The United Nations and World Bank have agreed to build resilience and sustain peace in conflict areas, the two institutions announced on Saturday. UN Secretary-General AntĂłnio Guterres and World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim released a joint statement confirming the news. The UN chief has been attending the World Bank and IMF or International [...]

Women continue to be "more vulnerable" to the impacts of disaster, but in some countries its men who are more of a concern. That was one of the surprising perspectives to emerge from a discussion on the empowerment of women and girls, which took place at the recent Fifth Regional Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction [...]

Human beings are too self-interested in their relationship with nature, because of their failure to understand they are part of the natural world, Wu Hongbo, the Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs has said. He made the remarks during an interactive dialogue to commemorate International Mother Earth Day, entitled "Harmony with Nature". The theme of [...]

Barriers to women's full workplace participation persist in Saudi Arabia, despite UN data showing that economic growth improves with a more diverse workforce. That's what Muna AbuSulayman, founder and co-host of Kalaem Nawaem, a popular social issues program on Arab television, told Bruce Edwards of the International Monetary Fund or IMF. In 2012, a decree [...]

Listen to a bulletin of news and features from the United Nations, with Matthew Wells and Jocelyne Sambira. In today’s programme: thousands of children have fled to Angola from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, often to avoid forced recruitment by militias; and the UN Children’s Fund in Yemen tells us the suffering of young [...]

  325 million people suffer from hepatitis B and C More than 325 million people are infected with hepatitis B or C virus, which can seriously damage the liver, and most sufferers do not get the life-saving help they need, UN health experts said on Friday. Here's Dr Gottfried Hirnschall, Director of WHO’s Department of [...]

The suffering of millions of children across Yemen has become "invisible to the rest of the world" according to UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) representative in the war-ravaged country. Merixtell RelaĂąo said the impact of the fighting between coalition-backed government forces and so-called Houthi rebels, on children and families, has been "catastrophic". The conflict has fuelled [...]

Thousands of children have fled a spike in violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in recent weeks and sought refuge in neighbouring Angola to avoid recruitment by militia, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said on Friday. Many of the children are sick and in need of urgent assistance, UNHCR says, amid ongoing [...]

World must agree a more responsible, humane way to manage migration It's time for the international community to come together to "more responsibly and humanely manage the movement of people". That's the view of the Director-General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), William Lacy Swing. The agency has documented over 65,000 deaths of refugees [...]

New mass graves find in DRC – OHCHR's Liz Throssell Seventeen new mass graves have been found in an area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that's seen months of clashes between government soldiers and local militia, the UN said this week. In a call for an independent investigation, the UN Human Rights [...]