Children returning to schools, workplaces re-opening, and vaccines all seemed to point to a return to normal but like 2020, 2021 has been a year of hope, loss, and uncertainty for people around the world. Stories of innovative ways to connect, protect our planet from climate change, and ways we, as a society, have joined forces to protect each other from the pandemic that has ravaged all our lives.
Every year around the world, thousands of volunteers from dozens of professional backgrounds join missions in different UN agencies to work in the field. All volunteers serving across 150 countries and territories are coordinated by an agency called UN Volunteers, or UNV for short.
“Persons with disabilities are capable and equal. It is time the world understands that,” says Antonio Palma, a UN Volunteer at the Resident Coordinator’s Office in Guatemala.
UN teams are tirelessly working with authorities and partners to respond to the ongoing pandemic and other multifaceted challenges across the globe. Today, we highlight some of the coordinated efforts.
More than six years into Yemen’s war, migrants continue to arrive in the country. Most hope to continue north through Yemen seeking job opportunities for day labourers. But many of them are kidnapped and held for ransom. Migrants face hunger, theft, injury, or death along the way as they desperately seek refuge.
The children of families who were affected by the massive earthquake which devastated large parts of south-west Haiti in August this year are receiving free hot meals at school as part of an initiative by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to support the recovery of the country’s most vulnerable communities.
When armed conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, it was the start of a tumultuous and insecure era. Many Ukrainians left everything behind in search of safety. They didn’t know if or when they would return.
Since it started in 2011, the war in Syria has killed or injured around 12,000 children and pushed over 90% of the country’s children into poverty. Millions of other Syrians have fled to the relative safety of nearby countries—including Jordan, which is now home to some three million registered refugees. That includes some 2.3 million from Palestine and almost 700,000 from Syria. Nearly half of the Syrians are under age 18.
