This week on Africa Weekly, we travel to Burkina Faso where transgenic mosquitoes are being used to battle malaria and we go on the trail of a prehistoric crocodile with archaeologists from South Africa’s Wits University.
The team from Wits University is hunting for previously unknown species. They began after a student of professor Jonah Choiniere found a fossil near the border with Lesotho in 2015.
The new discovery was one of the earliest relatives of modern crocodiles, which were the dominant carnivores on earth at the time.
Meanwhile, For the first time in Africa, a genetically-modified insect will be released into the wild.
Developed in this lab in Burkina Faso, 10,000 transgenic mosquitoes will be released to battle malaria in a new project authorised by the National Biosafety Agency.
Malaria killed nearly 450,000 people worldwide in 2016, and some 21,000 people in Burkina Faso alone.