I’ve recently signed up for a Substack called 54@Africa Science, newsletter produced by Ugandan investigative journalist Musinguzi Blanshe. It’s touted as simplifying scientific research into “easy to understand and enjoyable reads”.
And the reads are indeed easy, though one might question whether they are enjoyable, given some of the subject matter. The newsletter does three things very well: it simplifies science reports so the layperson can understand them; it takes global research and tells you why it matters for Africans; and Blanshe finds Africa-specific research or cases, which makes everything seem a lot more relevant.
The latest newsletter, for example, is about how climate change is producing a child-health crisis in Africa. The blurb reads: “Rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns and extreme weather events are worsening hunger, spreading disease and disrupting children’s daily lives in Africa.”
For this story, Blanshe referenced an article in Nature Climate Change from March 3 2025, so the topic matter is current. And this isn’t something you would normally read yourself. Besides the academic format of such a journal, it’s also expensive. An annual subscription to Nature portfolio journals is something like $209, which is probably a commitment too far for most of us.
Blanshe also contextualises the research for an African perspective, which might be his most valuable intervention. The newsletter about how climate change is affecting young, vulnerable Africans is illustrated with a story that gives it more relevance and immediacy.
“On February 22 2025 South Sudan closed all schools for two weeks due to extreme heatwaves that caused students to collapse. The country’s deputy education minister, Martin Tako Moi, stated, ‘an average of 12 students have been collapsing in Juba City every day’. This was not an isolated incident. In March 2024, South Sudan had also closed schools indefinitely due to extreme heat.”
The cool thing (if you’ll forgive that pun in this context) about Blanshe’s newsletter is that he takes you on a swift journey through the supporting material. Here’s a typical trajectory: almost 90% of the global disease burden linked to climate change falls on children, especially those under five; food insecurity is one of the most immediate dangers faced by African children; climate change has contributed to food shortages; and 11.4-million children under five in the Greater Horn of Africa suffer from acute malnutrition.
In South Sudan alone, we are told, “860,000 children under five are already affected by malnutrition, and extreme heat is making the situation worse”. There are other grim statistics, such as that “children living in hotter parts of sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be wasted, underweight, and both stunted and wasted”.
There’s way more detail about this, so go and sign up to the 54@Africa Science newsletter on Substack.
The edition headed “Men: How rising temperatures affect sperm quantity and quality” is also pretty interesting. A recent study analysed 78,952 semen samples from 33,234 men across six provinces in China, and discovered that “both excessive heat and extreme cold were linked to reduced sperm quality, with potential implications for global fertility rates”. Blanshe pairs this research with a study published in Nature in 2023, which found “a significant decline in semen quality in Nigeria and South Africa”.
Both excessive heat and extreme cold were linked to reduced sperm quality, with potential implications for global fertility rates
— 54@Africa Science
The article that really piqued my interest, though — possibly because I read it at 2.30am during a bout of insomnia — was titled “In Africa, we don’t sleep enough — and that’s a problem”.
The story is based on a paper published in a journal called Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “Are humans facing a sleep epidemic or enlightenment? Large-scale, industrial societies exhibit long, efficient sleep yet weak circadian function”. (Circadian rhythms are the physical, mental and behavioural changes we experience over a 24-hour cycle.)
I read the abstract for this paper, and boy, this is why we need journalists to simplify things for us. Here’s a sample: “We examine population-level sleep studies (n = 54) using polysomnography and actigraphy to test the sleep restriction epidemic hypothesis, which posits that labour demands and technological disruption in large-scale, industrial societies have reduced sleep duration. We used an actigraphy-generated circadian function index from both non-industrial and industrial societies (n = 866) to test the circadian mismatch hypothesis.” OK, then.
According to the report, “sleep restriction” is increasingly being described as an epidemic in the Global North, which covers Europe, North America and developed parts of Asia. In the US alone, an estimated 92-million people are affected. The economic cost can be huge, too, nearing 1% of GDP in some nations. And it is a global issue. The authors say a study across eight African and Asian countries shows about 17% of adults suffer from severe sleep problems.
The bit that seems to resonate for Africans, though, is that the research “revealed a startling juxtaposition between sleep and circadian function across small-scale non-industrial and large-scale industrial societies. People within non-industrial societies — many of which are local subsistence, non-electric, ‘off-the-grid’ and residing in the Global South — experience shorter, less efficient sleep yet have a greater circadian function.”
This does seem counterintuitive to the layperson. Surely you’d sleep worse if you were a grub hooked into an industrial society? I know there aren’t any perks to being poor, but it’s still grim to realise that rich people sleep better. That is my translation of this bit: “The inverse is also true, where people dwelling within industrial societies — many of which are characterised as heavily reliant on provisioned food, access to electricity, and residing in the Global North — are experiencing longer and more efficient sleep yet reduced circadian function.”
Blanshe pulls some Africa-specific statistics. Apparently, South Africa’s San people sleep an average of 6.66 hours a day, Tanzania’s Hadza sleep 6.22 hours, the Central African Republic’s BaYaka sleep 5.94 hours, and Namibia’s Himba sleep a mere 5.47 hours. And “a study conducted in two Ugandan secondary schools, published last month, found that 10% of students screened positive for moderate or severe insomnia. Girls (13%) were more affected than boys (6%). Boarding school students had significantly shorter sleep durations, averaging 4.2 hours on school nights compared to 6.3 hours for day students.”
It’s going to be important to run sleep studies that are specific to African countries, but according to a 2021 report by neurologist Morenikeji Komolafe et al, “the practice of sleep medicine as a speciality has been inadequate [in Africa] compared to other regions of the world”. The authors also argue that in Africa, “perception of sleep and sleep disorders is still based largely on cultural beliefs and is influenced by religion. The Zulu and Xhosa diviners (traditional healers) are regarded as ‘a house of dreams’ to whom the ancestors communicate answers to problems and prescribe the specific plant to cure illnesses through dreams during sleep. The native Amharic language speakers of Ethiopia use dreams in prophecy and fortunetelling, while the Yoruba of Nigeria believe that nightmares and dreams during sleep connote negative meaning and may be associated with witchcraft.”
Why am I doing a quasi-review of a Substack, you might be wondering? I wouldn’t have known about sleep studies, and about the disproportionate effect of climate change on children, if it hadn’t been for 54@Africa Science. And I wouldn’t have known that I need to care. There was a time large news organisations did the hard work of explaining, contextualising and suggesting solutions. Alas, those glory days are gone for most newsrooms (but not all!), which is why it’s great to have individual beat journalists stepping in to fill the gap. Let’s support them, those of us who can.
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