Week in Review

Civilians in Sudan, including scores of internally displaced people and refugees, are scrambling for safety and suffering the disastrous consequences of the violence there, as many aid operations have been forced to pause, UN humanitarians said on Friday.

A turbulent transition to civilian rule has been underway in Sudan since the ouster of former President Omar Hassan El-Bashir in April 2019. The civilian-led transitional Government put in place later that year, through a power-sharing agreement between military and civilian leaders, was toppled by a military coup in October 2021.

In a landmark resolution, the UN Security Council on Thursday condemned the de facto rulers of Afghanistan’s decision to ban women nationals from working for the United Nations, calling for Taliban leaders to “swiftly reverse” their decision.

Survivors of one of the world’s worst ever nuclear accidents at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 have been reflecting on the events of that fateful day 37 years ago, as current employees consider the challenges of working at the plant which was seized by Russian troops following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

What makes a good aid chief? That’s the question we set out to answer in Humanitarian Leadership Stories, a mini-series produced in collaboration with the UN Humanitarian Office, OCHA.

Helping people in emergencies is part and parcel of being a humanitarian, but there’s a lot more to helping vulnerable communities than you might think, as we’ll hear, in this compelling podcast series.

In this first episode, Daniel Johnson from UN News talks to Susan Namondo-Ngongi on her time as UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Eritrea.

• Post-production: Srdan Slavkovic
• Music: Ketsa, Night Whispers

Young people are valuable agents of change and around the world they are taking matters into their own hands and championing innovative solutions to accelerate action on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Conditions for children caught up in Sudan’s military showdown are critical, with at least nine dead and over 50 injured, though the UN Children’s Fund fears that total is probably much higher.

Ammar Ammar, UNICEF’s Jordan-based regional chief of advocacy and communications covering Sudan, said only a lasting humanitarian truce can help restore shattered services, and for now it’s too dangerous for their lifesaving work to continue.

Ezzat El-Ferri of UN News Arabic, began by asking him to describe what UNICEF’s doing to help ease the suffering.

Around 90 per cent of adolescent girls and young women do not use the internet in low-income countries, while their male peers are twice as likely to be online, according to a new UNICEF analysis, coinciding with the UN’s International Girls in ICT Day.

One year after the General Assembly adopted its so-called “veto initiative”, Member States met on Wednesday to discuss how it could contribute to a more efficient and impact-oriented UN. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday launched a new initiative to help strengthen countries’ ability to plan for, and deal with, another deadly pandemic like COVID-19, as latest figures show a huge fall in COVID deaths this year.

Secretary-General António Guterres led tributes from across the UN on Tuesday to the legendary singer, entertainer, and civil rights activist, Harry Belafonte, who has died, aged 96.

India is about to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation in the coming days, the UN population data chief told reporters on Monday.

Ahead of International Mother Earth Day, observed on 22 April, NASA’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Katherine Calvin, shared her terrestrial and intergalactic experiences with UN News and how viewing the Earth from outer space has driven generations to advance climate action.

On Mother Earth Day, marked annually on 22 April, Naw Ei Ei Min, a member of Myanmar’s indigenous Karen people, explains why indigenous peoples have an important role to play, in protecting the environment and addressing the climate crisis.