UN Interviews

More than one million people in southern Madagascar are going hungry in what the World Food Programme (WFP) believes could become the first-ever famine brought on by climate change. 

Successive years of drought have forced people in rural communities to eat locusts, fruit and cactus leaves because they have been unable to plant or harvest sweet potatoes, tomatoes and other crops. 

Alice Rahmoun, WFP Communications Officer in the capital, Antananarivo, was in the region recently. She said families have been selling prized assets, such as cattle, farmland and even homes, to survive.   

Ms. Rahmoun spoke to Dianne Penn about the UN agency’s support to some 700,000 people, with plans to reach more, and hopes for the COP26 climate change conference which opens later this month in Glasgow, Scotland. 

For more than two years, a UN-appointed team of 59 people has been collecting and analyzing more than two million pieces of evidence about possible human rights violations in Myanmar.

It’s not very often at the UN that we get the chance to talk to talented musicians whose work can help to promote the Organization’s goals of peace, human rights and development; but that’s exactly what happened when Mali songwriter Vieux Farka Touré agreed to tell us all about his brand new composition, A Song For The Sahel. 

In partnership with the humanitarian coordination office OCHA, Mr. Touré set out to write a message of hope to the people of the Sahel, a region where spreading violence has left almost 29 million people in need of life-saving assistance and protection; that’s five million more people than last year.  

Here he is now, talking - and singing - to UN News’s Daniel Johnson. 

When he went to school for the first time, five-year-old Kailash Satyarthi saw a child cobbler, sitting outside the school gate.  

Seeing the impoverished boy having to work and unable to go to class, gave him a new perspective, and set him on the road to becoming a passionate child rights advocate.  

Kailash Satyarthi has been at the forefront of the global movement to end child slavery for decades now.  

The human rights activist from India won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 and was recently appointed to serve as one of four UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocates. 

Mr. Satyarthi spoke to UN News’s Anshu Sharma in New Delhi.

The most important action the world can take to tackle the climate crisis is to quickly decarbonize every mode of transportation on earth, according to one determined expert, starting with buses. 

Alex Mitchell, Senior Vice President of Unlocking Innovation at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, and author of the newsletter, Sustainable Mobility, says that carbon is an existential threat that the world has an obligation to remove from transport. 

For Mr. Mitchell, electric buses are a “Swiss army knife solution” to the problem because, as ridership grows, there is less dependency on private car, and because they are equally applicable in both emerging and developed markets.  

Ahead of the upcoming UN Sustainable Transport Conference, which takes place between 14 and 16 October, Mr. Mitchell shared with UN News’s Liz Scaffidi, some of the ways the world can shift to safe, accessible and environmentally friendly transportation.

Afghan political exile Zarifa Ghafari fled Kabul shortly after the Taliban takeover on 15 August; she’d already survived three attempts on her life as one of the country’s few female mayors – and she feared the worst if she stayed.

Today, the 29-year-old activist is determined not to let the gains made by women over the last 20 years, go to waste.

She spoke in Geneva to UN News’s Daniel Johnson, who started by asking her for her assessment of the country’s new de facto rulers.