During my internship with the United Nations Development Operations Coordination Office (UNDOCO), we organized a virtual innovation fair devoted to Real Time or Frequent Monitoring. With only coffee as an incentive, Rose Sherman and Mita Paramita from Brightfront Group did all the leg work.
People are eager to talk about development if they are asked.
Last year, the UN Agencies in Albania embarked on a dynamic journey to develop the new United Nations Development Action Framework (UNDAF) - the UN strategic plan which aims to help Albania advance its development agenda and create a better life for citizens.
Health workers across Benin are dealing with the current outbreak of Lassa fever, while UN agencies are responding with outreach and treatment. Luckily there is an innovative new mechanism available to everyone involved: you can communicate directly with the UN, no matter who you are.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development builds on Millennium Development Goal (MDG) priorities while setting the world’s sights on emerging health and development challenges. Tobacco control is among the greatest of these, as tobacco use is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory illness – the four main non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that now account for the bulk of illness and deaths globally.
The UN has been in Haiti a long time. The most recent iteration of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) arrived 11 years ago. And it has been ‘shall we stay or shall we go’, for some years now. Maybe 2016 is the year where, finally, the decision to wrap up a full peace keeping mission does happen. For real. And for many, Haitians and UN colleagues alike, it is about time.
Do your new year’s resolutions include taking joint programming online in 2016?? We in Mozambique are moving in this direction. Working together with a team at HQ and Tanzania country office, we are on our way to fulfilling an aspiration of ours– to have an online United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF).
Buckminster Fuller was a polymath and one of the most well regarded futurists of the 20th century. Bucky, as he liked to be called, astutely encapsulated the aim of foresight in a single phrase: “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”
The recent surge of hundreds of thousands of refugees travelling from Syria and elsewhere into Europe has prompted new debate about the international aid response to the crisis caused by the Syrian conflict. Should European and other countries do more to help refugees leaving Syria and its neighbours? Should they do more to help in Syria and its neighbours? Can more be done to bring about an end to the war?
