By GREGORY GONDWE

MULANJE, Malawi (AP) — Alex Maere survived the destruction of Cyclone Freddy when it tore through southern Malawi in 2023. His farm didn’t.

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The 59-year-old saw decades of work disappear with the precious soil that the floods stripped from his small-scale farm in the foothills of Mount Mulanje.

He was used to producing a healthy 1,870 pounds of corn each season to support his three daughters and two sons. He salvaged just 8 kilograms (17 pounds) from the wreckage of Freddy.

“This is not a joke,” he said, remembering how his farm in the village of Sazola became a wasteland of sand and rocks.

Freddy jolted Maere into action. He decided he needed to change his age-old tactics if he was to survive.

He is now one of thousands of small-scale farmers in the southern African country using a generative AI chatbot designed by the non-profit Opportunity International for farming advice.

AI suggests potatoes

The Malawi government is backing the project, having seen the agriculture-dependent nation hit recently by a series of cyclones and an El Niño-induced drought. Malawi’s food crisis, which is largely down to the struggles of small-scale farmers, is a central issue for its national elections next week.

More than 80% of Malawi’s population of 21 million rely on agriculture for their livelihoods and the country has one of the highest poverty rates in the world, according to the World Bank.

Filesi Topola is seen on her farm in Mulanje, southern Malawi, Tuesday, July 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

The AI chatbot suggested Maere grow potatoes last year alongside his staple corn and cassava to adjust to his changed soil. He followed the instructions to the letter, he said, and cultivated half a soccer field’s worth of potatoes and made more than $800 in sales, turning around his and his children’s fortunes.

“I managed to pay for their school fees without worries,” he beamed.

AI, agriculture and Africa

Artificial intelligence has the potential to uplift agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 33-50 million smallholder farms like Maere’s produce up to 70-80% of the food supply, according to the U.N.’s International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Yet productivity in Africa — with the world’s fast-growing population to feed — is lagging behind despite vast tracts of arable land.

As AI’s use surges across the globe, it is helping African farmers access new information to identify crop diseases, forecast drought, design fertilizers to boost yields, and even locate an affordable tractor. Private investment in agriculture-related tech in sub-Saharan Africa went from $10 million in 2014 to $600 million in 2022, according to the World Bank.

But not without challenges.

Farmers use the Ulangizi AI chatbot in Mulanje, southern Malawi, Tuesday, July 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

Africa has hundreds of languages for AI tools to learn. Even then, few farmers have smartphones and many can’t read. Electricity and internet service are patchy at best in rural areas, and often non-existent.

“One of the biggest challenges to sustainable AI use in African agriculture is accessibility,” said Daniel Mvalo, a Malawian technology specialist. “Many tools fail to account for language diversity, low literacy and poor digital infrastructure.”

The man with the smartphone

The AI tool in Malawi tries to do that. The app is called Ulangizi, which means advisor in the country’s Chichewa language. It is WhatsApp-based and works in Chichewa and English. You can type or speak your question, and it replies with an audio or text response, said Richard Chongo, Opportunity International’s country director for Malawi.

“If you can’t read or write, you can take a picture of your crop disease and ask, ‘What is this?’ And the app will respond,” he said.

But to work in Malawi, AI still needs a human touch. For Maere’s area, that is the job of 33-year-old Patrick Napanja, a farmer support agent who brings a smartphone with the app for those who have no devices. Chongo calls him the “human in the loop.”

“I used to struggle to provide answers to some farming challenges, now I use the app,” said Napanja.

Smallholder farmers hold a meeting in Mulanje, southern Malawi, Tuesday, July 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

Farmer support agents like Napanja generally have around 150-200 farmers to help and try to visit them in village groups once a week. But sometimes, most of an hour-long meeting is taken up waiting for responses to load because of the area’s poor connectivity, he said. Other times, they have to trudge up nearby hills to get a signal.

They are the simple but stubborn obstacles millions face taking advantage of technology that others have at their fingertips.

Trust is critical, scaling up is difficult

For African farmers living on the edge of poverty, the impact of bad advice or AI “hallucinations” can be far more devastating than for those using it to organize their emails or put together a work presentation.

Mvalo, the tech specialist, warned that inaccurate AI advice like a chatbot misidentifying crop diseases could lead to action that ruins the crop as well as a struggling farmer’s livelihood.

“Trust in AI is fragile,” he said. “If it fails even once, many farmers may never try it again.”

The Malawian government has invested in Ulangizi and it is programmed to align with the agriculture ministry’s own official farming advice, making it more relevant for Malawians, said Webster Jassi, the agriculture extension methodologies officer at the ministry.

Feluzi Makono holds soil at his grandmother’s farm in Mulanje, southern Malawi, Tuesday, July 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

But he said Malawi faces challenges in getting the tool to enough communities to make an extensive difference. Those communities don’t just need smartphones, but also to be able to afford internet access.

For Malawi, the potential may be in combining AI with traditional collaboration among communities.

“Farmers who have access to the app are helping fellow farmers,” Jassi said, and that is improving productivity.

For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse

The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The United Arab Emirates summoned Israel’s envoy in the country on Friday to condemn Israel’s attack on Hamas leadership in Qatar, increasing pressure on the country as Qatar’s top diplomat visits Washington.

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The meeting Friday saw Emirati Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem bint Ebrahim al-Hashimy “denounce the blatant and cowardly Israeli attack” on Qatar, the UAE said. She called the assault “an irresponsible escalation that threatens regional and international peace and security.”

“The continuation of such hostile and provocative rhetoric undermines prospects for stability and pushes the region towards extremely dangerous trajectories, and solidifies a situation that is unacceptable and cannot be overlooked,” the statement added.

Israeli media reported on the meeting, but there was no immediate readout from the Israeli government. Al-Hashimy spoke to David Ohad Horsandi, the deputy head of the Israeli mission in the country. It marks a rare moment for the UAE to summon an Israeli diplomat after reaching a diplomatic recognition deal with Israel five years ago.

The summoning comes ahead of an emergency meeting of Arab and Islamic nations next week in Qatar over the attack.

Meanwhile, Qatar’s prime minister was expected to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington after earlier addressing the United Nations Security Council. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who also serves as Qatar’s foreign minister, said Thursday at the meeting that “Israel is trying to rearrange the region by force.”

P.J. Fleck threw Minnesota’s hat into the College Football Playoff ring back on Big Ten Media Days in July.

“If we are delusional enough to know we can do that, we can get there,” Fleck said.

Hey, why not shoot for the stars? What would be the point in not having lofty goals in July, a month ahead of the season’s actual kickoff.

But is that one realistic?

The schedule suggests so …

Minnesota figures to be favored in every home game this season. The toughest opponents coming to Dinkytown are Nebraska and Wisconsin.

The Gophers do appear to have two surefire road losses — at Ohio State and at Oregon. They play the games for a reason, but even then-No. 1 Texas couldn’t win in Columbus in Week 1. And defending national champion Ohio State lost in Eugene last fall. Winning at either site would be a minor miracle.

But 10-2 likely puts a Big Ten team on the right side of the bubble to get into the 12-team playoff field. Which means Minnesota, indeed, has a path, though the margin for error is miniscule.

The biggest obstacles standing between the Gophers and a two-loss regular season look like a pair of tricky road trips, at Iowa in late October and Saturday’s late game at Cal, where the Gophers are a slight favorite to edge a Bears team featuring an intriguing freshman quarterback in Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele.

This all sounds silly; why does anyone feel the need to opine about the postseason in Week 3? But the reality is if you go to bed before midnight Saturday, by the time you wake up Sunday morning, the Gophers’ playoff hopes will either be very much alive, or all but dead. A 9-3 season with losses to Cal, Ohio State and Oregon would not do the trick.

So, if you buy into Fleck’s notion that the Gophers could potentially punch a playoff ticket — probably the new bar for what makes for a truly special season at Minnesota — then Saturday is a must win. Frankly, outside of the Oregon and Ohio State dates, they all are.

Easy? Far from it.

Possible? Absolutely.

“As Indiana showed last year,” Fleck said in July, “anybody can get there.”

That’s no knock on the Hoosiers, who provided a number of programs with a positive dose of reality.

It’s part of the fun of the expanded playoff system. You don’t have to be some unstoppable juggernaut to participate. You do have to be good. You have to be consistent. And you have to have a little luck.

For a program like Minnesota, that luck comes in two forms: the rare confluence of a doable Big Ten schedule lining up with strong enough roster to take advantage, and that the inevitable one or two game-altering bounces or calls go your way. That can turn an 8-4 campaign into a magical 10-2 season.

On its surface, the schedule looks doable. While Minnesota hasn’t played anyone of note to date, the Gophers look good.

Is this the season the stars align for Fleck and Co.? That question will begin to be answered Saturday in Berkeley.

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By Nada Hassanein, Stateline.org

Pharmacies in Black and Latino neighborhoods are less likely to dispense buprenorphine — one of the main treatments for opioid use disorder — even though people of color are more likely to die from opioid overdoses.

The drug helps reduce cravings for opioids and the likelihood of a fatal overdose.

While the nation as a whole has seen decreases in opioid overdose deaths in recent years, overdose deaths among Black, Latino and Indigenous people have continued to increase.

Many medical and health policy experts fear the broad domestic policy law President Donald Trump signed in July will worsen the problem by increasing the number of people without health insurance. As a result of the law, the number of people without coverage will increase by about 10 million by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

About 7.5 million of the people who will lose coverage under the new law are covered by Medicaid. Shortly before Trump signed the bill into law, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University estimated that roughly 156,000 Medicaid recipients will lose access to medications for opioid addiction because of the cuts, resulting in approximately 1,000 more overdose deaths annually.

Because Black and Hispanic people are overrepresented on the rolls, the Medicaid cuts will have a disproportionate effect on communities that already face higher barriers to getting medications to treat addiction.

From 2017 to 2023, the percentage of U.S. retail pharmacies regularly dispensing buprenorphine increased from 33% to 39%, according to a study published last week in Health Affairs.

But researchers found the drug was much less likely to be available in pharmacies in mostly Black (18% of pharmacies) and Hispanic neighborhoods (17%), compared with mostly white ones (46%).

In some states, the disparity was even worse. In California, for example, only about 9% of pharmacies in Black neighborhoods dispensed buprenorphine, compared with 52% in white neighborhoods.

The researchers found buprenorphine was least available in Black and Latino neighborhoods across nearly all states.

Barriers to treatment

Dr. Rebecca Trotzky-Sirr, a family physician who specializes in addiction medicine, said many communities of color are “pharmacy deserts.” Even the pharmacies that do exist in those neighborhoods tend to “have additional barriers to obtain buprenorphine and other controlled substances out of a concern for historic overuse of some treatments,” said Trotzky-Sirr, who wasn’t involved in the study.

In addition to its federal classification as a controlled substance, buprenorphine is also subject to state regulations to prevent illegal use. Pharmacies that carry it know that wholesalers and distributors audit their orders, which dissuades some from stocking or dispensing it.

Dima Qato, associate professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Southern California and an author of the Health Affairs study, said that without changes in policy, Black and Hispanic people will continue to have an especially hard time getting buprenorphine.

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“If you don’t address these dispensing regulations, or regulate buprenorphine from the aspect of pharmacy regulations, people are still going to encounter barriers accessing it,” she said.

In neighborhoods where at least a fifth of the population is on Medicaid, just 35% of pharmacies dispensed buprenorphine, Qato and her team found. But in neighborhoods with fewer residents on Medicaid, about 42% of pharmacies carried the drug.

Medicaid covers nearly half— 47% — of nonelderly adults who suffer from opioid use disorder. In states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, another recent study found an increase in people getting prescriptions for buprenorphine.

“Medicaid is the backbone of care for people struggling with opioid use disorder,” said Cherlette McCullough, a Florida-based mental health therapist. “We’re going to see people in relapse. We’re going to see more overdoses. We’re going to see more people in the ER.”

Qato said the shortage of pharmacies in minority communities is likely to get worse, as many independent pharmacists are already struggling to stay open.

“We know they’re more likely to close in neighborhoods of color, so there’s going to be even fewer pharmacies that carry it in the neighborhoods that really need it,” she said.

‘There needs to be urgency’

Qato and her colleagues say states and local governments should mandate that pharmacies carry a minimum stock of buprenorphine and dispense it to anyone coming in with a legitimate prescription. As examples, they point to a Philadelphia ordinance mandating that pharmacies carry the opioid overdose-reversal drug naloxone and similar emergency contraception requirements in Massachusetts.

“We need to create expectations. We need to encourage our pharmacies to carry this to make it accessible, same day, and there needs to be urgency,” said Arianna Campbell, a physician assistant and co-founder of the Bridge Center, a California-based organization that aims to help increase addiction treatment in emergency rooms.

“In many of the conversations I have with pharmacies, when I’m getting some pushback, I have to say: ‘Hey, this person’s at the highest risk of dying right now. They need this medication right now.’”

She said patients frequently become discouraged due to barriers they face in getting prescriptions filled. The Bridge Center has been expanding its patient navigator program across the state, and helping other states start their own. The program helps patients identify pharmacies where they can fill their prescription fastest.

“There’s a medication that can help you, but at every turn it’s really hard to get it,” she said, calling the disparities in access to medication treatment “unacceptable.”

Trotzky-Sirr, the California doctor, fears the looming Medicaid cuts will cause many of her patients to discontinue treatment and relapse. Many of her patients are covered by Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

“A lot of our patients are able to obtain medications for treatment of addiction like buprenorphine, because of the state covering the cost of the medication,” said Trotzky-Sirr, who also is a regional coordinator at the Bridge Center.

“They don’t have the resources to pay for it, cash, out of pocket.”

Some low-income patients switch between multiple providers or clinics as they try to find care and coverage, she added. These could be interpreted as red flags to a pharmacy.

Trotzky-Sirr argued buprenorphine does not need to be monitored as carefully as opioids and other drugs that are easier to misuse or overuse.

“Buprenorphine does not have those features and really needs to be in a class by itself,” she said. “Unfortunately, it’s hard to explain that to a pharmacist in 30 seconds over the phone.”

More is known about the medication now than when it was placed on the controlled substances list about two decades ago, said Brendan Saloner, a Bloomberg Professor of American Health in Addiction and Overdose at Johns Hopkins University.

Pharmacies are fearful of regulatory scrutiny and don’t have “countervailing pressure” to ensure patients get the treatments, he said.

On top of that fear, Medicaid managed care plans’ prior authorization processes may also be adding to the pharmacy bottleneck, he said.

“Black and Latino communities have higher rates of Medicaid enrollment, so to the extent that Medicaid prior authorization techniques are a hassle to pharmacies, that may also kind of discourage them [pharmacies] from stocking buprenorphine,” he said.

In some states, buprenorphine is much more readily available. In Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont, more than 70% of pharmacies carried the drug, according to the study. Buprenorphine availability was highest in states such as Oregon that have the least restrictive regulations for dispensing it.

In contrast, less than a quarter of pharmacies in Iowa, North Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Washington, D.C., carried the medication.

“We’re going to see more people becoming unhoused, because without treatment, they’re going to go back to those old habits,” McCullough, the Florida therapist, said. “When we talk about marginalized communities, these are the populations that are going to suffer the most because they already have challenges with access to care.”

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.