WSub-Saharan Africa is, geographically and ethnoculturally, the area of the continent of Africa that lies south of the Sahara. According to the United Nations, it consists of all African countries and territories that are fully or partially south of the Sahara. While the United Nations geoscheme for Africa excludes Sudan from its definition of sub-Saharan Africa, the African Union's definition includes Sudan but instead excludes Mauritania.
WAncient Aethiopia, first appears as a geographical term in classical documents in reference to the upper Nile region, as well as certain areas south of the Sahara desert. Its earliest mention is in the works of Homer: twice in the Iliad, and three times in the Odyssey. The Greek historian Herodotus specifically uses the appellation to refer to such parts of Africa as were then known within the inhabitable world.
WThe traditional African religions or traditional beliefs and practices of African people are a set of highly diverse beliefs that includes various ethnic religions. Generally, these traditions are oral rather than scriptural and passed down from one generation to another through folk tales, songs and festivals, include belief in an amount of higher and lower gods, sometimes including a supreme creator or force, belief in spirits, veneration of the dead, use of magic and traditional African medicine. Most religions can be described as animistic with various polytheistic and pantheistic aspects. The role of humanity is generally seen as one of harmonizing nature with the supernatural.
WMost of the countries with the lowest rates of contraceptive use; highest maternal, infant, and child mortality rates; and highest fertility rates are in Africa.
WThe history of West Africa has been commonly divided into its prehistory, the Iron Age in Africa, the major polities flourishing, the colonial period, and finally the post-independence era, in which the current nations were formed. West Africa is west of an imagined north-south axis lying close to 10° east longitude, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and Sahara Desert.
WManeno was a blogging application powered by PHP, Smarty, and MySQL with content management capabilities. Initially released in October, 2008, it focused on creating a multi-theme, multi-author, multi-lingual system that works in a hosted setting. The name Maneno means 'words' in Swahili and the site focused on having low latency/filesize options to make it fast to load on low bandwidth connections. Additionally, it had an architecture that allowed for heavy customization by end users.
WSudan is the geographic region to the south of the Sahara, stretching from Western to eastern Central Africa. The name derives from the Arabic bilād as-sūdān, or "the lands of the Blacks", referring to West Africa and northern Central Africa. The Arabic name was translated as Negroland on older English maps.
WThe Turing Trust is a British charitable organisation that supports education in sub-Saharan Africa through the reuse of computers and improvement of associated teacher training.
WAlthough access to water supply and sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa has been steadily improving over the last two decades, the region still lags behind all other developing regions. Access to improved water supply had increased from 49% in 1990 to 68% in 2015, while access to improved sanitation had only risen from 28% to 31% in that same period. Sub-Saharan Africa did not meet the Millennium Development Goals of halving the share of the population without access to safe drinking water and sanitation between 1990 and 2015. There still exists large disparities among Sub-Saharan African countries, and between the urban and rural areas. The MDGs set International targets to reduce inadequate Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) coverage and now new targets exist under the Sustainable Development Goals. The MDGs called for halving the proportion of the population without access to adequate water and sanitation, whereas the SDGs call for universal access, require the progressive reduction of inequalities, and include hygiene in addition to water and sanitation. Particularly, Sustainable Development Goal SDG6 focuses on ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
WThe West Sudanian savanna is a tropical savanna ecoregion that extends across West Africa.