article uses the idea of “fugitive science” to show how early twentieth-century writers and editors in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, repurposed eugenic ideas in their efforts to reform the British Empire. In the pages of West Africa’s most widely read newspaper, the Sierra Leone Weekly News, West African authors and editors reinterpreted eugenics to articulate political claims indirectly in the absence of substantive political power. They reworked transatlantic medical texts to cast local conditions of infant mortality as evidence of African racial degeneration under colonial rule in order to expose the contradictions of the ideology of sexual paternalism legitimizing imperial administration. These commentaries weaponized eugenics to frame polygyny as evidence of African paternal authority and political legitimacy. Some of these contributors transformed such sexualized discourse into organized politics when they formed the National Congress of British West Africa, which carried these claims into its 1920 meeting with the League of Nations.

Women are being appointed as cabinet ministers across West Africa in increasing numbers, albeit predominantly to lead “soft” rather than “hard” portfolios. The experiences of women cabinet ministers from five West African countries—The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria—help to nuance our understanding of women in cabinets around the world. Women cabinet ministers from these countries reveal a broader conception of “paths to power” taken by women ministers, a concern for gender parity in their own ministries rather than in cabinets, and self-perceptions of the impacts of important substantive and symbolic representation on their terms in office.

Political crises play a pivotal role in shaping political secularization across sub-Saharan Africa. Côte d’Ivoire, located in the heart of French-speaking West Africa, exemplifies how such crises can catalyze secularist dynamics at the political level. From the early 1990s through the 2020s, especially following the near-overthrow of the government by armed rebels in 2002, it became increasingly apparent to many politicians that institutional religious leaders, both Christian and Muslim, should step back from political involvement. This process of secularization, driven by politicians, remains confined to the political sphere and has yet to permeate broader society and culture. This paper is based on fieldwork and data collected in Côte d’Ivoire between 2017 and 2020, including interviews, archival material from political parties, major newspapers, and religious organizations. Resources from the Pew Research Center further inform this research.

Between 1898 and 1923, a series of disputes erupted among fishing communities in the British Gold Coast Colony (modern-day Ghana) following the introduction of larger and more productive sea fishing nets. All along the coast, fishers debated the environmental and economic consequences of adopting the nets, which debates shifted across African and colonial forums. Focusing on these disputes, this article interrogates the ways in which sites of fishing innovations and experimentation became sites of intense conflict and negotiation throughout the Gold Coast Colony as different groups debated and contested technological change. In the process, voices advocating for caution within the fishing industry were effectively marginalised through the manoeuvring of net advocates while the introduction of colonial arbitration within the realm of fisheries offered new challenges to the authority of African leaders within the marine space.

A chemical explosion and fire erupted in Conakry, Guinea, West Africa on December 18, 2023, destroying Guinea’s main fuel depot and resulting in 25 dead and 459 injured. Fifteen of the deaths occurred directly at the explosion site. Firefighters initiated efforts to control the blaze and transported injured, non-ambulatory victims to local hospitals with assistance from the military, Red Cross, and mining companies. Thirteen clinical facilities within an eight-mile radius of the explosion received burn and non-burn victims, with only one of these, Donka National Hospital, capable of handling burn victims. Many less seriously injured victims self-selected where they sought care, although anecdotal information indicates that an unknown number of injured did not seek care or chose to leave the city. The disaster marked the first time stakeholders from various sectors in the Guinean society (from first responders to mining companies) came together in a concerted response. Ranked 179th of 193 countries on the Human Development Index (HDI), the disaster rapidly outstripped Guinea’s response and health care capabilities, leaving behind economic shocks affecting livelihoods and the local economy. These experiences underscore the need for improved capabilities and coordination in disaster planning, warning and communication systems, and prehospital and hospital response in developing countries.

This article is an attempt to reconstruct the history of the first Nigerien psychiatric service, and diverse aspects of the ordinary functioning of Pavillon E in Niamey (Niger): the organisation of daily life, the position occupied by coopérant doctors, the precise perimeter and development of practices taken from social and community psychiatry, and relationships with the outside world (families, police, legal system, the public health office).

This research allows us to rehistoricise and refine the details of a period from 1950 to 1980 which, up until now, was viewed as fixed and anachronistic. We draw on precious sources of empirical data – medical and administrative archives, students’ dissertations, oral sources – which invite us to reconsider both colonial/post-colonial (dis)continuities and the temporal caesuras in the literature or in reports from the time.

This landscape of mental healthcare appears to be more or less deeply affected by regional and international dynamics, such as the French coopération system, the networks of ethnopsychiatry and transcultural psychiatry, or the network of pharmaceutical groups and their subsidiaries.

Studying this service also raises the issues of the chronology and daily life of post-independence psychiatric care in francophone West Africa. Finally, our research interrogates the intellectual partitions between reforming disalienist movements and day-to-day psychiatry, and addresses fundamental epistemological questions on how historiography can restore the balance of knowledge between them.

In the early 1980s, a group of radical African economists working at the Dakar-based Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification (IDEP) were dismissed. Among them were three Ghanaian economists, Tony Obeng, Cadman Atta Mills, and Kwame Amoa, who applied a neocolonial analysis of global political economy to critique international development policies. Although the precise circumstances of their dismissal remain unclear, it was evident that their revolutionary approach to development clashed fundamentally with IDEP’s methods. Inspired by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah’s theory of neocolonialism and the Latin American school of dependency theory, these Pan-African scholars refuted the dominant, anti-political, dehistorical, and simplistic Western explanation of Africa’s underdevelopment and urgently searched for better explanations. Drawing on institutional records, working papers, interviews, memos, and published and unpublished papers, this article centers Africans and African institutions engaged in development thinking in the larger history of economic thought in the 1970s and 1980s.