The Lid is On

How does a child end up working for a terrorist organization that’s responsible for killing his own father?

That’s one of the questions addressed by a new report from the UN University (UNU) that’s drawn on two years of fieldwork.

For out latest Lid Is On podcast, Matt Wells has been talking to Siobhan O’Neil, leader of the Children and Extreme Violence Project for UNU.

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.

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.

This year’s UN Response Plan for Yemen, describes the war-torn country as “the worst man-made humanitarian crisis” in the world, with more than 22 million people – around three-quarters of the total population – in need of help.

Over the past few years, it’s the voice of Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick, that has been drawing the world’s attention the most loudly, and the most often, to Yemen’s plight.

Somali refugee ZamZam Yusuf has a message for any neighbours who think she doesn’t have the right to call Leicester, in the English Midlands, home.

“I would like to offer you a cup of tea” at my house, says the 30-year-old mother-of-four, who came to UN Headquarters in January, as world leaders prepare to debate the first ever global compact for migration.

He was one of the UN’s very first staff members, and 72 years on, Robert Kaminker is still advocating for peace and the power of the organization to ultimately “save the world”.

Although he retired in the early 1980s, his enthusiasm for explaining how the UN works and can help people everywhere lead better lives, never waned.

At 90, he is still hosting a weekly radio show in his native France, called “L’ONU vous concerne”, which translates as “The UN Matters”.

Astronaut Chiaki Mukai broke all the way through Earth’s stratosphere to become the first Japanese woman in space.

For this latest edition of our podcast series, The Lid Is On, she sat down with Dianne Penn at the recent High Level Forum on Space, held in Dubai and organized by the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) together with the United Arab Emirates Space Agency.