An activist who has mobilized young people in West Africa to lobby against practices that are harmful to girls will now be advocating for change across the entire continent.
Jaha Dukureh from The Gambia was recently named the first ever Regional Goodwill Ambassador for Africa with UN Women, the United Nations entity that champions gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Cuts in UN funding for Gaza’s Palestine refugees threaten to push the entire community “over the edge”, combined with what one senior official has called the “combustible cocktail of humanitarian, political and security challenges” facing the territory.
That’s the key concern of Sikham Al-Khalout, a Palestinian mother-of-seven, who has watched her family’s standard of living tumble in recent months, to the point where they are struggling to survive.
The United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) will close at the end of March 2018.
Over its nearly 15 years of operations, the peacekeeping mission has helped bring back peace and stability to the West African country.
In January, Liberia carried out its first peaceful democratic transition in more than 70 years, with the election of President George Weah, who succeeded Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – Africa’s first elected woman head of state.
It’s exactly 25 years since the UN created a new international emergency response team to respond to disasters around the world.
Officially known as the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination system (UNDAC) the team pools expertise from Member States, to rush to the aid of fellow Member States, hit by sudden-onset emergencies.
On Monday, the different countries that fund UNDAC from all the continents of the world, met for their yearly-gathering in Geneva.
She describes herself as “only an ordinary woman”, but Eva Lavi made an extraordinary contribution inside the UN’s General Assembly Hall in January, fulfilling what she said was her God-given destiny, to bear witness to the evil of the Holocaust.
Ms. Lavi is the youngest survivor to be saved from the Nazis by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler — just a little girl when she was added to “Schindler’s List”.
Before reaching the relatively safe-haven of his factory in Czechoslovakia, she survived the horrors of the gas chambers in Auschwitz.
