General News

Thousands of Chadian migrants who worked in Libya for many years lost their livelihoods when they were forced to return home as the country went through political turmoil.

Now, thanks to a donation of $2.9 million by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is helping the Chadians resettle in their country.

On Monday, IOM and the Swiss agency signed a two-year community stabilization project to support the livelihoods of the Chadian migrants and the local community in which they have settled.

More than 50 million people worldwide, mostly women, are employed as domestic workers, according to the latest figures from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

But ILO says despite their numbers, domestic workers are among the least protected of employees. Long hours, poor working conditions and insufficient legal protection are some of the realities they face.

For the first time, the agency has released a report which highlights the size and value of what it calls “one of the oldest occupations.”

Prasad Rao, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region, clearly remembers the day he met an HIV-positive orphan in Thailand who was only expected to live for five years.

Fifteen years later, the picture is brighter for people with HIV, thanks to greater access to life-saving anti retroviral medicines. And he looks forward to the day when no child is born with the virus.

Mr. Rao was in New York this week to brief UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on what’s being done to halt the spread of HIV and AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.

More than a thousand people died in the Philippines when Typhoon Bopha (locally known as Typhoon Pablo) ravaged southern Mindanao in early December 2012. It was the strongest typhoon to hit the area in decades, triggering flash floods and landslides displacing at least 10,000 people.

The storm also destroyed over 200,000 homes and decimated almost $950 million worth of banana plants and coconut trees, a vital livelihood to the farming community of Compostela Valley.

Beng Poblete-Enriquez reports:

Duration: 3'32"

Careers in science and technology are increasing, but the International Labour Organization (ILO) says women and girls are in danger of being shut out of these opportunities.

The ILO finds women tend to be overrepresented in areas such as the humanities and the social sciences, and the agency has launched a new manual to address progress in achieving gender equality.

Beng Poblete-Enriquez spoke to Jane Hodges, Director of the Bureau for Gender Equality at the ILO in Geneva, Switzerland.

This year marks a decade since the international intervention in Iraq, and French director Bertrand Tavernier  is working on a film about that time.

Tavernier was recently at the UN to shoot scenes for ‘Quai d’Orsay’ which is based on a graphic novel of the same name that became a bestseller in France a few years ago.

‘Quai d’Orsay,’ which is the name and address of the French Foreign Ministry in Paris, is about the difficulties of working in the pressure cooker environment of the French cabinet.

More than 80,000 people in The Gambia are benefiting from a government project that reclaims and develops degraded land to use for agriculture.

The project, which is funded by the UN Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), uses very simple technologies.

A number of dykes and spillways that have been built in the area where the project is being implemented to retain water that used to flow away, making the land more productive.

Nearby, they are also turning swampland into farmland.

Dianne Penn reports.

Nobel Peace laureate and former President of Timor-Leste José Ramos-Horta has been appointed head of the UN office in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made the announcement earlier this week, pointing out that as President, Mr. Ramos-Horta had contributed to healing wounds and stabilizing the situation in his homeland.

The New Year means a new start for thousands of Liberians who have returned to their homeland after fleeing to neighbouring countries following the outbreak of civil war more than two decades ago.

The last of 155,000 Liberian refugees repatriated by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), arrived home during the final weekend of 2012.

Sulaiman Momodu, UNHCR spokesperson in Liberia, tells Dianne Penn that the repatriation exercise was not only a success for the agency and the country, but the entire region.

Concerns are mounting over the safety of the thousands of civilians, particularly the children, as fighting continues in the Central African Republic.

The United Nations children’s agency (UNICEF) says over 300,000 children have already been affected by the conflict in the Central African Republic through recruitment, family separation, sexual violence and forced displacement, among other problems.

Beng Poblete-Enriquez reports.

Duration: 2’30”