This study presents a reconnaissance investigation into the occurrence, typology, and hydrogeologic significance of pockmarks in African drylands. These unique geomorphic depressions, characterized by poorly developed or disconnected drainage networks, occur on a surface covering more than 10 million km2 of the continent. Despite their widespread presence, pockmarks remain understudied in hydrogeology and their significance in local groundwater security is rarely investigated. Using an integrated methodology that combines remote sensing, digital elevation models, literature review, and field isotope hydrological investigations, this study identifies and classifies five major pockmark types. Evidence from the isotope hydrology study in Ethiopia reveals their vital role in focused groundwater recharge, temporary surface water storage, and promoting the occurrence of perched groundwater systems in otherwise groundwater-scarce environments. The depressions are shown to be critical for supporting biodiversity, ecosystem services, and water security in arid and semi-arid regions. This study highlights the hydrogeologic significance of these features and calls for an increased hydrogeological investigation.
Women's participation is pivotal to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6) in Afghanistan, yet progress has stagnated since the August 2021 political transition. This narrative review synthesizes secondary evidence from 2000-2025, drawing on peer-reviewed literature and international organization reports, with pre-2021 sources providing historical context and primary focus on post-2021 developments to evaluate gendered policy impacts. Pre-2021 gender-inclusive programs, such as Community Development Councils and the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Program, harnessed women's roles in leadership, hygiene promotion, and water management to raise safe drinking water access to 33% and improve sanitation coverage. However, post-2021 policies have reduced female labor force participation to 3.4% and blocked humanitarian aid access for over 70% of women in a gender-segregated context. Compounded by halved funding, economic decline, cultural norms, and inadequate school sanitation, these barriers perpetuate health and gender inequities while halting WASH gains. The review outlines feasible, culturally sensitive pathways alongside calls for sustained funding and diplomatic advocacy. Prioritizing women's inclusion remains essential and achievable for equitable SDG 6 progress in this constrained environment.
Timely and accurate situational reports are essential for humanitarian decision-making, yet current workflows remain largely manual, resource intensive, and inconsistent. We present a fully automated framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to transform heterogeneous humanitarian documents into structured and evidence-grounded reports. The system integrates semantic text clustering, automatic question generation, retrieval augmented answer extraction with citations, multi-level summarization, and executive summary generation, supported by internal evaluation metrics that emulate expert reasoning. We evaluated the framework across 13 humanitarian events, including natural disasters and conflicts, using more than 1100 documents from verified sources such as ReliefWeb. The generated questions achieved 84.7% relevance, 84.0% importance, and 76.4% urgency. The extracted answers reached 86.3% relevance, with citation precision and recall both exceeding 76%. Agreement between human and LLM based evaluations surpassed an F1 score of 0.80. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed framework produces reports that are more structured, interpretable, and actionable than existing baselines. By combining LLM reasoning with transparent citation linking and multi-level evaluation, this study shows that generative AI can substantially support the generation of humanitarian situation reports that domain experts judged more useful, better structured, and more transparently sourced than current approaches—marking a concrete step toward operational use, even as important challenges remain on the path to fully reliable autonomous deployment.
Abstract Play is integral to early childhood development, fostering skills crucial for holistic growth. While the role of mothers supporting children’s play has been widely studied, there is limited research on fathers’ roles, despite evidence suggesting a positive impact of their involvement on children’s cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes. This paper, drawn from a larger study on learning through play in Nigerian public pre-primary schools, explores fathers’ perceptions of Learning through Play (LTP). A mixed-method design was employed for the overall study, and data was collected through Focus Group Discussions (FGDs). Participants consisted of 160 fathers from diverse backgrounds, with children aged 3–5 attending public pre-primary schools in 16 urban and rural locations across eight states in Nigeria. The primary objective of the FGD discussions was to gain an in-depth understanding of the fathers’ comprehension of LTP and their perceptions regarding its significance in children’s learning. The data were analyzed thematically, using NVivo-12 to derive key themes from the transcripts. Themes emerged around fathers’ knowledge of LTP, cultural perceptions regarding play, urban-rural distinctions in play practices, perceived benefits of LTP, fathers’ supportive roles, challenges and cultural constraints, and strategies for father engagement. Findings indicated that fathers recognized LTP as a holistic approach incorporating play and learning and improving father-child relationships. While emphasizing their role as financial supporters of education, fathers acknowledged their interests and availability to undertake community-level engagement, advocacy, and development of play environments and resources. Urban-rural distinctions contributed to diverse perspectives on LTP. This study recommends encouraging paternal involvement in LTP through engagement of fathers as community awareness ambassadors, and father-focused and led initiatives for fostering healthy child development in pre-primary classrooms.
This study presents the results of indoor radon measurements collected during three survey campaigns, accumulating around 450 data taken in dwellings, public buildings, and workplaces. The first stage of the study focused on refining the database, which included only 220 measurements taken on the ground floors of dwellings. The information collected from the largest cities in twelve administrative areas of Albania showed that approximately 30
