Development

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message to the opening of the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development for the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), in Geneva today:

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message for the R-SDG Forum segment on the “Presentation of the 2020 System-wide results report of the UN+ development system in Latin America and the Caribbean”, held today:

Following is the text of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ video message to the opening of the Aswan Forum for Sustainable Peace and Development, held from 1 to 5 March:

Ten years into Syria’s crisis, humanitarian needs are deepening, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says, with an estimated 13.4 million people requiring protection and assistance, up more than 2 million people from 2020.  Nearly 60 per cent of the population is food insecure.

Following are UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks to the Munich Security Conference segment on “Priorities for Global Action”, held today:

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message to the round table hosted by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development titled “Rebuild, Boost, and Transform:  Gender approaches for an inclusive COVID-19 recovery”, today:

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.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced today the appointment of Usha Rao-Monari of India as Under-Secretary-General and Associate Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The period following the start of Afghanistan’s peace negotiations in September 2020 has witnessed a sharp rise in the number of human rights defenders and media professionals killed in the country, a new report issued today by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) says.

Acting unanimously today, the General Assembly decided on an exceptional basis to provide Angola — which had stood poised to graduate from the United Nations list of least developed countries — with an additional preparatory period of three years, in light of socioeconomic vulnerabilities exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.