The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that “our health systems are inadequate”, the UN chief told a ministerial meeting on Thursday, citing weak structures and unequal access to healthcare as “major reasons” why the coronavirus has killed one million people and infected more than 30 times that, globally.
Helping to reshape the UN's approach to better serve the continent and merge the UN-led Sustainable Development Goals with Africa's own 2063 Agenda, are top priorities for the newly minted UN Special Adviser on Africa.
Tax abuse, money laundering and corruption, plague the global financial system, a high-level UN panel reported on Thursday, launching an interim report that underscores the need for urgent reforms to achieve the 2030 Global Goals (SDGs).
“The spirit of South-South cooperation and global solidarity”, is alive and well across the hemisphere as the word grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, said the UN chief in a message relayed to countries of the Global South on Thursday.
Without harnessing the energy, tech savvy and optimism of young people, the world has no hope of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or the Paris Agreement on climate change, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Tuesday.
Tourism is much more than visiting cultural landmarks or swimming in tropical beaches; it is “one of the world’s most important economic sectors”, the UN chief said on Tuesday.
Polio vaccination campaigns have resumed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, months after having been severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday.
The global prevalence of potentially-deadly hepatitis B in children under age five, dropped to under one per cent in 2019 – down from five per cent in the pre-vaccine decades between the 1980s and early 2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Monday.
Although some 178 million hectares of forest has been lost worldwide over the past three decades, the rate of loss has declined substantially during this period, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Tuesday.
While the scale and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic is being felt in developing and developed countries alike, the President of the UN General Assembly maintained on Monday that the response must focus on “the two-thirds of the world’s population at risk of being left behind”.
