"I would go to the villages, and people will tell me, ‘On this day, we learned that we were going to be attacked [...] and then it happened.’ The question then became for me, ‘If people know that they are going to be attacked, and you don't have 911. You don't have ways of calling. The nearest policeman is 600 miles away. What do you do?'"

In this episode, we listen to the story of Alice Nderitu, the Secretary General’s Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide. Alice speaks candidly about her experiences mediating in areas of conflict and how her powerful storytelling techniques built a peace agreement between 56 ethnic communities that still stands today.

When she was a young girl, she had told her brother "'I'm going to be an elder, and I'm going to sit there and I'll make decisions.’ And my brother would tell me, ‘You’re a girl. Girls don't get to do that. Only men can do that.’ And so we...now it's a joke between us."

:: Alice Nderitu interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"We all need to be convinced that we don't have a plan B. We only have one plan. And that one plan is to correct how we do business around our food systems and what our environment can handle. Our planet can take care of itself. It will eject us and move on. But is that where we want to be?"

Agnes Kalibata, UN Secretary General's Special Envoy to the 2021 Food Systems Summit, shares her remarkable story of growing up in a Ugandan refugee camp with her Rwandan parents. Her father, a trained doctor, was forced to retrain as a farmer after relocating. But his passion for learning drives his daughter and she’s admitted into the best girls' school in Uganda, receiving a UNHCR scholarship to support her studies.

Agnes discusses how an encounter during her Ph.D led to her becoming the former Minister of Agriculture in Rwanda and why it’s so important to build resilience around climate change at this year’s Food System Summit.

:: Agnes Kalibata interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"No, you cannot have two metres apart from a family member who may show symptoms because it's only one room. No, you cannot wash your hands regularly because there is no tap water and the children of the woman will have to go 5 kilometres away to get some water. No, you don't wash your hands because between buying a bit of rice and soap, you choose the rice. And no, you don't stop going out to beg on the street or to have one of those daily meagre wages from daily work because the money you get in the morning is the money which allows you to buy lunch. [...] Yes, the Western world worries about the coronavirus. Yemen cannot even afford to worry about the coronavirus because we have malaria, chikungunya, cholera and dengue fever. All that. Plus, there is a famine," said Jean-Nicolas Beuze, Representative of the UN Refugee Agency in Yemen.

In a deeply personal interview about his career helping refugees and victims of torture, Jean-Nicolas describes being driven by the “denial of their human rights” and that “injustice was something I could not accept”. He also reveals fearing for the first time for his own loved ones who face the dangers of COVID-19 back home.

:: Jean-Nicolas Beuze interviewed by Melissa Fleming

Inger Andersen, UNEP Executive Director, warns that climate change poses an existential threat far greater than COVID-19. "[P]eople understood COVID because it was imminent," she said. Yet, "it's a fact that COVID is [...] a small overture to what will happen if we do not take action on climate."

Inger describes UNEP as ‘the environmental conscience’ of the world. "Our job is to tell the world honestly, without scaremongering, what science tells us and then to support countries [...] so that they can implement what it is that we are telling them needs to get done."

Science, in Inger's words "has to make its way to the dinner table, to the voting booth, to the school playground, into the boardrooms. Science needs to be understood so there is not something that only some people in a high ivory tower can deal with. But that anyone gets."

“You have more than 30 countries in Africa that have a degree of plastic bans. [...] If they can do it, then why can't we in the wealthy world? When we respect nature, and our planet, we are respecting ourselves. And when we fail to, we are in fact disrespecting ourselves, or certainly the next generation and their life."

:: Inger Andersen interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"Five months after losing my son in the #BeirutBlast I have decided to start writing about my experiences of grief and trauma. I can't promise it will be eloquent, or even make sense, and it certainly won't be pretty. But I hope this process is cathartic for me."

On August 4th 2020, as Sarah Copland was working and preparing for the arrival of her second child, Ethan, she and her family were tragically caught in the vast explosion that caused devastation across Beirut.

Isaac, Sarah’s first born son, was killed.

Trying to understand her grief, Sarah started writing a blog, and in the process, her words have resonated with others experiencing loss.

Sarah Copland is a UN Officer working on women's rights and gender equality in the ESCWA Centre for Women.

:: Sarah Copland interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"Maybe that's what attracted me to this kind of work as well, because there isn't a script, you know, no one really tells you when you're in the middle of a crisis, what's right and what's wrong. You know, a lot of it is instinctual. A lot of it is based on sort of your principles as a human being."

Richard Ragan, the Country Director of the World Food Programme in Bangladesh, says a sense of adventure drew him to working for the UN and it also fuels his passion for outdoor sports. He says he functions better in environments, where you have to think on your feet. But with his line of work comes enormous responsibility:

“I don't want one person that I'm responsible for to be hungry. And you know, that, that keeps me up at night, for sure. But the thing that scares me, probably more than anything, and, you know, there's no vaccination for it, is climate change. ... It's like the waves or the mountains, it doesn't care."

:: Richard Ragan interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"And he rushes up to embrace his mother. At that moment, I just said, thank you. This is what happiness is, I want to do this all my life. I just want to repatriate refugees for the rest of my life."

This week’s guest is Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, which delivers education in humanitarian crises through funding investments for UN agencies and civil society organizations. Yasmine describes herself as a pragmatic idealist, who was taught by her mother not to look for success in life, but to seek to serve. Before her current role Yasmine worked for UNHCR resettling refugees.  She says that her mission now is crucial to helping people overcome crises and rebuild their lives:

“If you invest in the children, give them the tools, the education, so that they are no longer disempowered, that if you and I cannot change the world, they can do it.”

:: Yasmine Sherif interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"Days go by. And you know that every single day is a day of somebody losing their lives, or their livelihoods. And so you say to them, no more time!" 

Martin Griffiths is the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Yemen, a country that has been devastated by civil war, and which is experiencing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises with famine, very little medical care, and now the coronavirus pandemic. Working to end the six-year conflict there is only the latest challenge in his long career as a mediator and humanitarian worker,  and while he admits to being impatient for results, he also describes himself as an optimist, even if only 10 percent of mediation efforts ever succeed: 

"But that priceless moment, which I can only really associate with mediation, is to die for."

:: Martin Griffiths interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"This is why exile, refugee exile is so devastating, because it is the admission to oneself, that home is not safe anymore. There are very few decisions that a human being can make, that are as difficult as choosing the path of exile. And this is what displaced and refugees do.”

Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is recovering from Covid-19, and says it's given him a sense of the fragility of life. He says the socio-economic effects of the epidemic, including  rising poverty, are especially dire for refugees and displaced people.

"We believe, for example, that 50% of the refugee girls who used to go to school before the pandemic, may not ever go back to school afterwards, because their families are too poor to support their education. They'll go to work. But it could be even worse. They could go into early marriage, they could go into exploitation and worse."

:: Filippo Grandi interviewed by Melissa Fleming

"So what we try to bring to the top level, and then at the advocacy level is that all of those things are important because they do impact on the way that women and men, boys and girls access those resources and services [...] they cannot be gender neutral, because their lives are not gender neutral. That's not how people live their lives. "

Funmi Balogun is the head of Humanitarian Action at UN Women, supporting some of the world’s most vulnerable women and girls - people who are displaced or refugees. She works to make sure that the humanitarian response does not perpetuate gender inequality.

"[M]en usually do not leave those camps [...] they stay in those camps as a security net, but the women and children have to go out, they have to look for food. So the women become very vulnerable to violence to all sorts of abuses. At the same time, they are not leading in those camps. They are not the ones who speak about what type of food, they're not the ones who are consulted, about what types of housing, they are not the ones that are consulted in everything."

:: Funmi Balogun interviewed by Melissa Fleming