U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said on Sunday that the United States will increase investment in Africa and help spur economic growth as she began a week long tour of the continent aimed at offering a counter to the influence of rival China.

China has invested heavily in Africa in recent decades, including in infrastructure and resource development, while Russian influence has also grown, including through the deployment of troops from Russia’s private military contractor Wagner Group to aid governments in several countries.

“On this trip I intend to do work that is focused on increasing investments here on the continent and facilitating economic growth and opportunity,” Harris said shortly after touching down in Ghana, the first destination in a trip that will include visits to Tanzania and Zambia.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has sought to strengthen ties with Africa, in part to offer an alternative to rival powers.

In December, ahead of a U.S.-Africa summit, the U.S. committed $55 billion to the continent over the next three years. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced $150 million in new humanitarian aid for Africa’s Sahel region during a visit to Niger this month.

Biden is yet to visit Africa as president.

On this trip, Harris will also discuss China’s engagement in technology and economic issues in Africa that concern the United States, as well as China’s involvement in debt restructuring, senior U.S. officials said last week.

Harris will meet Ghana President Nana Akufo-Addo this week and will visit a former slave castle from which slaves were sent to America during the slave trade era.

Harris will be in Ghana from March 26-29, then in Tanzania from March 29-31. Her final stop is Zambia, on March 31 and April 1. She will meet with the three countries’ presidents and plans to announce public- and private-sector investments.

The family of a South African held hostage by jihadists in Mali for over five years launched a fresh appeal for his release on Saturday.

Forty-seven year old, Gerco van Deventer, was kidnapped in Libya on November 3, 2017.

Van Deventer, an emergency paramedic who was working for a security company, is the only South African citizen held hostage by a non-state actor in the Sahel, according to his wife, Shereen van Deventer.

The appeal takes place days after the release of French freelance journalist Olivier Dubois, 48, and 61-year-old American aid worker Jeffery Woodke — respectively kidnapped in 2021 and 2016.

A Nigerian senator, Ike Ekweremadu, was found guilty in a London court on Thursday for trying to have a young man’s kidney removed last year for a transplant to his daughter.

In addition to the 60-year-old senator, his wife Beatrice, 56, and a doctor who acted as a go-between, Obinna Obeta, 50, were also found guilty of conspiring to bring the young man, from Lagos, to the UK to have his kidney removed.

The couple’s daughter Sonia, 25, was cleared.

The influential senator, a former deputy speaker of the Nigerian Senate, and his wife pleaded not guilty, as did their daughter and the doctor, at the opening of the trial which caused a stir in Nigeria.

The sentences will be handed down on 5 May. They face life imprisonment under the Modern Slavery Act. Under the Act, they were formally charged with conspiracy to arrange for the travel of a third party for exploitation.

The victim, whom the defendants posed as Sonia’s cousin, was a street vendor in Lagos who was promised up to £7,000 (€7,800), according to the prosecution, with the promise to work and stay in the UK.

In the UK, it is legal to donate a kidney altruistically but illegal to do so for financial or material “reward”.

During the trial, the young man said that he thought he had been brought to the UK to work and only realised once he was confronted by British doctors that he was receiving an organ transplant.

He then went to the police “looking for someone to save (his) life”. The operation did not take place.

Ike Ekweremadu, who was elected for the opposition People’s Democratic Party in a south-eastern constituency of Nigeria, could not stand in the recent elections because he was in pre-trial detention, the prosecution said, citing flight risks.

In a statement issued by the police after the conviction, prosecutor Joanne Jakymec denounced a “appalling plot to exploit a vulnerable victim”.

She criticised the defendants’ “total disregard for the victim’s welfare and health”, using their “considerable influence” to try to get their way with a victim who had only a “limited understanding of what was actually happening”.

Esther Richardson, from the London Police Modern Slavery Unit, hailed the decision as “significant” and the victim’s courage in coming forward.