UN – United Nations

It’s World Toilet Day and still more than one-third of the world’s population – 2.5 billion people – do not have access to proper toilets, and 1 billion people practice open defecation. Toilets may not be a popular topic of daily conversation, but it’s a crucial issue we need to talk about in order to create a healthier and safer world. Why? The facts are shocking. According to the UN: Every year, hundreds of thousands […]

While there have been some signs of progress in the global effort to stop the Ebola outbreak, the crisis is still extremely serious and demands greater resources. Simply put: We can’t let up now or we risk losing the gains we have made. That’s why some of the world’s top soccer players have teamed up with FIFA, the Confederation of African Football, and leading health experts, including from the World Health Organization, to raise awareness

The United Nations Foundation works to support the UN in solving some of the world’s most urgent challenges, so it’s with great interest that I read Understanding “New Power,” Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms’ new piece in the Harvard Business Review on how organizations can be most effective in driving positive change. The article is an insightful and thoughtful examination of how power is shifting in today’s world and how organizations can navigate the new landscape

Cooking shouldn’t kill. It’s a simple premise, yet every year more than 4 million people die from exposure to household air pollution from cooking over open fires or traditional cookstoves. Girls and women often spend hours collecting and carrying heavy loads of wood and other fuels for cooking. And the smoke from traditional cookstoves contributes to the growing threat of climate change. This is one of public health’s greatest challenges – and solving it is

As we begin to see some progress in the fight against Ebola in Liberia, the country hardest-hit by the outbreak, more details are now available about Ebola’s spread to neighboring Mali. Initially, a 2-year-old girl imported the virus from Guinea to Mali and sadly died of the disease on October 24. All 118 people believed to have come into contact with her have now passed the 21-day period without developing symptoms. However, the virus was

The ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa is unprecedented, with over 14,000 cases so far and a mortality rate up to 70%. While we are making some progress, we have a lot of work to do. Bringing the outbreak under control depends on quickly finding people with Ebola and isolating them during treatment so they cannot infect others. However, identifying cases of Ebola requires a good diagnostic test, and the current tests are cumbersome, slow, and complex.

Today, November 25, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and a good time to reflect on the many extended ramifications of gender based violence, quite apart from such violence being bad and unacceptable in and of itself. A recent World Health Organization report for example trawls the data to come up with some appallingly high global and regional estimates of the levels of such violence and sobering figures on the

November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Today, one in three women around the world experience some form of physical or sexual violence. This is not only a threat to women’s overall health and safety, but also to their ability to pursue an education, earn an income, and be equal participants in society. At its core, violence against women is a human rights issue that both men and women

The international community’s response must continue to be “fluid, nimble, and regional,” Ambassador Samantha Power, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, told the UN Security Council on Friday, November 21 at a meeting on Peace and Security in Africa. She recalled the unprecedented Security Council resolution on Ebola that was signed in September and remarked that now, two months later, “We are beginning to see the impact of the international community’s collective response.”