Over the past five months, I have had the privilege to serve with UNMISS as a volunteer. I support a diverse and passionate team of peacekeepers who create a secure environment for the voluntary and dignified return and reintegration of internally displaced persons and refugees displaced during South Sudan’s civil war, or more recently due to climate-induced disasters and inter-communal clashes.

Ezat Ullah’s family hails from Koz Kunar in Nangarhar Province, in the eastern part of Afghanistan. The family fled to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in the 1980s, during the Soviet-Afghan War. His seven siblings, three sisters and four brothers, were also born and raised in Pakistan. In the refugee camp, Ezat and his siblings pursued an education and later, Ezat went on to obtain a Master’s degree in International Relations from Bahria University in Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad.

My Name is Emmanuel Chileshe Musonda, and I am currently serving as a UN Volunteer Health and Nutrition Associate at UNHCR's Kawambwa field office in the Mantapala refugee settlement. As a UN Volunteer, I mainly support the planning, implementation and analysis of health and nutrition projects in the refugee settlement. From a strategic standpoint, I provide technical guidance and programmatic recommendations on the overall design and focus of public health and nutrition programmes in the settlement. 

My role on a day-to-day basis consists of helping asylum seekers to substantiate their applications. This comprises interviewing asylum seekers in Morocco to find out why they request international protection and, based on their statements, evaluating their case to make a recommendation on whether their application should be accepted. 

The Archipelagic and Island States Forum (AIS Forum) is UNDP Indonesia’s one of a kind project, serving as a platform to bring together 47 archipelagic and island states to collaborate on common challenges and opportunities faced by island nations. Talei and Linnet are the AIS Forum’s Programme Development Specialists for the Asia Pacific and Caribbean Regions respectively.

What are the key highlights of your assignment, and who do you interact with in your daily work?

"At the beginning of the pandemic, there were no specific treatment modalities, and no vaccines were available for COVID-19. It was important to isolate the people infected from COVID-19 and contact tracing on time to stop the spread of the virus."

Dyah joined the Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) Project as a UN Youth Volunteer in 2018. BIOFIN is a global partnership that addresses the challenges of biodiversity financing in a comprehensive way. This initiative provides an innovative methodology that enables countries to measure biodiversity expenditure in the medium term and identify financial solutions that are most suitable for bridging biodiversity and financial disparities.

I joined the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) as a UN Volunteer in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) team shortly after the first COVID-19 outbreak in Kenya in May 2020. Almost immediately after I started my assignment, traveling to the field was no longer safe due to the rising COVID-19 infection rates in the country.

Chaired by the World Health Organization (WHO) Representative in Namibia, the UN CPRP contributed to strengthening national health capacity and systems as well as providing operational assistance on logistics, especially for the procurement of medical equipment, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.