Every Thursday, Jennifer Barros goes to Rondon 3, a refugee camp in northern Brazil near the border of Venezuela. The camp hosts 844 Venezuelan refugees and migrants, and Jennifer teaches Portuguese there. Kaleth Colmenares, 12, is always waiting for Jennifer at school. Last February he started attending a Brazilian public school and was still adapting to the new language when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Now, once a week, he gets tutoring sessions in several subjects, not least of all Portuguese.
Anong is 20 years old. She suffered serious health issues and anxiety due to the COVID-19 crisis. “I was living with a man, and things were not easy. He was forcing me to have intimate relations,” she says. “After the lockdown, he was seeing someone else while being with me. I was silent and accepted my situation. I was not protected and contracted a sexually transmitted infection.”
In 2021, International Women's Day falls at a time of extraordinary hardship for the people of Syria. This week will mark the tenth anniversary of a crisis which has caused unfathomable loss and driven widespread and growing humanitarian needs across the country.
UN country teams across the world are playing a critical role as they support local and national authorities to rollout vaccination efforts. They are also taking immediate and proactive measures to curtail the rise of Ebola cases in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Guinea.
There are 10 years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. That’s the ambitious to-do list for prosperity and peace that the countries of the world agreed upon at the United Nations in 2015.
For the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence, the UN’s call to “Orange the World” comes with the rallying cry to “Fund, Respond, Prevent and Collect” – bridge the funding gaps, ensure essential services for survivors of violence, focus on prevention and collect the data that we need to adapt and improve life-saving services for women and girls. This year we are handing over the mic to them.
Last week, the world celebrated the International Day of the Girl Child. Progress for adolescent girls has not kept pace with the realities they face today, and COVID-19 has reinforced many of these gaps. Data shows women and girls are especially vulnerable in the face of COVID-19. UN teams across the globe recognize the urgency to protect and support women and girls, especially right now, and are taking every measure to do so.
One million lives have been lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In partnership with local and national authorities, partners and civil society, UN teams continue to fight COVID-19 with the same continued ferocity and commitment. Today, we highlight some of their efforts across the globe.
Just over a year before the novel coronavirus emerged, countries around the world came together to adopt the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) — a new framework for managing large movements of refugees more equitably among States.
