Features

After completing a historic 500km journey from the Kenyan island of Lamu to the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, the world’s first ever traditional “dhow” sailing boat made entirely from recycled plastic, known as the Flipflopi, has successfully raised awareness of the need to overcome one of the world’s biggest environmental challenges: plastic pollution.

Many of the world’s biggest problems may be going unsolved because too many women and girls are being discouraged from the sciences.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – the UN’s blueprint for a better and more sustainable future for all – calls for a reduction in inequality between and within countries. Nevertheless, global inequality is increasing. So what can be done?

In September 2017 two category five hurricanes swept across the Caribbean, devastating island communities in the region.  In the 2nd part of this special report marking the one year anniversary of hurricanes Irma and Maria hitting the Caribbean, UN News looks at how the UN has responded, helping communities to get back on their feet, and preparing them for the inevitability of more damaging hurricanes in the future.

“It was angry. That's what it sounded like to me. When the roof came off, there were these horrible screeches, this horrible noise. It was devastating, and we all had to run”.

On 19 August 2003, a suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives to the United Nations headquarters in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, Iraq, and blew it up, killing 22 people – among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the head of the UN mission in Iraq.

If Bilal Bashir, a Palestinian fisherman and lifeguard living on the coast of the Gaza Strip, does not get work over the summer months, he risks being sent to debtors’ prison.

Twenty-three-year-old Kodi Moumdau laughs with a group of young women in brightly coloured shawls in her ward at the National Fistula Centre [Centre National de Référence de Fistule Obstétricale] in the outskirts of Niamey, the capital of Niger. They can consider themselves amongst the lucky women who have been treated for and survived an obstetric fistula condition.

After the Second World War, 90 per cent of the Holocaust survivors were between 16 and 45 years old. Today, the youngest survivors, who were born in the last phase of the war, are over age 70.

An uptick in armed hostilities in Ukraine has resulted in more deaths and new damages to critical water infrastructure storing dangerous chemicals – posing a grave threat to human life and the environment, according to a new United Nations report.