The number of people affected by humanitarian crises is unprecedented. In the past decade, over 1.5 billion people have been affected by natural disasters, and more than 65 million have been forcibly displaced – internally in their own countries or seeking shelter across borders. Worldwide, one in nine people go to bed on an empty stomach every night, and one in three suffer from some form of malnutrition.

Volunteer Sonali Rani Das works as a nurse and has been a member of the mobile medical team since 2011. Currently the team is seeing 200 patients a day, all presenting complaints about the recent catastrophic floods that hit Bangladesh.  We are seeing a lot of women and children. They have problems like skin infections, eye infections, scabies, diarrhoea and asthma. We have even seen snake bites. When I see the children, I take the mother’s blood pressure and check her over too,” she explains.

A Bangladesh Red Crescent mobile medical team has been set up in Bangladesh, and it is run by volunteer Dr. Mohsin Ahmed. He explains that food, water and shelter are the main concern of the people he is seeing, most of whom are women and children.

I was looking at the UNV Bangladesh Facebook page when I noticed that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Bangladesh was looking for a UN Volunteer to serve as Research Assistant to work on daily media briefings, data entry and standardization, and drafting policy briefs for the Democratic Governance Cluster. Their needs tied directly to my interests and areas of expertise. When UNV contacted me, it was indeed a remarkable day.

Daniel Gustafson, FAO Deputy Director General and UNV Executive Coordinator Olivier Adam signed a Memorandum of Understanding today aiming at scaling-up their collaboration and making rapid deployments easier.   UNV fields around 6,600 UN Volunteers from more than 150 countries working with dozens of UN organizations and Peacekeeping Operations in more than 120 countries.  FAO currently has 17 UN Volunteers posted in Chad, Honduras, Mongolia, Viet Nam and a host of other duty stations.  

Decades of drought, floods and refugee influx, as well as war and displacement, has meant that the those living here have been through substantial challenges. About 67 per cent of children under the age of two suffer from growth stunting, the highest in the country. Before that, 245 of every 100,000 births ends in death; the second highest infant mortality rate in the country.

As many as 68 per cent of women and girls aged 15-49 in Asia and the Pacific face some form of violence in their lifetime. This is one of the highest levels reported in the world.

On Thursday July 2nd, the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme Executive Coordinator, Richard Dictus, and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) President, Youngmok Kim, signed the new Agreement on the United Nations University Youth Volunteer Programme, which further strengthens the collaboration between the two organizations.

On 25 April, a massive 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal. This natural disaster, the worst in 80 years for the country, has not only taken lives but caused life-threatening living situations for hundreds of thousands of people in Nepal, Bangladesh and India. UNV has established a Nepal Earthquake Taskforce to coordinate the most effective and needed support on the ground. Its first priority was to secure the wellbeing of UN Volunteers in Nepal.

The 16 days of activism campaign is a global initiative to raise awareness and combat all forms of gender based violence. The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme joined the 2014 campaign in Bangladesh and decided to focus on an issue often raised during discussions with Bangladeshi citizens: gender and public transportation.