Coordinating the humanitarian response to drought and COVID-19 in Lesotho

Muhammad Waqas, UN Volunteer Humanitarian Coordination Officer, UN Resident Coordinators Office, Lesotho
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I am an international UN Volunteer from Pakistan serving in Lesotho as a Humanitarian Coordination Officer with the UN Resident Coordinator’s office. I am responsible for the coordination of humanitarian responses among the UN agencies, government counterparts and partner organizations.

I joined the UN in Lesotho in 2019 to lead the drought emergency coordination efforts in the country. The country had just been devastated by drought at the time, leaving more than half a million people (about a quarter of the total population of Lesotho), mostly women and children, experiencing severe food shortages. Tens of thousands were ‘one step away from famine’. While farmers experienced droughts, rising temperatures, and extreme weather, the changing weather condition was forcing people to migrate.

Indigenous community leader supports COVID-19 response in Guatemala as a UN Volunteer in her own community

UNV partnering with UN Women
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Ingrid Sierra is a Guatemalan indigenous woman from the Poqomchii’ linguistic community, with a Q’eqchi identity. She joined UN Women Guatemala in 2016, first as part of its Economic Empowerment team and currently serves in the area of women, peace, security and humanitarian response. Her deep commitment to women’s rights, however, not only manifests itself through her service as a UN Volunteer. Ingrid is also leading her community’s response efforts to the pandemic, demonstrating the immense power of solidarity and compassion in the face of a crisis.

When reflecting about the aspects of her work which she is most passionate about, Ingrid highlights the direct contact, the ability to engage in sincere communication with women in her community. These exchanges go well beyond the institutional context, as she is enabling women’s voices and facilitating their participation in decisions that affect their lives and communities:

Offering opportunities to the youth of Mali

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A country's greatest wealth is undoubtedly its youth. In Mali, as in most of the countries in Africa, young people represent more than 60 per cent of the population. Half of them live in precarious conditions, lacking opportunities to ensure their socio-economic integration. This situation is exacerbated by the political crisis that the country has been going through since 2012, which is making young people the prey of extremist groups in search of new recruits.

In 2018, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) launched a job creation programme for 3,000 young people in Mali. Daouda Michel Sawadogo (Burkina Faso) is based in Mopti and served under this programme as an international UN Volunteer Youth Specialist.

Idleness makes young people easy prey for armed groups who can then easily recruit them.  The challenge is to help them find an occupation that meets their aspirations. --Daouda Michel Sawadogo, international UN Volunteer Youth Specialist

Taking bold action to address development challenges in the Pacific

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Today, on International Youth Day, we celebrate the power of youth engaging and taking action across the world to bring about positive change.

Ernest Gibson is a young change maker serving as a UN Volunteer who was recently named as one of the seven members of UN Secretary-General’s new Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change, promoting young leaders for bold climate action.

UNV Offer for Lebanon

UNV Offer in Support of the UN System Rapid Response in Lebanon
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UNV is ready to support the UNCT in Lebanon in facilitating single source and fast-track recruitments or re-assignments of currently serving UN Volunteers for emergency response-and-recovery. UNV offers a wide range of volunteer categories – from UN Community, Youth and Specialist to Expert Volunteers – to fit the needs of our UN partners. Read more in this document.

Reaching the unreached: Youth in Zambia help lead COVID-19 response

UNV partnering with UNDP
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In May of this year, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in partnership with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme, the Zambian Government and the National Youth Development Council, kicked off a mass community outreach campaign. The partners deployed youth volunteers for door-to-door sensitization, as part of a UN-wide initiative in Zambia to strengthen community preparedness and response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Child Development and its network, the initiative aims to mobilise, train and deploy 2500 community youth volunteers across the country, selected from some of the most affected communities in the country. They will support ongoing sensitization efforts by the Zambian Government, the United Nations, Development partners and other key stakeholders to help control the spread of the virus.

New cohort announced: Population Data Fellowship – a UNFPA/UNV initiative for civil registration and vital statistics

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What will the prospective fellows gain from this experience?

The UN Volunteer Population Data Fellows will work with UNFPA in advancing applied research, technical assistance and capacity building in civil registration and vital statistics, in close collaboration with national statistics offices, civil registration authorities and related UNFPA institutional partners.

New cohort announced: Population Data Fellowship – a UNFPA/UNV initiative for civil registration and vital statistics

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What will the prospective fellows gain from this experience?

The UN Volunteer Population Data Fellows will work with UNFPA in advancing applied research, technical assistance and capacity building in civil registration and vital statistics, in close collaboration with national statistics offices, civil registration authorities and related UNFPA institutional partners.

Angolan youth at the forefront of the COVID-19 response

Judite Silva, UNV Youth Volunteer with UNDP's Accelerator Lab
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There is no need to call a specialist to find out what the most searched topic on the internet is these days: Coronavirus. Since its outbreak last December 2019, in the central city of Wuhan in China, the virus has spread all over the world, becoming a pandemic, as stated by the World Health Organization (WHO) last month.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) does not discriminate by race, gender, geography, income, age or sex. Regardless of who you are, the type of job you have, or the lifestyle you lead, COVID-19 has shaken societies around the world and upended lives and livelihoods. It has forced governments to respond rapidly and develop response and recovery plans.

Transitioning from agricultural economics to preventing violent extremism

Tomas Kral, UN Youth Volunteer, UNDP Regional Service Centre for Africa
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My name is Tomas Kral, from the Czech Republic, and I have been serving as a UN Youth Volunteer at the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Service Centre for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, since March 2019. As a Programme Assistant, I work on preventing and responding to violent extremism in Africa, a regional project.

Before UNDP, I worked at the Permanent Representation of the Czech Republic to the European Union (EU) in Brussels, Belgium – working closely with the Agriculture and Environment Unit and engaging with the EU’s Task Force for Rural Africa. This provided me with development experience in an agricultural context.

As a recent graduate and practitioner in the field of Agricultural Economics, it has been a challenging yet compelling transition to dive into the approaches to prevent violent extremism (PVE). --Tomas Kral, UN Youth Volunteer, UNDP

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