UN News

Only female contingent commander in South Sudan heads new hospital project in Bentiu

When he took office in January of this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres pledged to reach gender parity across the global organization.

Mr Guterres took that commitment a step forward this week by launching a strategy to reach parity among senior leaders by 2021, and ultimately across the UN system in 2028.

Currently, there is a negative correlation between the representation of women and seniority in the UN as the proportion of women staff decreases as grade levels increase.

After steadily declining for over a decade, world hunger is once again on the rise, says the latest UN report on world food security and nutrition, released on Friday.

Some 815 million people were affected by hunger in 2016, an increase of 38 million from the previous year.

The report singles out conflict, increasingly compounded by climate change, as one of the key drivers behind the resurgence of hunger and many forms of malnutrition.

The return of displaced people to their homes in Wau in north-western South Sudan could provide a “model” for other parts of the country, the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) has said.

David Shearer was speaking on a visit to the town which is hosting over 40,000 people who have fled their homes due to a four year long conflict between government and opposition forces.

Emtithal (Emi) Mahmoud writes poetry to draw attention to the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan, as well as the global refugee crisis.

The Sudanese poet, who currently lives in the United States, recently visited El Fasher, Darfur.

Brought up in the region - which has suffered years of conflict - she left Sudan as a toddler for Yemen, and reached the United States in 1998.

Emi first discovered slam poetry while attending Yale University, and holds two world championship titles for her work, which expresses her love and connection to Sudan and its people.

The Under-Secretary-General of the newly created United Nations Counter-Terrorism Office believes that “geographical balance and gender equality are pre-requisites for the success of the unit”.

The flow of desperate Rohingya refugees fleeing across the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh is “unprecedented in terms of volume and speed”.

That’s the assessment of the Asia-Pacific Spokesperson for the UN migration agency, IOM, Chris Lom, who is on the ground in the Bangladeshi border town of Cox’s Bazar.

He said both the government and humanitarian agencies are lacking the necessary resources to deal with the crisis, which has seen around 370,000 flee in the space of two weeks.

The head of the UN’s Department of Political Affairs has urged Somalia to continue its efforts towards reconciliation and state-building.

Under-Secretary-General Jeffrey Feltman concluded a two-day visit to the Horn of Africa country on Friday where he met with leaders, including the President of the Federal Government, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed.

The President, whose nickname is Farmaajo, after the Italian word for “cheese,” took office earlier this year.

Parents in north-west Syria now have access to more than 35 re-opened vaccination centres where they can bring their children for life-saving protection, the UN said on Friday.

World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Christain Lindmeier explained that the move is hugely important for communities in Idlib and Hama left vulnerable to 10 preventable diseases, including whooping cough and tuberculosis.

South Sudan has known no respite since fighting broke out last July, following the collapse of a peace deal between the government and opposition forces.

People in Africa’s newest nation have witnessed "barbaric" acts of violence carried out by armed groups, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), such as the sexual assault of women and girls and the kidnapping of boys for forced drafting.

The number of South Sudan refugees in Uganda has now passed the one million mark.