Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed's video message to the Young African Women Fellows programme, a joint initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the African Union Commission, held today:
On International Women’s Day, peacekeeping colleagues report that Bangladesh, for the first time, is deploying four justice government-provided personnel, all women, to the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM), later this month.
In Mozambique, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) today launched a $12 million humanitarian appeal to urgently provide life-saving sexual and reproductive health and protection services to 330,000 women, girls, and youth who have been impacted by the humanitarian crisis in Cabo Delgado and COVID-19.
About 931 million tons of food — or 17 per cent of all food available to consumers in 2019 and roughly equal to 23 million fully loaded 40-ton trucks bumper-to-bumper, enough to circle the Earth seven times — were trashed by households, retailers, restaurants and other food services, a UNEP report says.
Following are Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s opening remarks, as prepared for delivery, to the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, held today:
Schools for more than 168 million children around the world have been closed for an entire year due to lockdowns, a report from UNICEF says, noting that around 214 million children globally, or one in seven, have missed more than three quarters of their in-person learning. The most vulnerable may never return, it warns.
The Secretary-General regrets the use of violence and the subsequent loss of life reported at the residence of the presidential candidate Yaya Dillo in N’Djamena, Chad. He deplores the use of force in the context of the electoral process and urges the authorities to foster an inclusive political process.
In north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, United Nations vaccination teams are supporting the Ebola response by rehabilitating treatment centres and boosting contact-tracing capacity, and today began a four-day mission to Guinea to assess the situation in Nzérékoré, where the first Ebola case was reported.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) today launched the Humanitarian Airfreight Initiative, with 15 leading airlines supporting the prioritization of the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines and other critical supplies.
Following is the text of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ video message for the G5 Sahel Summit today:
