Andela, the developer outsourcing company launched seven years ago in Nigeria, has announced plans to expand beyond its African beginnings and leverage the growth of engineering talents in Latin and South America.

Andela became fully remote last July, which allowed it to open up to applications from senior engineering talents from across and beyond Africa. The company says it has recorded 500% growth in applications in the past six months, which it attributes entirely to the change in its operational model. In March this year, more than 30% of its inbound engineer applications came from outside Africa, with half filtering through from Latin America.

The company, which outsources engineers to firms like GitHub, Cloudflare, Coursera, and ViacomCBS, now has engineers spread across 37 countries, on five continents. Its global plans don’t take away from its support of African talent, it says, even as it enters a much more competitive landscape.

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When former US president Barack Obama wanted to rein in climate change, he favored sticks over carrots. His centerpiece policy was the Clean Power Plan, a regulation developed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit carbon emissions from power plants. That plan was quickly challenged in court, rolled back by the Trump administration, and ultimately abandoned in Feb. by Joe Biden. During his turn in the White House, Biden seems to have learned from his former boss, and has so far chosen carrots such as the $2 trillion infrastructure proposal dominated by clean energy.

The Biden administration is now wielding its first regulatory stick: new limits on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), an extremely potent greenhouse gas used in air conditioning and refrigeration. In a statement on May 3, EPA administrator Michael Regan said the agency will enact a new regulation to phase down the production and importation of HFCs in the US by 85% below the 2011-13 average over the next 15 years. That would bring the US in line with the minimum requirements of a 2016 amendment to the Montreal Protocol, a global treaty on ozone gases, addressing HFCs. While the US is a signatory to the treaty, it never ratified the subsequent amendment, which called for a global reduction of HFC use to about 15% of the 2011-12 average by 2036.

Industry wants to head off more regulation

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The multibillion-dollar Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament was finally suspended today (May 4).

In India, there are around 400,000 new daily Covid-19 infections (that we know of); a lack of hospital beds, vaccines, and oxygen supplies; and bodies cremated wherever grieving relatives can find space.

But until now, some of the world’s best players, along with support staff, TV crews, and the entire machinery of a major sporting event—except spectators—were still moving around the country in Covid-secure bubbles. Medical resources are severely limited in India, and questions were raised about whether any should be diverted to athletes rather than desperate patients.

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Good morning, Quartz readers!

Here’s what you need to know

Bill and Melinda Gates are divorcing. “We no longer believe we can grow together as a couple,” they said at the end of their 27-year marriage, but will continue to jointly run their foundation.

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India’s clamour for help on the internet has been relentless.

Between April 5 and April 20, searches for “oxygen” on Google, Flipkart, Amazon, and YouTube apps went up 60 times, according to market intelligence firm Kalagato.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/mTQOF/4/

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India is paying a huge price for decades of callous attitude towards data and statistics.

For several weeks now, experts have been calling out the Indian government and state heads for suppressing Covid-19 infection and death figures. None of the political leaders have addressed these concerns even as official data reflects a small fraction of what’s playing out at hospitals and cremation grounds.

A major reason why administrations are getting away without an answer is that data lapses are nothing new to India.

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On TV, cops are almost never the bad guys. But one television series has become the most popular in the UK by subverting that long-running trope.

Line of Duty, a BBC drama about an anti-corruption unit on a fictional police force in England, brought in 12.8 million live viewers for the finale of its sixth season yesterday, the Guardian reported. The BBC said that was the biggest audience for any single episode of British TV since 2001 (not including soap operas). It outperformed even the most-watched episodes of series like Doctor Who and Downton Abbey, which are considered to be among the country’s most popular of all time.

What makes Line of Duty unique—and perhaps why it’s so appealing to viewers right now—is that it’s one of the few mainstream TV dramas throughout history in which the major villains are all police officers, called “bent coppers” in the show. Series like Dragnet, The Wire, and Watchmen have all touched on issues of police misconduct, but Line of Duty stands mostly alone in its unflinching look at widespread corruption within police departments. As several countries begin to reckon with police brutality, Line of Duty‘s soaring popularity shouldn’t be surprising as one of the few shows that dares to paint the police in a negative light.

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It took Amazon 13 years to reach its first 100 million subscribers to Prime, the company’s benefits-loaded membership program. It took just three years to add its next 100 million, as founder Jeff Bezos revealed last month in his final letter to shareholders as Amazon’s CEO.

Prime has long served as the engine driving Amazon’s business, pulling new users in via perks such as streaming video and music and locking them into shopping on Amazon with fast, free shipping. The number of shoppers signing up is accelerating, perhaps especially now as e-commerce surges amid the pandemic and Amazon lures more customers both in the US and overseas. The average amount Prime members spend on Amazon also appears to be growing. It’s making Prime more valuable than ever to the company.

Amazon doesn’t provide detailed data on Prime members, but in September, Bank of America released a note to investment clients looking at the effect Covid-19 has had on US e-commerce and the use of Prime. In a survey of US shoppers, it found Prime members spent $1,968 per year on Amazon on average, roughly four times as much as the non-Prime shoppers surveyed. The spending gap between Prime and non-Prime shoppers had grown substantially, suggesting Covid-19 ramped up Prime spending. Subscribers also reported searching for products on Amazon first at twice the rate of non-Prime shoppers.

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Menopause, anyone?

Oh, we know. Speaking the word (and its precursor, perimenopause) aloud can clear a room. While everyone knows it’s something we have to deal with, no one wants to actually talk about it—especially not in the workplace, and certainly not in mixed company. But in this era of bringing our whole selves to work (whether that’s in the physical presence of our coworkers or from our home workspaces), it’s high time we introduced the topic.

Menopause, meet the workplace. Workplace, say hello to menopause.

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Finding, attracting, and retaining top talent is a big challenge for tech startups in Africa.

In the early years of Sokowatch, an e-commerce platform for informal retailers in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda, founder and CEO Daniel Yu wanted to find a way around this. A software developer originally from California, he understood the tech ecosystem in Silicon Valley, where he says talented people frequently leave big companies to work for small startups, with employee stock ownership plans serving as a major draw.

“How do we get people to leave jobs at Safaricom or at other big or multinational companies to work for small startups? It’s gotta be because they see something in it for themselves,” he says.

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