A Dialogue Through Service: Making a Difference while Making Friends
If we are to solve the world's major problems such as ending war and making sure everyone has enough to eat, millions of people from all over the world will need to be involved. They will need to understand the interconnectivity of all people, care about others, and maintain the highest ethical standards while they focus on solutions. In other words, we need world citizens to communicate with one another. But how are we to find and cultivate these people?
Tackling Poverty Reduction: The Role of the Islamic Development Bank
Poverty reduction is the greatest challenge facing humanity today. An ideological commitment to reduce or eradicate this phenomenon should be contemplated as part and parcel of social moral responsibility and shared human values across countries and generations. Failure to do so will have unprecedented repercussions on human development.
The Secretary-General's Agenda: Progress On Disarmament Required For Global Security
It is an honour to suggest agenda items and top priorities in international security for Ban Ki-moon's first term in office as Secretary-General of the United Nations. However, it is also a daunting prospect, given his special expertise in foreign affairs and international security policy.
Are Twittering Youth Agents of Positive Change?
The United Nations World Youth Report 2007 stated that there are approximately 1.2 billion people -- 18 per cent of the entire world population -- between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four living in the world. Youth is a powerful force for change and youth activism is on the rise, with a lot of young people taking action for social transformation. Youth are engaging with their communities and making their voices heard. This activism is being carried out through a variety of media and is conducted differently in nearly every country in the world. Young people can choose to hold rallies and protests on the streets, attend public hearings, or even organize grassroots movements within their communities. Since the Internet is used by 30 per cent of the world's population, as some estimates have it, it has also become a preferred tool for young people to foster positive change.
The New Untouchables Crime: Punishment and Race in America
The current American prison system is a leviathan unmatched in human history. Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million people were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails scattered across America's urban and rural landscapes.
Learning from Slavery– The Legacy of the Slave Trade on Modern Society
In 2006, I gave some lectures at Harvard during which I called for a month, a week -- a day even -- of collective mourning for the millions whose souls still cry for proper burial and mourning rites. These lectures have now been published under the title: Something Torn and New. I did not know then that others were thinking along the same lines. I am glad that this day is being commemorated at the United Nations, but it should be actively observed in the whole world, as slave trade and plantation slavery were of prime importance in the making of the modern world.
Towards Universal Primary Education: The Experience of Tanzania
The Government of the United Republic of Tanzania recognizes the central role of education in achieving the overall development goal of improving the quality of life for its citizens. It considers the provision of quality universal primary education for all the most reliable way of building a sustainable future for the country.
LIFESTYLE DISEASES: Access to Chronic Disease Care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Chronic, non-communicable diseases or chronic diseases,* such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes, have a considerable impact on human life and the economy.These diseases have become the leading cause of mortality worldwide and were estimated to account for 60 per cent of global deaths -- 35 million -- in 2005.
First UN Art to Reach the Summit of Everest: The Uniting Painting
On 26 May 2011, I celebrated my seventy-ninth birthday, and it seemed to me as if only two weeks had passed since I had turned sixteen years old.
But time has indeed flown by, measured by the more than eleven thousand political cartoons that I produced on a daily basis during those two weeks.
Addressing the Sustainable Urbanization Challenge
The cities of the world's emerging economies are increasingly drivers of global prosperity while the planet's resources are fast depleting. It is, therefore, more critical than ever that Member States and United Nations agencies commit themselves to realize the goal of sustainable urbanization as a key lever for development.
Ahead of the Curve: A series on Development Pioneers at the United Nations
A new series in the UN Chronicle will highlight the major intellectual contributions and policy consequences of work undertaken by major researchers who worked with the United Nations system during their careers.
The Importance of the MDGs: The United Nations Leadership in Development
The Millennium Development Goals are the international community's most broadly shared, comprehensive and focused framework for reducing poverty.
National Identity and Minority Languages
How far do we go in implementing language policies into the education system so as to integrate a nation's peoples? Nearly all nations identify and determine at least one language as the official language, and some include another as the national language.
Equal Opportunity In Education : Eliminating Discrimination Against Roma
n 2002, on my way to the United States Congress where a hearing on the education of Roma was being held, I was asked by the taxi driver where I come from and what was the purpose of my trip. I told him I was going to testify before the Congress about the problems faced by Roma in education.
Girls in War: Sex Slave, Mother, Domestic Aide, Combatant
The attackers tied me up and raped me because I was fighting. About five of them did the same thing to me until one of the commanders who knew my father came and stopped them, but also took me to his house to make me his wife. I just accepted him because of fear and didn't want to say no because he might do the same thing to me too. This is the testimony of a young girl of 14 from Liberia as told to the Machel Review in a focus group conducted jointly by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (OSRSG/CAAC).