yonnetim

I just returned from Guatemala where the United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up team is focused on the UN’s vital work to empower indigenous girls and stop domestic violence in rural towns and villages. Thinking about the people I met there, I keep returning to one word: bravery. It takes bravery for girls to ask their parents to allow them to join the Espacio Amigable – “Safe Space” – program run by the UN in remote towns such […]

Engaging with the public is a key to global progress.  That is why I am inspired by what I am seeing this weekend as the Public Diplomacy and Government Communication Forum in Dubai, a first-of-its-kind gathering for public diplomacy professionals in the region, gets underway.  Public diplomacy is an ancient art and yet one that’s more relevant than ever. The world is more interconnected—and just plain connected, through technology and social media—than at any time in history. And today,

This March, a spotlight is shining on the role of women in the workplace. The conversation launched on International Women’s Day (March 8) with the theme “Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030,” and discussions will continue throughout the 61st UN Commission on the Status of Women (March 13-24), which is focusing on “Women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work.” The Sustainable Development Goals have brought renewed interest in

As we speak, the UN Peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, MINUSCA, is working around the clock outside of the town of Bambari to protect tens of thousands of civilians – many of whom are internally displaced – from encroaching rebel fighters. The religious and ethnic tensions in CAR coincided with the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. The international community’s reminder of the failures of the UN in Rwanda helped deploy a

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals will require new ideas and new ways of thinking. Parallel to the 2017 World Government Summit in Dubai in February, the United Nations Foundation partnered with Dell to bring together over 30 policymakers, entrepreneurs, and NGO workers from 15 countries to develop and propose innovative solutions to global challenges. Participants were posed the overarching question: How can public policy promote entrepreneurship and advance the Sustainable Development Goals? Five teams came

The highly-anticipated second report of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, released this week at the UN, leaves no room for ambiguity: Empowering women as economic players is good to do, right to do, and smart to do. More than that, we know how to do it, and Leave No One Behind: Taking Action for Transformational Change on Women’s Economic Empowermentgives us a clear and compelling game plan. The report is enlivened by the conviction that

  Twitter posts, credit card purchases, phone calls, and satellites are all part of our day-to-day digital landscape. Detailed data, known broadly as “big data” because of the massive amounts of passively collected and high-frequency information that such interactions generate, are produced every time we use one of these technologies. These digital traces have great potential and have already developed a track record for application in global development and humanitarian response. Data2X has focused particularly on

By Zenia Tata, Executive Director, Global Expansion, XPRIZE On World Water Day, we are served a powerful reminder that water is life. Water is the universal link between human survival, our climate system, and sustainable global development. But a quick search on Google with the question, “Will earth ever run out of water?” will spring up an optimistic “never” in a matter of milliseconds. A check of the facts illustrates that planet Earth is covered with 71%