BBC premiered its new Pidgin service on Monday, August 21, hopeful that the station will attract the estimated 75 million Pidgin speakers in Nigeria, as well as Pidgin speakers in Cameroon, Ghana and Sierra Leone. Pidgin, for the unfamiliar, is a hybrid language that mixes English with one or more other languages. About 5 million Nigerians speak Pidgin as their first language.

Within 24 hours of of hearing from the country’s national security adviser that Sierra Leone needed food for survivors, Israel had sent supplies expected to provide nourishment for three days. [...] The ambassador emphasized the importance of getting the aid into the country quickly, in order to illustrate to desperate citizens that help was on its way and there was reason for hope.

Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, Princess Anne, daughter of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, will visit Ghana from this evening as part of a two-country visit to West Africa that also encompasses Sierra Leone. This visit, The Princess Royal’s third to Ghana, will celebrate the unique friendship between the UK and Ghana as it marks its 60th Anniversary of Independence. It will also reinforce the strength and depth of bilateral relations and the UK’s “Global Britain” drive to reinvigorate the Commonwealth.

A conference, organized by several non-governmental organizations to review the current state of national and international efforts to assist in rebuilding the healthcare delivery systems, environment management, and develop emergency preparedness in countries of the Mano River Union (MRU) worst affected by the Ebola epidemic.

Book Aid International, a charity that supports literacy by increasing access to books, is returning to Sierra Leone. The charity, which ships around a million books each year to libraries in sub-Saharan Africa, sent a shipment of 38,000 brand new, carefully-selected books to Freetown to help the country rebuild after the Ebola crisis. 

Sierra Leone poured a lot of money into the battle against Ebola. The government earmarked $18 million of treasury funds and public donations to combat the disease, which has claimed around 3,800 lives there. That's an admirable commitment. But there's just one problem. A third of that money appears to have disappeared.

Some 600 experts, politicians and representatives of aid organizations met in Brussels to discuss the Ebola crisis and its consequences. Talks focused on the economic reconstruction of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.