Imagine if your children couldn’t walk to school without fear of life-threatening violence. Imagine if you feared for your safety every night because there were no lights on your street. Imagine if you were brutally attacked for simply trying to feed your family. This is the harsh reality of every day life for millions of women and girls around the world. The tragic story of Malala Yousafzai, a 14 year-old girl from Pakistan, has been

Authored by: Helena Minchew and Jacob Tobia In Haiti, a 17-year-old girl reports being attacked and raped by six men in a temporary camp after the 2010 earthquake displaced her from her home. In Nepal, a woman is told to go “put on her silk sari,” by her mother-in-law so that she may be scorched in “punishment” for giving birth to girls and not boys. Silk, the mother-in-law says, will burn faster. These are just

Today, the UN Foundation and more than 2,000 partners across the country are making history by launching #GivingTuesday—a movement to celebrate giving and encourage more, better and smarter giving during the Holiday Season. The UN Foundation family is taking part in this new tradition by showing our jean-orosity! Everyone who donates $10 or more to their favorite charity in honor of #GivingTuesday is allowed to wear jeans to work today. We don’t have casual Fridays,

Imagine a life where you live on less than two dollars a day.  You have been saving for months to afford a trip to the health clinic. With your payment in hand, you walk three hours to get to the nearest clinic, carrying your young children with you. When you finally arrive, you want to be able to receive information and testing for HIV and also pick up contraception to prevent pregnancy, but you’re told

Today, the UN and the world are recognizing a group of people who deserve our thanks: volunteers! Every year, more than 7500 volunteers join the United Nations on the ground for projects promoting development, peace, and sustainability. These volunteers, most from developing countries, work in more than 130 countries. Today, on International Volunteer Day (IVD) 2012, the world is thanking both UN and worldwide volunteers for their selfless dedication to causes they believe in and

“So, now we can just walk into the office?” That’s what Rogath Lewis Mollel of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (ELCT) said to me as we made our way into the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill. I responded with a surprised “yes.” Rogath was amazed with the amount of access he and the average U.S. citizen have to our elected officials in Washington, DC. As an American it’s easy to take for