Youth apostolate is a major priority of the Archdiocese of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. The challenges facing young people in Ethiopia are immense: many face a future of poverty and unemployment and can only dream of fleeing the countryside for the capital, or even leaving the country altogether for Europe.
Mali is a landlocked country in West Africa with an overwhelmingly Muslim population. Christians, Muslims and followers of traditional African religions there lived together peaceably, as they had for centuries, until 2012, when war broke out in the northern part of the country, much of which lies within the Sahara Desert region.
In January 2017, the coastal region of northern Mozambique was battered for five long days by a severe cyclone. The tropical storm brought heavy rainfall and devastated large swathes of the countryside in two of the coastal provinces of this country in southeast Africa, already one of the poorest in the world. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and countless people left homeless.
In Algeria, the birthplace of Saint Augustine, there are approximately 5,000 Catholics living today. Algeria, in Northwest Africa, is the largest country in Africa, with an area of almost 930,000 square miles – around one quarter the size of the United States. Close to 97% of its 36.5 million inhabitants are Muslims.
The Apostolic Vicariate of Gambella lies in the extreme west of Ethiopia, on the border with South Sudan. It is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped regions in the country, and is constantly plagued by violence, unrest and conflict.