Bonn, Germany: Five years after the Women’s World conference in Beijing, the UN General Assembly in a special session takes stock — and so does UNV. This issue of UNVNews gives an impression of the work currently undertaken. Read

Bonn, Germany: The United Nations Volunteers programme (UNV) has been called to help coordinate a “high-tech corps” for developing countries to be integrated under a new initiative proposed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Read

San Salvador, El Salvador: The signing of the 1992 peace accords in El Salvador brought an end to more than 12 years of civil war that resulted in a situation of poverty and social injustice in the Central American country. Read

Bonn, Germany: Daddy helps mummy take care of my little sister and My father is a good cook are the titles of posters of some of the 40,000 entries submitted by Vietnamese school children to represent how they perceive gender equality. “I am too familiar with the image of my father reading the newspaper while my mother is cleaning or cooking to question why there is such an inequality,” said a 14-year-old winner in the poster competition. Read

Bonn, Germany: In Rwanda, a tiny, strife-torn East African country, national UNV field workers are helping widows and girl orphans raise an income in the rural areas around Umutara, Kibungo, Kigali Rural, Butare and Gitarama. Auréa Gasengayire, Drocelle Mukazayire and Hélène Muragijemariya, all Rwandans, are three of the UN Volunteer field workers taking part in a UNV programme targeting the needs of some 17,000 people. Among these are 7,200 widows and 500 orphans who survived the country's 1994 genocide. Read

Orissa, India: The state of Orissa in eastern India was devastated by a cyclone on 29 October 1999. Efforts have been in full swing to help the affected people of Orissa first through immediate relief measures. Several agencies under the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have come together here to work. The UN's mission in Orissa, however, could not have been such a success were it not for the efforts of the 13 national United Nations Volunteers (NUNVs). Read

Bonn, Germany: Gabriela Elroy is a Swedish UN Volunteer fully-funded by her government who is working as a gender specialist with the Middle East Nonviolence and Democracy (MEND), a Palestinian NGO in Jerusalem. Read