Our proverb of the day:

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Welcome back to BBC Africa Live where we will bring you the latest news and trends from around the continent.

Lucy Fleming
BBC Africa Live

That's all from BBC Africa Live for now. Keep up-to-date with what's happening across the continent by listening to the Africa Today podcast or check the BBC News website.

A reminder of our wise words of the day:

Click here to send us your African proverbs.

And we leave you with this camouflage shot by photographer Ricci Shryock taken in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau.

The organisers of the Blue Economy conference that has just closed in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, told the BBC the event had been a great success, but admitted they had made a mistake by allowing single-use plastic at the venue.

Ambassador Macharia Kamau said banning bottled water at the conference would have been a chance to lead the way in the fight against plastic pollution, and that it had been an oversight.

The BBC's Mayeni Jones at the conference said Norway and Canada committed hundreds of millions of dollars to improving maritime safety, protecting sea life and reducing ocean pollution.

Small island states, including Antiga and the Bahamas, pledged to ban plastic utensils and bags within the next two years.

A polio vaccine that can be stored as a dried powder at room temperature is a new opportunity to help eradicate the disease, researchers at the University of Southern California say, external.

The vaccines usually require a cool and stable temperature to ensure the medicine remains effective.

Polio has no cure and can lead to irreversible paralysis. It mainly affects children under the age of five, and can only be prevented by giving a child multiple vaccine doses.

It remains endemic in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Woo-Jin Shin, one of the researchers involed in the study, told the BBC’s Newsday programme that the freeze-dried polio vaccine did not need refrigeration to keep it stable and effective.

"The main purpose of this project was to store the vaccine in an ambient temperature at 37C and one at 40C and we also used commercial polio vaccines as a reference and we compared the efficacy of the vaccine.

"Frozen-dried ones worked very similar to commercial vaccines.

"The main objective was to transfer the vaccine at different areas where there’s no refrigeration and second we think that we could apply this formulation to different kinds of vaccines and we are pretty sure that it will work."

What is polio?

• Polio, or poliomyelitis, mainly affects children aged under five
• It is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus. It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours
• Initial symptoms include fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness of the neck and pains in the limbs
• One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis. Among those paralysed, 5% to 10% die when their breathing muscles become immobilised
• Only three countries in the world have never stopped transmission of polio: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Growing marijuana for medical purposes is now legal in Lesotho, but only big businesses can afford the $10,000 (£7,800) licence.

Small-scale producers, like Mampho Thulo, say they're being forced to sell illegally.

She says she has no choice but to grow and sell marijuana to the South African black market, in order to pay her child's school fees.

Read more: Africa's marijuana pioneer aims to cash in

South African prosecutors are dropping a case against the controversial Gupta family accused of corruption in a dairy scam.

The AFP news agency says the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) had alleged that $20m (£16.5m) of public money meant for poor black dairy farmers in Free State province was syphoned off to the Guptas – allegations the family, originally from India – denied.

A tranche of leaked emails released last year alleged that some of the money ended up paying for the family's lavish wedding at Sun City, South Africa's upmarket holiday resort.

The NPA has sent a letter to lawyers for the Guptas saying it “ has not received information regarding the mutual legal assistance requests made to India and the United Arab Emirates, as a result the investigations are not finalised”, South Africa’s Business Day paper reports, external.

“The state intends to provisionally withdraw charges against the accused on 4 December,” the paper quotes the letter as saying.

The NPA spokesman in Free State Phaladi Shuping told South Africa's News24 website, external that law enforcement agencies were hard at work with those from the UAE and India to get "more evidence" in the quest to re-institute the charges.

About 200 soldiers deployed a year ago to bolster security in Lesotho after the killing of the country's army chief have left, a regional official has told the AFP news agency.

Lt Gen Khoantle Motsomotso, and two officers guarding him, were shot dead at a military barracks in the capital, Maseru, in September 2017.

The landlocked country, surrounded by South African, has a history of instability marked by coups or attempted coups.

The mission from the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) was deployed to help "strengthen peace and security", the regional bloc's spokeswoman Barbara Lopi told AFP.

"There is significant improvement in the working relations amongst the various security agencies, the government and civil society," she said, adding that the mission was now complete.

Mercy Juma
BBC Africa, Nairobi

Kenya’s parliament has deferred a vote on a controversial gender equity bill to 2019 as not enough MPs turned up to vote.

It is the fourth time that the vote on the bill, which seeks to increase the number of women representatives in the National Assembly, has been stymied.

Despite the constitution, which was adopted in 2010, stipulating that no more than two-thirds of any elected or appointed body can be of the same gender, women only hold 22% of seats in the parliament.

Previous court rulings compelling parliament to implement the legislation have failed, with female lawmakers accusing their male colleagues of deliberately frustrating the efforts.

President Uhuru Kenyatta, his deputy and other top political leaders have urged lawmakers to support the bill.

Wahiba Ahmed
BBC Somali service

Image source, AFP

Parliamentary elections due in the breakaway republic of Somaliland in March have been delayed until further notice.

Electoral Commissioner Abdiqadir Iman Warsame told the BBC there were several reasons for the delay, including a lack of funding from the international community.

Donors have been concerned about recurring delays with the electoral calendar.

He said the government had not provided any funds for the elections.

Registration for the election was behind because of these problems.

There was also disagreement over how many seats each region would be allocated in the next parliament, he said.

Opposition parties are demanding Mr Warsame's resignation and want the other members of the official election committee to be replaced.

Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in 1991.

The move followed a secessionist struggle during which Siad Barre's forces pursued rebel guerrillas in the territory. Tens of thousands of people were killed and towns were flattened.

Though not internationally recognised, Somaliland has a working political system, government institutions, a police force and its own currency.

Read: Making a success of 'independence'

Image source, PHILLIP ROGERSON

A gay rugby player from Kenya, who is facing deportation from the UK, has been granted bail, the Press Association reports.

Bristol Bisons team member Kenneth Macharia is being held in an immigration removal centre near Heathrow Airport in London.

More than 96,000 people have so far signed a petition to stop him from being deported and to grant him asylum in the UK.

The 38-year-old rugby player, who has lived in the UK since 2009, appeared on Wednesday before an immigration tribunal via video link, wearing a black and pink Bristol Bisons RFC T-shirt, PA says.

The agency quotes Judge Edward Woodcraft as saying: "The fact I have released you on bail is not an indication that you will forever more be allowed to stay in the United Kingdom."

Homosexual acts are illegal in Kenya and punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Image source, Reuters

As part of measures to fight fake news ahead of Nigeria’s election in February, a new website called CrossCheck Nigeria has been launched.

It will allow journalists from newsrooms around the country to work together to investigate and debunk rumours, particularly those circulating on social media.

The public will be able to provide tips, post pictures, videos and other information via WhatsApp or the CrossCheck Nigeria website, external that they want verified.

Completed investigations will appear on the site only when at least five partners have approved the work, says the AFP news agency, which is participating in the project.

About 46 journalists from 15 media organisations have attended a two-day "boot camp" in Lagos organised by the backers of the project First Draft News, a British non-profit group, and the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), Nigeria’s Tribune paper reports, external.

Dayo Aiyetan, the executive director of ICIR which is overseeing the project, said that Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp had become "avenues for politicians to spread misinformation, rumour, falsehood and fake news.

"The media bears responsibility to verify information being churned out on social media to ensure that they are true.”

Read more about fake news.

Piers Edwards
BBC Africa Sport

Image source, Getty Images

Issa Hayatou, the former Confederation of African Football (Caf) president, and Hicham El Amrani, Caf's former secretary general, have been fined $27.9m (£21.8m) each by the Egyptian Economic Court (EEC).

The EEC ruled that the pair flouted Egyptian law when signing a $1bn deal between Caf and French media company Lagardere in 2015.

The deal was not open to free and fair tender as required by Egyptian law, the EEC said.

Hayatou, who presided over Caf from 1988 to 2017, and El Amrani, who also left his position last year, will both appeal. The BBC has contacted Caf for comment.

Read the BBC Sport story for more

Rescue workers in Uganda are having difficulty raising the wreck of a cruise ship that capsized on Lake Victoria on Saturday.

Among the more than 30 people who died were the owners of the vessel Templar Bisase and his wife Sheila.

The BBC’s Catherine Byaruhanga in the capital, Kampala, says the salvage operation is being hampered by breaking wires.

Uganda's NBS TV tweeted some drone footage of the rescue operation:

Dave Lee
North America technology reporter

When it rains, it pours - and Facebook’s utterly sodden year continues to be flooded by accusations of bad governance.

Mark Luckie, a black, former Facebook employee whose job it was to handle the firm’s relationship with “influencers”, put it quite plainly: “Facebook has a black people problem.”

His 2,500-word note, posted on Tuesday, outlines what he sees as a culture that talks about inclusion, but does not practise it. In some buildings at the company, Mr Luckie said, there were “more ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters than there are actual black people”.

He goes on to outline how he, and other black employees, often felt uncomfortable at work about how Facebook’s black users are also being unfairly treated:

Read the BBC New story for more.

And Mr Luckie tweeted a link to his full statement:

Habiba Adamu
BBC Africa, Abuja

Image source, Getty Images

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari has arrived for a one-day working visit in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state and the birthplace of the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency.

He addressed the troops deployed to the front line to fight the militants who are still terrorising large areas of the north-east.

His trip comes days after an attack on a military base in Metele, which resulted in the death of at least 40 soldiers.

Mr Buhari also visited some of the injured troops receiving treatment at a military centre in Maiduguri.

His government and the military have come in for a huge amount of criticism since the attack.

The army took five days to confirm reports of the attack and disputed the death toll.

Mr Buhari, who faces re-election in February, came to power in 2015 promising to defeat the militants, which he subsequently said had been achieved.

On Saturday, he said he would close the "loopholes" that had allowed militants to attack the base on Sunday 18 November.

Read more on the insurgency:

• Brutal tactics renew fears

A Zimbabwe academic says while he commends the decision by the UK’s prestigious Oxford University to pay the settlement fees for staff from the European Union wishing to stay in the UK after Brexit, he cannot help but feel snubbed.

Simukai Chigudu, who is an associate professor of African politics at the university's Department of International Development and a fellow of St Antony's College in Oxford, tweeted that he had to pay his own settlement fees when he joined the faculty, adding:

The EU Settlement Scheme gives workers from the EU the right to continue to live, work and study in the UK if they have been resident for more than five years.

On 16 November, Oxford University said it would “pay the fees for staff applying to the pilot scheme, as well as fees for all staff and their dependants when the full scheme comes on line after Brexit, external.

“Staff who are applying for a permanent residence card, or who have applied since the 2016 referendum, will also have fees covered for them and their families.

“The University’s immigration team is on standby to provide further information and advice for colleagues wanting to apply to the scheme."

Chenchen Zhang, a researcher based in Belgium, responded to Mr Chigudu’s tweet, saying that the fee for EU citizens to apply for settlement was £65 ($83), but for non-EU migrants the fee was £2,389:

A PhD student at Cambridge University said she had experienced a similar attitude:

Oluwaseun Osowobi is helping other women in Nigeria to report rape to police after her own traumatic experience.

She tell the BBC about how she set up the Stand to End Rape Initiative, which offers mental health services and support to survivors of rape.

It sits within the #NoMore app, which allows people to report sexual assaults through a secure, encrypted platform.

Watch her interview:

Video produced by women affairs journalist Abigail Ony Nwaohuocha and Joshua Akinyemi

Jonathan Paye-Layleh
BBC Africa, Monrovia

Image source, Jonathan Paye-Layleh/BBC

Liberia's House of Representatives has ordered the arrest of the journalist who broke the news about the alleged disappearance of more than $100m-worth (£76m) of newly printed bank notes intended for the central bank.

The notes allegedly vanished from containers in Monrovia’s port and airport - and the government ordered an investigation in September.

Central bank governor Nathaniel Patray denied the money was missing, saying an internal audit found that all the notes, shipped from a Swedish printer between 2016 and 2018, had been accounted for and had been stored in vaults.

Journalist Philipbert Browne had been asked to come to parliament on Tuesday to explain why, during a recent radio interview, he had accused some MPs of taking bribes to allow for the unlawful printing of the money.

But he failed to show up, so House Speaker Bhofal Chambers has asked the justice ministry and the police to arrest and produce “the living body” of Mr Browne before the house on Friday.

Mr Browne runs the Hot Pepper newspaper that is known for breaking news about sensitive matters.

He was a former assistant defence minister when Charles Taylor was president.

His family have been intimidated and he has received death threats since reporting on the alleged missing money.

Image source, Getty Images

The She Cranes, Uganda's netball team, gave England a scare in Liverpool - nearly inflicting a home defeat.

But in the end The Roses won their first match of the series at Liverpool's Echo Arena 50-46.

The Roses, the current Commonwealth champions, took a nine-goal lead into half-time but an error-strewn third quarter allowed the She Cranes back in.

A resurgent Uganda levelled the score to 43-43 in the final quarter but the English side held on.

"We need to learn what to do when they do come back at us," England captain Serena Guthrie said.

The final two games in the three-match series take place at London's Copper Box on Friday, 30 November (19:00 GMT) and Sunday, 2 December (14:15 GMT).

Read the BBC Sport story for more