AI midwife seeks to fill gaps in Zimbabwe's maternal health care

Mutare, Zimbabwe – With public health services stretched thin, women in Zimbabwe sometimes struggle to access reliable information about pregnancy and childbirth. A locally developed app aims to answer their questions and direct them to appropriate care, in an example of the potential of artificial intelligence to ease pressure on overloaded health systems.


Issued on: 17/10/2026 - RFI

A pregnant woman in Zimbabwe looks at her phone to get pregnancy-related information from a WhatsApp chatbot known as DawaMom. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

By: Farai Shawn Matiashe

When Harare resident Samantha Murungweni found out she was pregnant for the first time earlier this year, she felt scared.

The 25-year-old, who lives in Greendale, one of the capital's suburbs, wasn't able to ask midwives all the questions she had when she registered for antenatal care at her local clinic. Zimbabwe’s public healthcare facilities often have lengthy queues.

Murungweni sought help from friends and social media – but she struggled to get reliable information.

Then a friend introduced her to DawaMom, an AI-powered chatbot designed to provide pregnancy-related information.

“I asked about food that would keep both of us healthy,” Murungweni, who started using the service in her second trimester, told RFI.

“I also asked about back pain, frequent urination and foetus movements in the uterus. It felt like I was talking to a real midwife.”

Easy access

Developed in 2024 by DawaHealth, a Zambia-based startup, DawaMom gives pregnant women and mothers validated medical information and connects them with licensed health workers via WhatsApp.

While accessing the chatbot is free, users must pay a subscription fee for more advanced services such as personalised monitoring or home visits.

Tafadzwa Kalisto Munzwa, DawaHealth co-founder and chief executive officer, said they chose WhatsApp because millions of people across Southern Africa already use the platform to communicate with their families and access information directly from their smartphones.

“Google is not accessible to everyone because internet data is expensive, but most people still keep a WhatsApp data bundle,” he told RFI.

A screenshot of a conversation with DawaMom, a WhatsApp chatbot which provides pregnancy-related information for women in Zimbabwe. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

Developers also sought to make the service more reliable than a traditional internet search.

To ensure medical information is accurate and relevant to the local context, DawaMom does not generate answers from general content on the internet. Instead, it uses a technique known as retrieval-augmented generation to provide responses based exclusively on a verified database.

Munzwa said the team compiled information from dozens of medical sources – including Health Ministry guidelines, World Health Organization recommendations, medical school curricula and hospital protocols on women’s health – to create an authoritative knowledge base.

“More than 25 health workers translated and validated this content into Shona, Ndebele and Tonga. Every answer DawaMom gives is drawn from this database,” he said.

Adapting the service to Zimbabwe’s multilingual context was also part of establishing trust.

“This year we also worked with more than 30 women from across Zimbabwe to build an English-Shona code-switching dataset,” said Munzwa. “This lets DawaMom understand the way people actually speak, mixing English and Shona, and reply by voice in a Shona accent that users find natural and understandable.”

According to the company, DawaMom has supported over 20,000 users to date. They are targeting 50,000 users by the end of 2026.

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Reducing pressure on health workers

With a lack of funding in the health sector and mass migration of skilled professionals abroad, Zimbabwe faces severe shortages of health workers.

Nurses and doctors handle heavy workloads, especially in rural areas. Zimbabwe had just over 22 health workers per 10,000 people in 2022, less than half the World Health Organization’s recommended 45 per 10,000, according to an analysis by the WHO and Ministry of Health.

Elijah Dakwa, president of the Zimbabwe Medical Analytics and Informatics Network (ZiMAIN), which brings together medical professionals, researchers, data scientists and technology experts, says artificial intelligence can help ease the pressure on the country’s health workers – but only if it is used to support them rather than replace them.

“Clinicians we have can focus on the high‑risk cases instead of being swamped by low‑acuity visits,” he told RFI.

Dakwa says building robust digital infrastructure, improving connectivity, making devices widely available and providing training are key to the adoption of AI in the health sector.

“When that is in place, AI acts as a force multiplier: faster, more consistent, clearer decision-support systems for health workers and fewer unnecessary trips to central hospitals, which ultimately reduces congestion and workload across the system.”

The women carrying the burden of Kenya’s rural healthcare on their backs
Identifying high-risk patients

According to Munzwa of DawaHealth, AI can act as a triage filter, identifying women who need urgent or in-person follow-up and those who can be reassured at home without visiting a clinic.

“This means high-risk patients are less likely to be missed and are prioritised for follow-up, so limited staff and resources have more impact,” he said.

DawaMom connects pregnant women and mothers with licensed healthcare facilities and automatically identifies high-risk women, enabling the company to follow up with those who need additional care.

Rutendo, from Rusape in eastern Zimbabwe, used the chatbot to learn about numbness and spotting in the first trimester of her pregnancy.

But one day, when she was in her final trimester, she became alarmed after going for days without feeling any movement from the foetus.

Why the African continent has a role to play in developing AI

Rutendo consulted DawaMom and the chatbot advised her to see a doctor immediately.

She hurried to the nearby clinic where she was registered for antenatal care, but it was too late. The foetus had died after becoming tangled in the umbilical cord, a situation that can also lead to dangerous complications for the mother.

“The information I got saved my life,” said 31-year-old Rutendo, who asked RFI not to use her full name.

In Harare, Murungweni gave birth to a girl last month. DawaMom eased her fears about becoming a mother.

“It helped me navigate pregnancy and gave me access to accurate medical information I was struggling to get elsewhere,” she said.

 

Vaccinating moms protects offspring from deadly superbug

Mouse study advances efforts to shield infants from a leading cause of newborn deaths

WashU Medicine

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WashU Medicine researchers found that vaccinating mouse mothers transfers antibodies that defend vulnerable newborns against Klebsiella pneumoniae.

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Credit: Sara Moser/WashU Medicine

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that a vaccine given to pregnant mice protected their newborn pups from a severe bloodstream infection caused by Klebsiella pneumoniae, a dangerous bacterium that kills thousands of infants in low- and middle-income countries each year and is the leading killer of children globally.

Such infections can be difficult to treat due to the bacterium’s growing resistance to antibiotics and there is currently no vaccine available to prevent infection. The study, published Oct. 14 in Science Advances, points to a promising new strategy for protecting vulnerable infants from the drug-resistant superbug by harnessing maternal immunity.

“Klebsiella pneumoniae is a serious threat to newborns who have not yet developed their own immune defenses,” said the study’s senior author, David A. Rosen, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics and of molecular microbiology at WashU Medicine. “Our study shows that maternal immunization can effectively bridge that critical window of vulnerability, giving newborns the protection they need right from birth.”

Harnessing maternal immunity

K. pneumoniae is a big problem around the world, especially in the hospital where it can cause pneumonia and other infections among adults and children. In low- and middle-income countries, where children often get exposed to the bacterium in their environment, it drives severe bacterial blood infections, known as sepsis. Because K. pneumoniae is increasingly resistant to standard antibiotics, doctors are often left without effective medicines to treat such infections.

The Rosen team collaborated with the lab of Drew Schwartz, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics, to model K. pneumoniae sepsis in newborn mice that mimics the infection seen in children and asked if vaccinating a pregnant mouse would prevent infection in pups.

“This study presents the first evidence that giving moms a vaccine could be an effective strategy for protecting their babies against these severe infections.”David A. Rosen, MD, PhD, WashU Medicine

Female mice were immunized at the time of mating and then again once or twice during pregnancy. The vaccine targets two of the most dangerous types of K. pneumoniae — known as K1 and K2 — and was developed by Omniose, a St. Louis-based startup. Rosen had previously published findings that show the vaccine is effective in preventing K. pneumoniae infection in adult mice that can progress to life-threatening liver, respiratory tract, bloodstream and other infections.

Two weeks after birth, the young mice were exposed to lethal doses of the bacteria, either the K1 or K2 type. Of the two-week-old mouse pups from unvaccinated mothers, 0% infected with the K1 type and less than 35% with the K2 type survived. In contrast, of the young mice from vaccinated mothers, more than 80% infected with either type survived. Whether the mother received two or three doses of the vaccine did not impact survival.

The researchers drew blood weekly from the young mice starting on their day of birth and continuing up to six weeks of life. They also collected breast milk from lactating mice. They found high concentrations of vaccine-specific antibodies in both the milk of vaccinated mothers and their newborn mice over the course of the study.

“Mice that were never immunized themselves are highly protected from a lethal infection just from the durable antibodies transferred to them from their mother,” explained first author Paeton Wantuch, PhD, a staff scientist in the Rosen lab.

The researchers are now testing updated vaccines designed to shield against multiple strains of the superbug found across the globe.

“This study presents the first evidence that giving moms a vaccine could be an effective strategy for protecting their babies against these severe infections,” said Rosen. “And it also has established a practical model that we can now use to test therapies and vaccines that will bring us one step closer to human clinical trials with the ultimate goal of impacting global health.”

Wantuch PL, Tung J, Robinson LS, Darwech I, Knoot CJ, Harding CM, Schwartz DJ, Rosen DA. Maternal vaccination with capsular polysaccharide bioconjugates protects against murine Klebsiella pneumoniae neonatal sepsis. October 14, 2026. Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh8222

This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant numbers R01AI175038, R01AI195492 and K08AI159384; the Gates Foundation, grant number INV-088225; Washington University Department of Pediatrics. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NIH, the Gates Foundation or other funders.

Competing Interest Statement: Robinson LS, Darwech I, Knoot CJ, Harding CM have a financial stake in Omniose, a for-profit entity developing bioconjugate vaccines using patented technology reflected in the data presented in this and other published manuscripts.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aeh8222

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Maternal vaccination with capsular polysaccharide bioconjugates protects against murine Klebsiella pneumoniae neonatal sepsis.

Article Publication Date

14-Oct-2026

COI Statement

Robinson LS, Darwech I, Knoot CJ, Harding CM have a financial stake in Omniose, a for-profit entity developing bioconjugate vaccines using patented technology reflected in the data presented in this and other published manuscripts.

 

Does lithium in drinking water cause a rare heart condition?

UCSF study adds to understanding of how environmental exposures may affect the developing heart

University of California - San Francisco

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Children living in areas with higher levels of lithium in drinking water were more likely to be diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a rare heart condition that can cause a dangerously fast heartbeat, according to a new study led by UC San Francisco researchers.

The findings, which were published online in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, are based on health and water-quality data for more than 2.3 million children in California and were also observed among nearly 2 million children in New York. Children in California counties with lithium levels in the highest 25% had 71% greater odds of a Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) diagnosis than those living in counties with lower levels.

Lithium occurs naturally in groundwater, and concentrations vary widely by location. Although the research focused on California and New York, lithium is found in groundwater used for drinking water across the United States and elsewhere, raising questions about the potential broader public health significance of the findings.

WPW occurs when an extra strand of heart muscle, known as an accessory pathway, creates an abnormal electrical connection in the heart. These pathways form during fetal development, but why they develop has remained largely unknown. Most people with accessory pathways do not have a family history of the condition, suggesting that environmental exposures during fetal development could play a role.

“We’ve known about these pathways for decades, and we know how to treat them, but we haven’t known why people develop them,” said Gregory Marcus, MD, MAS, an endowed professor in atrial fibrillation research in the UCSF Division of Cardiology and senior author of the study. “This is an exciting step because it points to a potential environmental factor that may be modifiable. But we need more research to determine whether lithium is actually contributing to their development.”

A clue to an unexplained heart condition

Accessory pathways are among the most common causes of supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), a rapid heart rhythm that can cause palpitations and other symptoms. WPW, which involves a particular type of accessory pathway, is also associated with a small increased risk of sudden death.

The pathways can be treated with catheter ablation, a minimally invasive procedure that eliminates the small area of heart tissue responsible for the abnormal electrical connection.

Medicinal doses of lithium during pregnancy have been associated with an increased risk of congenital heart defects, including Ebstein’s anomaly, a rare condition that is frequently accompanied by accessory pathways. That led the UCSF researchers to ask whether lithium in drinking water might also be associated with changes in the developing heart.

In addition to the association with WPW, higher lithium levels in California were associated with SVT, palpitations, and fainting. Researchers then retested their main finding in New York, where children living in areas with lithium levels above 10 parts per billion also had greater odds of WPW.

Measuring the environment to understand health

The study does not prove that lithium causes WPW. Researchers did not know how much lithium individual children or their mothers consumed, and they used county of residence to estimate exposure. Other environmental or genetic factors could also help explain the association.

Marcus said the findings should not alarm people about the safety of their drinking water, including those who are pregnant. WPW is rare: Just 686 of the more than 2.3 million California children in the study had a documented diagnosis.

Instead, researchers said the results underscore the importance of collecting environmental data and studying how ordinary environmental factors may affect health.

“We’re exposed to things in our environment every day, including substances that occur naturally,” Marcus said. “The more precisely we can measure those exposures and connect them with health outcomes, the better we can understand what may be influencing health.”

Lithium in drinking water is not currently regulated in the United States, although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires monitoring for it through its program for unregulated contaminants. The U.S. Geological Survey also measures lithium in groundwater.

Researchers said studies in other populations, as well as research that more precisely measures exposure during pregnancy, are needed to determine whether lithium plays a causal role.

“The next step is to determine whether lithium itself is contributing to the development of these pathways and, if so, how much exposure matters and when during development it matters most,” Marcus said. “That will require studies that can measure exposure much more precisely.”

 

Authors: In addition to Marcus, the study authors are Justin T. Teraoka, Anushree Agarwal, Janet J. Tang, and Thomas A. Dewland, all of UC San Francisco.

Disclosures: The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical system, includes highly-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at ucsf.edu.
 

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Journal

Journal of Clinical Investigation

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Elevated lithium levels in drinking water are associated with higher prevalence of Wolff-Parkinson-White diagnoses

Article Publication Date

13-Oct-2026

Reckoning With the Children Buried in ‘Secret Cemeteries’ Across the US

There are more than 1,000 graves of children who died in state custody that are slowly being identified, forcing the nation to confront legacies of racism and child exploitation.


Cinder block markers mark the graves of children buried at the Maryland House of Reformation & Instruction for Colored Children Burial Site.
(Photo by Marc Schindler)

Emma Cieslik
Oct 12, 2026

Common Dreams

Last year, Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice, broke the news that 230 or more incarcerated Black children died at the Maryland House of Reformation & Instruction for Colored Children. These children died and were buried between 1877-1939 in nearby unmarked graves. Last month, the Center released research finding that there are 40 similar “secret” burial sites in 29 states where over 1,000 children were buried after they died while under the care of youth institutions. The news went viral when shared in a Washington Post piece.

Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice undertook this research as part of the Forgotten Children Initiative launched back in February 2026. Back in 2023, the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services started to document and report how the department has functioned, including reckoning with histories of physical and emotional abuse, exploitative labor practices, and racial discrimination. The House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, which was open and operational from 1870-1937, is just one example.

Georgetown University’s report indicates that House of Reformation served as the first reform school for delinquent Black children in the American South. The house was originally created by the Maryland General Assembly because Black children were sent to adult jails and state prisons for criminal offenses, some as light as running away from home. Maryland children were sent to the House of Reformation for many reasons—sometimes because they were orphaned or had lost a parent or did not have a parent deemed “fit” to care for them, because they lived in poverty or were unhoused or because they were accused of minor offenses.

This latest report reveals a devastating but not entirely unknown truth—that children continue to be exploited, killed, and buried in secrecy under the “protection” of the state and federal government.

Nineteenth century prison reformers argued that children should be placed in facilities that offered religious, vocational, and personal education, but despite this arguably white saviorist goal that these institutions not be places of punishment, reform schools like Maryland’s House of Reformation became places where children were pushed into overcrowded facilities without proper food and medical care. Many children were then forced to labor without pay (often solely to enrich the institutions rather than to teach them vocational skills), to live and work in isolation, or were subject to corporal punishment.

As Georgetown University’s report indicates, a child’s reform school experience was largely based on their race, class, and age. Black and white children were placed in segregated facilities, often also separated by gender. Young Black girls specifically were especially subject to sexual violence and assault in these facilities. As expected, reform schools—later called training schools, industrial schools, juvenile reformatories, and eventually juvenile detention centers—were radically different based on whether Black or white children were living and working there.

Because of the horrific working conditions; a systemic lack of medical care; and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, hundreds of children died at these schools. Approximately 230 Black boys died at the Maryland House of Reform & Instruction while it was operational, and when they died, they were buried in hidden or unidentified graves, likely to cover up the rampant child abuse and death that occurred under the state’s watch. In fact, the secret cemetery was only discovered through a former Maryland Department of Juvenile Services staff member, and while the first section of the cemetery dating to the 19th century included headstones with the names of the boys buried at the site, the second section (dated from the early 20th century) only has rows of cinder blocks with no name or other identifiable information.

The Department of Juvenile Services is working to identify living relatives of the boys buried on site, restore and maintain the site to an official cemetery, and erect historical markers that acknowledge how children were exploited at the site. As the Forgotten Children Initiative report reads, “The overall goal was to properly honor the youth who died or were killed at the House of Reformation and are buried at the site, and provide a more holistic and accurate understanding of the racial inequities that we see today and help with efforts to reduce these inequities moving forward.” This is key because the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services runs the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, a successor to the House of Reformation where almost 250 boys died and were buried in unmarked graves.

But as Georgetown University undertook this study, the researchers realized this was a much more widespread problem. More “secret cemeteries” have come to light, specifically at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida and the New York House of Refuge in New York. These are just three of hundreds of reform schools and institutions that received federal funding to effectively abuse children for decades. At its core, these reform schools were racist institutions meant to police, mold, and erase children of color across the country.

These patterns of child death and secretive burial are also deeply connected to Native American boarding schools throughout the United States and Canada. As Georgetown University’s latest report notes, there are more than 1,000 graves of children who died in state custody that are slowly being identified. The Forgotten Children Initiative questions how many more “secret cemeteries” will be discovered and how many will still be hidden to protect the state that literally enabled their deaths.

This research is part of a global reckoning about the outright murder and covert burial of children in state and religious-run youth institutions. This summer, survivors of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes and their allies rallied in downtown Cork against the impending development on the lands of the Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute where hundreds of infants and children are believed to be buried. These institutions, strikingly similar to those in the United States in the 1960s during the “Baby Scoop” era, were homes for unwed mothers who would have their babies in these facilities. Their children would then be adopted out to neighboring families or would be put into a religious-run institution where abuse and neglect were rampant.

To be clear, this still exists to this day with the Liberty Godparent Home where young, single, pregnant women are coerced into giving up their children to be adopted by affluent Christian families in exchange for a full tuition scholarship to Liberty University.

This violence is also indicative of a much larger history of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States, where people whose bodies are not claimed or whose families cannot cover the expenses to prepare and bury their loved one, are buried in prison cemeteries with simple concrete slabs or metal markers with the incarcerated individual’s name rather than traditional headstones, or their bodies might be cremated and stored or scattered according to The Marshall Project. It’s one final denial of an incarcerated person’s humanity and dignity reminiscent of what the young Black boys at the House of Reformation experienced.

The children who died (or more accurately who were killed due to abuse and neglect in state-run institutions) are the direct ancestors of the modern Prison Industrial Complex. The Prison Industrial Complex tethers together histories of slavery and sharecropping with modern prison systems where prisoners are forced or coerced to work for subminimum wages, with no employee protection. Like modern juvenile detention centers and even group homes, the House of Reformation and other reform schools served as pipelines to prisons, keeping people of color incarcerated in systems of exploited labor for their entire lives.

It’s worth noting that the House of Reformation admitted its first occupants in 1873, only six years after Maryland had abolished slavery, so at least some of the first children admitted into the House of Reformation were formerly enslaved. During a time when courts were still segregated and Black Americans were systematically denied due process, any criminal accusation against a Black child (in the time before Emmett Till’s horrific lynching) would be difficult to fight. Even before (and after) Maryland outlawed slavery, free Black individuals could be easily declared unsuitable to raise their children under discriminatory statutes, forcing minors into unpaid indentured servitude under white masters and later these reform institutions.

This latest report reveals a devastating but not entirely unknown truth—that children continue to be exploited, killed, and buried in secrecy under the “protection” of the state and federal government. It will take decades if not centuries to locate or recover the remains of children, especially children of color, whose lives and deaths were erased by the state to cleanse itself of systemic violence, if all of these children can be found at all. But as more information comes to light, this news is indicative of a much longer, and darker American history of exploiting children, especially children of color, and how this violence continues in the modern juvenile detention and prison systems.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Emma Cieslik
Emma Cieslik is a museum worker and public historian based in Washington, DC.
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Year later, Gaza ceasefire promises mostly unfulfilled

Jerusalem (AFP) – One year after US President Donald Trump declared the war in Gaza to be over, few of the long-term promises of the ceasefire have come to fruition.


Issued on: 10/10/2026 - RFI

Here is a list of some of the key points of the October 10, 2025 ceasefire and where things stand:
Hostages released, calm in Israel

Three days after the agreement was announced, Hamas freed the 20 remaining living hostages seized during the group's October 7, 2023 attack, the deadliest day in Israel's history.

The captives' return was a key priority for Israel, whose public had agonised over their fate.

The ceasefire anniversary also marks one year of quiet for Israel from the Gaza front, with no rocket attacks by Hamas.

The group's missile inventory was depleted by near-constant Israeli bombardment, which damaged or destroyed the vast majority of buildings in the Palestinian territory.

The US military set up a command post with foreign allies near the Gaza border to monitor the truce.
No Israeli withdrawal or let-up

Israel has reduced its level of attacks but has kept striking Gaza on a near-daily basis.

Israeli strikes have killed some 1,450 Palestinians since the ceasefire, according to Gaza's health ministry, which operates under Hamas and whose figures are considered accurate by the United Nations.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is in a tight election race, has vowed to kill everyone involved in the October 7 attack.

Netanyahu said on the attack's anniversary that 4,000 out of 6,000 "Hamas monsters" had been killed.

Israel has reduced its level of attacks but has kept striking Gaza on a near-daily basis © Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP

Israeli forces were allowed to stay in 53 percent of Gaza under the terms of the ceasefire, but a year later they control about 70 percent of it, according to official accounts.
Hamas remains, with weapons

The second phase of the agreement was supposed to include a political transition away from Hamas, and technocrat Ali Shaath was appointed head of a new National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG).

Hamas announced in July that it was disbanding its governing body and handing over Gaza's administration to the US-blessed NCAG.

But Hamas effectively remains in charge of security in Gaza, and Shaath has taken a low profile.

The Palestinian Islamist movement elected a new leader, Khalil al-Hayya, in July. Shortly afterwards, the group announced it would give up its weapons, a step hailed by Trump as a breakthrough.

But Israel has been sceptical, with Netanyahu demanding verifiable decommissioning of all weapons down to individual guns.

Hamas has not gone ahead with disarmament, and Israel has refused to reciprocate by starting to withdraw forces.
Reconstruction just talk

Trump set up a new global body for the deal dubbed the "Board of Peace", tapping as key figures former British prime minister Tony Blair and Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, who serves as "Gaza high representative".

Trump, a critic of foreign aid, in January promised $10 billion in US funding to the board he controls, and Gulf allies have pledged more, but no money is known to have made its way to Gaza reconstruction.

In September, the board proposed a $2.45 billion Gaza recovery plan at a meeting of its members and stakeholders, in an effort meant to span over six months.

© 2026 AFP



Hunger and malnutrition stalk Gazans, a year on from ceasefire

Khan Yunis (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – Every day, Gazan mother Niyaha al-Masri spends six exhausting hours or more queueing at a community kitchen in the hope of getting some food for her family.


Issued on: 10/10/2026 - RFI

Nihaya Al-Masri is struggling to feed her family of 10 people, who are surviving on one meal a day © Bashar Taleb / AFP

It has been a year since a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel was supposed to allow food to flood into the ruined territory, yet widespread hunger persists there.

Masri has little choice. Without the kitchen run by humanitarian groups, she and her eight children would have "nothing at all", the 35-year-old told AFP.

Each day she sets out early in the morning and returns in the afternoon, this time bringing four containers of rice, lentils and a little chicken, which the family throws itself at.

Among them is her husband, wounded in both legs by an airstrike, meaning he "cannot go and fight with the others" to get food.

This will be the only meal of the day for the family of 10, living in a tent in Khan Yunis. There was no breakfast and they will have no dinner.

What little flour they have, Masri explained, has to be rationed.

In August 2025, a United Nations-backed body, the IPC, declared a state of famine in Gaza © Bashar Taleb / AFP

In August 2025, a United Nations-backed body, the IPC, declared a state of famine in Gaza, though Israel quickly denounced it as a lie.

By December, the UN had lifted that declaration, saying that the ceasefire had allowed in enough supplies over the course of two months to ease conditions.

COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry organisation responsible for civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, told AFP that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was stable.

But Shaun Hughes, of the UN's World Food Programme, was less sanguine.

The food security situation, he said, "is still extremely serious".

The most recent figures, from July, show that "1.4 million out of the population of about 2.1 million people are acutely food insecure", he said, with 200,000 of them "just one step below famine".
'Shameful'

While some food is getting in, a lack of sufficient nutritional variety continues to pose a health threat.

"Dietary diversity is a major food security issue in Gaza," said Hughes.

"You cannot survive on dry goods and wheat flour and bread alone. Particularly children, particularly pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, they need the micronutrients that come with high protein foods, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits," he explained.

While some food is getting into Gaza, a lack of sufficient nutritional variety continues to pose a health threat © Bashar Taleb / AFP

Masri said that her children, aged between three and 14, "dream of eating fruit" but the family doesn't have the means to buy any.

She said one of her sons suffered from malnutrition during the 2025 famine, although "little by little, his condition is improving".

Malnutrition isn't only caused by a lack of food, but also essential nutrients. It weakens the immune system of children, making them vulnerable to illnesses and stunting their growth.

"Repeated bouts of acute malnutrition amongst children is something that human beings just don't recover from," said Hughes.

Cognitive and physical impairments "continue into later life", he added.

At Khan Yunis's Nasser hospital, the head of the malnutrition unit, Israa al-Najjar, told AFP she had "observed an increase in syndromes and conditions" linked to malnutrition that affect the immune system.

In a report published on Thursday, the day after the third anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack that sparked the Gaza war, Medecins du Monde published a study that found 93 percent of pregnant or breastfeeding women had symptoms of anaemia, which is closely linked to malnutrition.

Just 17 percent had a sufficiently varied diet to meet their nutritional needs, the group found.

All the while, Masri has kept visiting the community kitchen, despite asthma leaving her exhausted.

Her children spend their days collecting "pieces of nylon, bits of cardboard and chunks of foam" to try and reinforce their tent, which is in a poor state.

She said it was "shameful" that her children had to do so.

"I swear to God, this isn't normal."

© 2026 AFP

 

Orangutan mothers seek out playmates for young

Mothers of the most solitary great ape plan and structure playdates, even when it comes at a cost

Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

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Social play between two-year-old female Moby and three year old female Jane, mother Mindy on the right is watching closely.

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Credit: Tuanan Orangutan Research Project/UZH

Playing with peers is a crucial part of growing up; so crucial, that orangutan mothers will go out of their way to arrange playdates for their young, according to a 15-year study on wild Bornean orangutans published in PNAS.

Orangutans are the most solitary of all great apes. Mothers spend most of their time alone with their youngest offspring, who remain dependent for their first seven or more years of life. Infants have little opportunity to meet youngsters their own age, yet playing together helps to build the strength and social skills that they need later in life.

Now scientists have strong evidence that orangutan mothers look for opportunities for their young to play with similarly aged playmates, even travelling further to do so.

“We reveal a hidden cost of solitary living,” says Dr. Maria van Noordwijk, senior author of the study. “On top of providing food and safety for their young, orangutan mothers are tasked with supplying social resources too.”

The study was led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) together with the University of Zurich, Universitas Nasional, and Rutgers University.

A longstanding mystery

Since 2003, van Noordwijk and her team have followed mother-infant pairs at Tuanan Research Station on the island of Borneo in Indonesia, where they observed habituated orangutans from morning to night. Encounters between mothers are rare, but when they do happen, they’re a cautious affair.

“Adults usually don’t get very close to each other,” says van Noordwijk, a fellow at MPI-AB, who led the fieldwork while at University of Zurich. Infants, though, are a different matter. “They zoom towards each other, roughhousing, biting, grappling,” she says. “Orangutan kids have a ‘play button’ that only mom can switch off when she decides it’s time to move on.”

Van Noordwijk noticed that these infant encounters seemed to come at a cost to the mothers. “It just looked like a really long, hard day for them,” she says. “I knew there was something going on with these playdays, but we needed the right statistical technique to verify this.”

Playdates with peers

After 15 years, van Noordwijk’s team had amassed 32,000 hours of observations from 31 mother-infant pairs. Working with Dr. Odd Jacobson, a postdoctoral researcher at MPIA-AB, she tested whether mothers were actively seeking out playmates for their young. “We applied a statistical technique that combined mothers’ space use with social characteristics of neighboring mother-infant pairs,” says Jacobson, the paper’s first author.

Jacobson found that mothers with infants closer in age shared more of the same forest areas, and those infants also played together more often, even after accounting for factors such as relatedness and fruit availability.  “Mothers appear to match their kids with play partners that are physically and developmentally suitable,” says Jacobson.

Playdates also carried a clear movement signature. Mothers travelled further not only on play days themselves, but also on the days surrounding play. Adult females are known to have a core area, where they spend most of their time. Starting on the day before play, mothers moved toward the other mother’s core area; and after play, they moved back toward their own core area. These patterns suggest that orangutan playdates are not chance meetings, but are actively shaped by mothers’ ranging decisions.

Mapping the social landscape

“To find a suitable playmate it seems that they position themselves spatially to increase the likelihood of encountering mothers with similarly-aged offspring,” says Jacobson. This targeted movement illustrates that mothers are aware of what van Noordwijk calls the “forest gossip.”

“Orangutans might spend most of their day alone, but they are still embedded in a social network. They know exactly who their mostly life-long neighbors are, and they know who had a baby when. From their treetop positions they can probably get a rough sense of where these neighbors are, at least on occasion.”

The ability to navigate this social landscape may draw on known cognitive skills of orangutans. “We have accepted for a long time that they apply spatial navigation and route planning to locate and access food resources,” says van Noordwijk. “Now we show that they are combining a cognitive map of not only feeding but also social resources in order to provide for their young.”

Mothers pay the price

All this effort comes at a cost. Mothers spent more time travelling and less time feeding on days associated with playdates, representing an overlooked form of maternal investment in their offspring's social development.

“In many social species, playmates come naturally with group living,” says Jacobson. “The play problem arises when moms spend most of their time alone with a single young and don’t regularly come together for feeding, socializing, or protection.” How many other species face this same problem, and how they solve it, remains unknown.

The authors acknowledge that playdates are rare, occurring on just 6% of the days that a mother-infant pair was followed, or roughly once every 20 days. And on days when infant peer play did occur, they spent only around 20 minutes doing so in total.

Whether that investment ultimately pays off remains an open question. “We still don’t know if the time and energy mothers spend arranging playdates give their young an advantage later in life,” says Dr. Sri Suci Utami Atmoko, coauthor from Universitas Nasional, Indonesia. “What is certain is that only long-term studies like these can possibly unlock the answer. Discoveries like this depend on sustained research, allowing us to connect behavior with development, environment, and demography across the lifespan of these long-lived species.”

The findings also raise a broader question: what do we gain from living socially, and what do we pay when social contact is scarce? Prof. Meg Crofoot, a coauthor and director at MPI-AB says: “In some ways, we are more like orangutans than we realize. We evolved to raise children in large groups, but modern life is increasingly pushing us into a solitary lifestyle. Orangutans remind us of what we lose when we isolate ourselves. When opportunities for social contact are limited, someone has to pay the cost.”

Social play Danum-Jip [VIDEO] | 

Social play Jane-Moby [VIDEO] 

Social play Jane-Moby-2 [VIDEO] 

Four-year-old infant carried by its mother during travel

Credit

Tuanan Orangutan Research Project/UZH

Seven-year-old female Milo playing with five-year- old male Jery. During such play-wrestling infants often hang upside down

Credit

Tuanan Orangutan Research Project - Mure Wipfli/UZH

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2621225123

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Maternal ranging strategies facilitate offspring social play at energetic cost in the most solitary ape

Article Publication Date

6-Oct-2026