Which large, grey mammal is wholly aquatic, herbivorous, weighs close to half a tonne, has a big flat tail rather like a beaver but no back legs or eyelids, is related to elephants and lives along the coast and waterways of West Africa?

Britain's announcement confirming the deployment of 330 military personnel to assist French military intervention in Mali has been met with a noticeab...

As Britain prepares to send hundreds of troops to West Africa to support French forces fighting Islamists in Mali, charities and human rights groups h...

Britain is sending up to 330 military personnel to help train a West African intervention force in Mali, Downing Street has said. The move was anno...

A British military aircraft bound for Mali to support French efforts against insurgents allied to al-Qaeda has been grounded due to a technical fault....

When I looked around and observed peaceful processions, people quickly reminded me that one small spark could set everything off.

In the space of 10 months, Niger has been hit by a food crisis brought on by high market prices and poor harvests, a refugee crisis triggered by conflict in neighbouring Mali, followed by a cholera outbreak and now devastating floods. It has left many in this West African state wondering when the next disaster is and what could it possibly be?

In the developing world, swimming lessons aren't free or widely available or part of a standard childhood routine. Here in Dakar, Senegal, West Africa, a capital city surrounded on three sides by the sea, the majority of children grow up without learning to swim.

There are no proper words to describe the heartbreaking sight of a malnourished child. No image on TV can prepare you for the sheer lightness of their bodies, their minuscule wrists, their over-sized, slightly bulging heads; the breathtaking shock of realising that the cute baby who looks newborn is actually nearly two years old. Malnourishment is not something that enters our world very often. Ours is a place where 60 stone teenagers must be hoisted out of their homes by the local fire service because they no longer fit through their front doors. It's a place where five-year-old girls worry themselves silly about being thinner, aspiring to a 'body ideal' that's estimated to be not physically achievable by 95% of the population.

I want to tell you the stories of the two strong women we met recently in Niger. But I'm finding it very difficult.

As the clouds gathered over the small village house in the Liberian bush early on Tuesday morning where John Humphrys was preparing to co-anchor the Today programme, little could he have known that a Twitter Storm was about to rain down on his head.

The international community and governments need to stop treating food crises as a series of unexpected disasters. They can no longer play with people's lives or wait to act until we see starving African children on our TV screens, as if it were the televised Hunger Games.