Listen to our daily bulletin of news and features from the United Nations, presented by Dianne Penn and Matt Wells. In today's programme: Recovery efforts continue in the Caribbean island nation of Dominica, decimated by a recent hurricane; and: Could electronic payments be Better than Cash? We hear about Ghana's experience.

Earth observation technology can be a tool for women's empowerment as it provides satellite imagery which can help with environmental monitoring: for example, in agriculture or with tracking infectious diseases. That's the view of Bolo Basuti, a research assistant at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology. She participated in a recent event in [...]

Continued fighting, airstrikes, threaten thousands in Syria's Deir-ez-Zour The UN voiced continuing alarm over the impact of fighting and airstrikes on civilians in Syria's Deir-ez-Zour governorate on Tuesday. Between 1 and 8 October, around 95,000 were reportedly displaced to as many as 60 different locations in and around the governorate, as forces from both the [...]

Medical staff trying to keep basic services going on the devastated Caribbean island of Dominica urgently need support, including reliable food supplies. That's the plea from Clemens Buter, team leader in Dominica for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), in an interview on the hurricane-ravaged island, with UN News. He said that 29 out of [...]

Unequal pay and lack of paid parental leave holds women back in the world of work. That's the economic reality underpinning a meeting organized by UN Women and the Nordic Council of Ministers which took place at UN Headquarters in September. Norway began offering paid parental leave to mothers for a full year in the [...]

Ramya Subrahmanian attended the high-level event on Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals for Children: Collective Actions and Innovative Solutions held at the UN Headquarters. The main challenge in the achievement of the sustainable development goals for children by 2030 is the scale. 1.7 billion children in 2015 have experienced interpersonal violence, both from their parents and [...]

WHO and partners undertake massive anti-cholera campaign in Bangladesh Hundreds of health workers and volunteers in Bangladesh are gearing up to inoculate more than 650,000 refugees against cholera. They will be taking part in what has been described as the world's second largest oral cholera vaccination campaign ever. The campaign kicks off on Tuesday in [...]

Deadly attack on blue helmet base in eastern DRC Two peacekeepers have reportedly been killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations said on Monday. This follows an attack against a base of the UN mission in the country, MINUSMA, located in Mamundioma in North Kivu province, in the east. Violence between [...]

More than 200 million people are out of work around the world – an increase of 3.4 million since last year, the UN said on Monday. In a new report on jobs and the economy, the International Labour Organization (ILO) warned that small business has "stagnated". The impact of this is worst in developing economies [...]

Rapid urbanization in Africa is creating opportunities to strengthen rural economies, as demand for food rises in cities and towns. That's according to a major new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), published on Monday, which argues that a "sweeping transformation" is needed to unlock the potential of the countryside and stop the [...]