European Union

The co-pilot of a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv apparently attempted to stab the pilot and take control of the aircraft with 174 passengers on board on Wednesday. The captain and passengers were able to regain control of the situation and land the aircraft safely in Saudi Arabia. Commentators examine the ramifications of the incident for Israel.

An investigation is under way in Finland into a series of suspected break-ins at the homes of several members of parliament. Signs of breaking and entering were left without anything being stolen. The perpetrators and their motive remain unknown, but all eyes are on Russia, although there is no concrete evidence of Russian involvement at this stage. The press discusses how to protect politicians and democracy against intimidation.

In the US state of Tennessee, the execution of a woman who had been on death row since 1996 failed on Wednesday. Christa Pike (50), was taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injections. Although views on the death penalty differ the media are united in their opposition to such executions.

Environment committee and public health committee MEPs want the next EU crisis prevention and response tool to do more to anticipate crises and support recovery.
Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety
Committee on Public Health

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Environment committee and public health committee MEPs want the next EU crisis prevention and response tool to do more to anticipate crises and support recovery.
Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety
Committee on Public Health

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Rwanda, experts explored how renewable energy can ease the burden on farmers. Here Shifra Ainomugisha poses beside a solar-powered irrigation system in Uganda. She was named the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year for the development of AI and solar-powered agricultural technologies. Credit: Solar Farm Uganda

By Farai Shawn Matiashe
KIGALI, Oct 2 2026 (IPS)

Post-harvest losses, particularly in rural areas, threaten the gains Africa is making in agricultural production and export capacity.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, up to 40% of farm produce is lost because of a lack of cold storage, according to industry players.

Highly perishable farm produce, like fruits and vegetables, can go as high as 70%.

With agriculture accounting for one-third of the Gross Domestic Product and employing over 60%, such a loss threatens jobs and the livelihoods of millions of people.

Farmers in Africa grapple with a lack of reliable refrigeration, an underdeveloped cold chain and unreliable power storage, leaving harvests to heat and spoilage.

Poor road networks and limited refrigerated transport options also worsen the situation. Farmers transport fruits long distances to processing centres under non-ideal conditions, resulting in losses.

Renewable Energy Offers an Opportunity

At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Rwanda, experts are exploring how renewable energy can ease the burden on farmers who often turn to diesel generators to cool their farms’ fresh produce.

Olamide Niyi-Afuye, Chief Executive Officer at Africa Minigrid Developers Association (AMDA), an industry association working to improve the operating environment for mini-grids, said the biggest gap is not awareness but aggregation and intentional market design.

“We already see individual examples of mini-grids powering agro-processing, cold storage and other productive activities,” he said.

“The challenge is that these are still too often treated as individual projects rather than part of a scalable commercial model.”

Mugwe Manga, a Climate Finance Lead at Financial Sector Deepening Kenya (FSD Kenya), an independent trust supporting micro and small enterprises, said energy presents a tremendous opportunity for smallholder farmers to capture more value from what they produce.

“Solar, increasingly combined with battery energy storage, is particularly important because it is modular, increasingly affordable and can be deployed relatively quickly in rural areas,” he said.

“Solar-powered irrigation, cold storage, drying, milling, cooling and agro-processing can reduce post-harvest losses, increase productivity, improve product quality and allow farmers to sell into higher-value markets.”

Manga said energy can become an important enabler of both climate resilience and higher farmer incomes.

“The productive use of energy for cold storage, solar-pumped irrigation, and agro-processing is critical to value capture, climate resilience, and adaptation that will strengthen smallholder farmers,” he said.

Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest economies, lost between $2.3bn and $3.3bn to post-harvest inefficiencies in 2025, according to industry players.

The food wasted due to poor storage and transport networks amounted to up to 40 million metric tonnes.

South Africa loses an estimated 10.3 million tonnes of food annually, about 19% of its fresh produce, according to a 2021 report titled Waste Research Development and Innovation Roadmap Research.

Funding Cooperatives Is a Better Funding Model

Renewable energy offers reliable and accessible solutions to cold storage and processing problems in Africa, but funding remains a major challenge.

Though prices of solar panels and batteries shipped from China have been declining in recent years, current prices remain high for many farmers, particularly smallholders in rural areas.

With low capital amid limited access to grants and loans, many cannot afford solar-powered agro-processing and cold storage facilities.

Experts said that clean energy is the cheapest technology to deploy when farmers work together.

“Due to the capital expenditure of some of these, it is important for farmers to organise themselves and come together as a collective in order to take advantage of economies of scale and the power of aggregation that can use energy for all, as opposed to rolling out these solutions to individual smallholders that may not be cost-effective,” said Manga.

Niyi-Afuye said there is a need to bring energy developers and agribusinesses together much earlier, aggregate demand across agricultural value chains, and structure projects around credible productive loads from the outset.

“The opportunity is to stop treating energy and food systems as two separate investment cases and start building bankable opportunities at the intersection of both,” he said.

Manga said one of the key lessons from distributed energy is that the economics are often stronger when players move away from financing individual assets for individual farmers and instead aggregate demand.

“Farmers can organise through cooperatives, producer organisations, aggregators or rural enterprises and invest in shared infrastructure that serves many producers,” he said.

“This creates economies of scale, improves asset utilisation and creates a stronger and more predictable revenue base.”

Manga said aggregation also makes these projects more attractive to financiers by reducing transaction costs and perceived risk.

“Rather than lending against hundreds of individual smallholders, investors can finance a productive asset with an identifiable operator, clear cash flows and an aggregated customer base,” he said.

Niyi-Afuye said the better model is to aggregate projects into investable portfolios, combine commercial capital with appropriate credit enhancement and risk-sharing mechanisms, and increase access to patient, local-currency financing.

“Financing infrastructure in dollars while the underlying customers earn in Nigerian Naira or Kenyan shillings creates a structural mismatch,” he said.

Pratik Patel, Bureau Chief for East and Southern Africa at AfriCatalyist, a global development advisory firm headquartered in Senegal, said a public-private-producer partnership is the model that can make renewables affordable.

“Instead of a cold storage facility or cold chain operator trying to stand alone as a single commercial enterprise, it’s embedded in a collective plan that covers the full journey from farm to table, production, aggregation through farmer cooperatives, storage, processing, and market access, with clear roles and coordination at each stage,” he said.

He said the approach matters for financing because it gives investors what a standalone facility cannot, such as a defined use case, identified long-term clients, and a credible route to market.

“When responsibility for each link in the chain is assigned to the actor best suited to manage it, the plan becomes legible and de-risked, which is what ultimately builds investor confidence,” he said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

Shehnaz Ali from Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan, has been living with a fistula for 16 years. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Oct 2 2026 (IPS)

“You’re living a life drained of joy,” is how Shehnaz Sher Ali describes her “perpetually wet and stinky” existence. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” says the 35-year-old, who travelled by bus for more than 12 hours with her husband from their village in Rahim Yar Khan, Punjab, changing diapers whenever possible to keep the smell from reaching the fellow passengers.

For 16 years, she had lived with urine dribbling, unaware that it was treatable with a relatively simple surgical procedure.

She developed an iatrogenic fistula—caused by a surgical injury during a Caesarean section—and is among the estimated two million women living with untreated obstetric fistula worldwide.

Shehnaz got married at the age of 18 and conceived soon after. At full term, her obstetrician suspected a complication for which she underwent a Caesarean section, but the baby was stillborn. The doctor then told the young couple she would not be able to conceive again.

That was not all. She soon realized she was leaking urine.

The doctor assured her it would stop within weeks. It never did, despite three months in hospital trying to repair the leak.

“After spending so much on my operation, being told I could never have children, and then living with the urine leakage, my husband divorced me. I was damaged goods, a liability, and he didn’t want to spend any more money on me.”

She returned to her parents’ home and, a few years later, married Ali, twice her age and already married with three daughters.

“He knew about my condition but married me because he needed someone to care for his paralyzed wife and their three daughters.”

But now, her life is beginning to change.

Fistula Ward at Kooh Goth Hospital, where cats are allowed to roam free. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

Center of Hope

She is being treated at the best facility for treatment of fistula—the Koohi Goth Women’s Hospital (KGWH), run by the Zafar and Atia Foundation Charitable Trust (supported by numerous Pakistanis both abroad and within the country), in Karachi’s Landhi neighborhood.

“A relative found out about it a month back, and my husband brought me to it immediately,” she said.

Dr. Shershah Syed, who founded KGWH, was Pakistan’s first gynaecologist and obstetrician to train in genital tract fistula (both rectovaginal and vesicovaginal fistula) repair. He describes these as among the “worst and most devastating childbirth injuries” a woman can endure.

In 1993, Syed trained at Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital under renowned surgeons Dr. Reginald Hamlin and his wife, Dr. Catherine Hamlin, who provided free obstetric fistula repair in Ethiopia. Two years later, as medical superintendent of the government-run Sobhraj Maternity Hospital, he began actively repairing fistulas.

Since KGWH began operations in 2007, it has treated “more than 3,200 women and trained 30 master trainers,” said Dr. Sajjad Ahmed Siddiqui, its fistula project manager.

In 2025, UNFPA’s Asia-Pacific office designated KGWH a Regional Center of Excellence for fistula care after it trained surgeons from Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan. It was already the national referral and surgical training hub.

“We want to treat 800 women annually while providing psychosocial support, literacy, and skills training to help them reintegrate and become economically empowered,” says Dr. Jameel Ahmed, sexual and reproductive health specialist at UNFPA Pakistan. “But with global funding constraints and rising iatrogenic fistula cases, we are unsure how much reintegration support we can provide.”

KGWH’s work has also extended beyond its walls.

Syed, who is a medical advisor to the Fistula Foundation, organizes free surgical camps with the help of trained surgeons in remote Sindh government hospitals, bringing treatment to women from nearby villages.

In January, he travelled to Kabul with four female surgeons, where they set up a fistula repair camp and provided refresher training to Afghan female surgeons.

“In five days, the women surgeons repaired 20 fistulas,” said Syed. “There is a great need there, but with relations between the two countries at their lowest, it is difficult for us.”

Before the Taliban takeover, 30 to 35 women from remote provinces of Afghanistan would travel to Pakistan each year for treatment. That has now ended.

Today, there are 11 fistula repair centers across Pakistan equipped with 88 trained surgeons, and in the last decade, these centers have treated over 7,800 women for fistula.

Globally, about 50,000–100,000 new cases of vesicovaginal fistula occur each year, with 80% in developing countries, mainly in Asia and Africa, according to UNFPA. “In Pakistan, we estimate that up to 5,000 cases of fistula occur annually; iatrogenic fistula is one type,” explained Ahmed.

Back in 2007, when UNFPA began addressing obstetric fistula caused by obstructed labor in Pakistan through the Pakistan National Forum on Women’s Health, it believed that improved reproductive healthcare and more facility-based births would help reduce the incidence of this devastating condition.

Some Progress, But Not Enough

“To some extent, there have been significant improvements in maternal mortality and morbidity since then,” said Ahmed.

The progress is reflected in World Health Organization figures: Pakistan’s maternal mortality ratio fell from 276 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006 to 155 in 2024. Neonatal mortality declined from 52 to 37.6 deaths per 1,000 live births over the same period, while the stillbirth rate fell from 39.8 per 1,000 births in 2000 to 27.5 in 2024.

But Syed remains unimpressed. Despite these gains, the toll is still “not acceptable” to him. Every day, 675 babies die before reaching one month of age, and 27 mothers die from preventable complications, amounting to more than 246,300 newborn and 9,800 maternal deaths a year. Pakistan also records more than 190,000 stillbirths annually, WHO figures show.

All these put Pakistan’s achievement of SDG 3—which deals with sexual and reproductive health—at risk.

And there is another worrying development.

As Pakistan made progress in tackling obstetric fistula, another form was emerging—one caused not by obstructed labor but by medical intervention itself. “We observed women developing fistulas following Caesarean sections or hysterectomies in health facilities—iatrogenic,” said Ahmed.

Syed is particularly concerned about this kind. “In most childbirth cases, I find surgical intervention unnecessary. Too often, the decision to intervene is a ‘personal’ one, driven by greed and ‘ease’ rather than ethics.”

“We have irrefutable proof that most of the injuries happen due to surgical error during C-sections, hysterectomies, or repair of ruptured uterus and bladder,” says Siddiqui.

UNFPA has found that a staggering 70% of fistula cases in Pakistan result from surgical injuries. “We tried to plug one hole two decades back, through improved facility-based births, and realized there was a bigger one at hand that happened in facilities that needed to be plugged now,” said Ahmed.

Dr. Pushpa Srichand, 75, has spent more than five decades as a gynaecologist and has treated some 2,200 fistula patients in hospitals, along with countless more at free surgical camps. “It is a disease of the poor; I promised myself I would never charge these women,” she said. Even after retiring from government service and joining Isra University, she made free fistula treatment a condition of her appointment.

A recent seven-year prospective study by Isra University found a 56% rise in iatrogenic fistula among gynaecological patients between 2017 and 2024. Of the 2,190 women treated for obstetric and other gynaecological complications, some 1,358 had iatrogenic fistula.

“This is a huge and extremely concerning number,” said Srichand, sharing her findings at a UNFPA national consultation that brought together regulators, medical bodies, and provincial health officials to discuss the rise in iatrogenic fistula and ways to prevent it.

Earlier research points to a similar pattern. A two-year study at Lady Willingdon Hospital, Lahore, from January 2007 to December 2008, found that 54% (33 of 61) of referred fistula cases were iatrogenic. A 2004 report from the same hospital, by contrast, found that 79% of fistulas were obstetric. The 2008 study concluded that “gynaecological surgery is being performed by untrained hands in the periphery.”

Another study at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad, covering almost 12 years to June 2018, also found a rising trend in iatrogenic urogenital fistula. It concluded that the trend underscored the need for better safety standards in both obstetric and gynecological surgery.

The same was concluded at the UNFPA consultation, where doctors largely blamed inexperienced and unskilled practitioners.

“They make wrong diagnoses, perform faulty surgeries, and leave patients with lifelong complications,” Syed told IPS on the sidelines of the event.

“A C-section, for instance, is a relatively straightforward procedure,” he pointed out, but in incompetent hands, even this can go terribly wrong. “It requires a very special kind of negligent expertise to get this wrong,” he said sarcastically. He also blamed the superiors for the errors of their juniors. “They never taught their juniors properly, and many C-sections and even normal births are carried out by those without adequate training, resulting in these grave mistakes that women suffer lifelong. The worst part is there is no accountability.”

For women like Shehnaz, such medical errors are not simply complications—they can reshape an entire life.

For years, she saw her suffering as punishment for some inexplicable sin. The treatment, she says, is “Allah telling me that I have finally atoned for it.”

“When I go home, the first thing I will do is cook a large pot of biryani and distribute it among the poor, in gratitude to Allah for giving me a second life,” says Shehnaz, her face beaming after her first successful operation.

Dr. Sana Ashfaque, who carried out an “extremely complicated, four-hour-long surgery” to repair Shehnaz’s holes, is hopeful she has plugged the leak for good. “But we will keep her for another two weeks just to be sure everything is in place; she’s come from far and it may not have been easy for her to come back to us.”

After 16 years of waiting, four hours was a small price to pay for a second life.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

 

 

 

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