The second major storm to hit southeast Africa in six weeks threatens to devastate an area already compromised by conflict, poverty and drought.

The second largest Ebola outbreak in history is raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that has faced decades of violence and instability. Over nine months in, the outbreak has infected more than 2,000 people and taken more than 1,300 lives.

Forced by war to abandon their businesses and former lives, Syrian women are creating new opportunities for themselves and their families in the countries where they’ve found refuge. Meet five resilient and ambitious entrepreneurs in Jordan in our new multimedia series, Starting up again: Syrian entrepreneurs in exile.

Women in South Sudan experience high rates of domestic abuse, but girls routinely fall victim to an even worse fate.

Since June 2012, widespread violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine State has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people. The majority are Muslims who call themselves Rohingya—the world’s largest stateless group and one of the most persecuted. The latest violence only makes the resolution of the world’s longest civil war all the more elusive.

“ISIS killed my husband,” Abeer* says as she sits in her sweltering tent in a windswept camp in the suburbs of Baghdad. Her three children, ages 9, 10 and 13, keep close to her as she describes the trauma they experienced over the past three years.

Two month old Mamie Koiwo screwed up her face in surprise and let out a brief wail as a nurse in apple green scrubs administered the polio vaccine. In October, Mamie entered the world just twenty feet away in the delivery ward of the Konia Health Centre in Lofa county, northern Liberia. Only days earlier, the last Ebola case had been registered in the country in the largest outbreak ever recorded, leading to over 4800 confirmed deaths in Liberia alone.

In a dark mud hut, VSLA members crowded around the communal safety deposit box. One by one they were called to present their passbooks, where ink stamped stars denoted the number of shares each of them had bought every week during the past months. Chantal, who cannot read or write, had only a vague idea of how much cash she would receive. She certainly didn’t expect it to be in excess of 80,000 Congolese francs (£53)—a small fortune in this area, where most families make ends meet with 60p a day or less.

Abigail is a business owner who runs a hairdressing and beauty salon in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria. But for her, the journey has not been easy.