Africa in pictures: 23-29 January 2015
A selection of photographs from around the African continent this week:
Flower girls prepare to enter a wedding reception in Liberia's capital, Monrovia, on Saturday as life slowly returns to normal in some Ebola-hit areas of the country. The bride and groom had waited until the worst of the epidemic had passed before scheduling their wedding as public gatherings and physical touching have been discouraged to stem the spread of the virus.
On the same day, hundreds of revellers dance the night away on a football field near Botswana's capital, Gaborone. Many young people say they cannot afford going to nightclubs since an alcohol levy was introduced in 2008. One of the performers was DJ Gouveia, whose popular track Ambuye recently featured on the BBC's Best Nightclub in Africa series.
On Tuesday, a man pulls a transport platform made of metal barrels carrying a UN vehicle across a section of Lake Chad to a refugee camp at N'Gouboua…
About 14,000 Nigerians have fled over into Chad to escape recent attacks by the Islamist group Boko Haram, according to the UN refugee agency.
The next day, riot police in Nigeria practise crowd control techniques in the capital, Abuja, ahead of general elections next month.
Parliamentary elections were held on the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Comoros on Sunday. Former President Abdallah Sambi wraps up his party's campaign on Friday with a rally staged after Muslim prayers in the capital, Moroni.
Floods in Mozambique are affecting about 124,000 people and have led to the deaths of close to 80 people. Here people on Monday are stranded on either side of a bridge over the Licungo River.
There is always time for shopping - even when you are one of the world's busiest women. Here International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde walks through a fabric shop in a market in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, on Wednesday.
A park ranger stands next to a female northern white rhino at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, some 290km (180 miles) north of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on Tuesday. She is one of five members of the rhino sub-species left on the planet. This week conservationists and scientists have been meeting there to discuss plans to save them extinction.
Dancers in Somaliland welcome actors from London's Globe theatre to Hargeisa, the capital of the self-declared republic, on Thursday...
They were there to perform Shakespeare's Hamlet. The cast have been performing on stages around the world to mark the 450th anniversary of the English playwright's birth.
It has been an exciting week for football fans - like this supporter from the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday - whose teams have made it through to the quarter finals of the Africa Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea...
But it was a bitter disappointment for Mali's supporters whose fate was decided in a drawing of lots on Thursday because they finished level in Group D with Guinea. It is the first time lots have decided a team's qualification in the tournament since 1988...
This weekend will see the quarter finals played in Bata - where this family plays with a football on a beach on Friday - and the capital, Malabo.