The 15 members of the Security Council are in Kampala, Uganda, today, as part of their visit to the Great Lakes region of Africa. And about now, they are meeting President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. Earlier today, they were in Rwanda, where they met President Paul Kagame in Kigali. The delegation will arrive later today in Addis Ababa, and that will be the last leg of the visit.

Arriving in Hungary, the Secretary-General attended the Budapest Water Summit where he informed attendees that by 2030 nearly half the world would be facing water scarcity. He called for full engagement of all stakeholders, in particular the business world, towards guaranteeing a water-secure world. He also met with Hungary’s President and Prime Minister.

The Deputy Secretary-General will deliver the Sorensen Lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations this afternoon, and he intends to talk about the recent plenary session of the General Assembly and what was achieved there. That lecture will be webcast on the Council of Foreign Relations website.

Thanks largely to Member States meeting their obligations, the overall financial situation of the United Nations was sound, and the Organization’s cash position in its core operations other than the regular budget were projected to be positive at the end of this year, said Yukio Takasu, Under-Secretary-General for Management at a Headquarters press conference today.

Attending a summit of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders and the United Nations, the Secretary-General highlighted points of partnerships and said the Organization needed ASEAN’s dynamism to set new standards for equitable growth and sustainable development in the region and beyond.

The crucial needs of about 1 billion people living with physical and mental disabilities around the world must be woven into the disaster planning and emergency response plans of Governments and civil society groups, said the Organization’s senior manager on disaster reduction at a press conference at Headquarters today.

At a time of progress for women’s right alongside the emergence of devastating new forms of violence against women, consolidating inter-agency efforts to make more of an impact on the ground was the next forward step, the Head of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women said at a press conference at Headquarters today.

The Secretary-General congratulated the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) for being awarded the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize today. He noted that, later today, the Security Council is expected to approve a first-of-its-kind OPCW-UN joint mission in Syria following the landmark work of the UN chemical weapons investigation mission.

On Sunday, a UNAMID convoy was attacked in West Darfur, killing three peacekeepers and wounding another; on Friday, a UNAMID military observer was killed in an attack in North Darfur. The Secretary-General said that these attacks were unacceptable and called on the Government of Sudan to bring those responsible to justice.

The Secretary-General has appointed Sigrid Kaag of the Netherlands as Special Coordinator of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-United Nations joint mission to eliminate the chemical weapons programme of the Syrian Arab Republic. The appointment was made in close consultation with OPCW Director-General Ahmet Üzümcü.