The UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, Mr. Ahmad Alhendawi recently spent a week visiting China at the invitation of the All-China Youth Federation.  He was joined by a joint UN delegation of senior youth experts from UNESCO, UNV, UNEP, UN Habitat, ILO, and UNFPA to advance collaboration on youth development in China.

Gaza, State of Palestine:  Volunteers are catalysts of change and make important contributions to sustainable development – this is so aptly personified by Mona Ouda and Diana Abu Ramadan, two national UN Volunteers with UNDP’s rubble removal programme. Engineers and workers are part of this USD $ 14 million project to facilitate the removal of debris of destroyed homes and other civic infrastructure in The Gaza Strip. Four female engineers that include Mona and Diana are also part of this programme.

Gaza, State of Palestine: Volunteerism is the path I have chosen to shape the development of my community and my own self-confidence. In my home of Gaza city, within the State of Palestine, volunteerism, as with many other things, takes its own particular shape. We volunteer to help people and to help ourselves in the context of high levels of poverty and unemployment.

Ramallah, State of Palestine: They say if you travel the world carrying the same thoughts and attitude throughout your journey, it is as if you have never left your place. Cognition and knowledge is not about how many places you have seen; sometimes it is how you can view the same place or thing in different ways and from different perspectives. Being a national UN Volunteer provided me with the opportunity to see my country, Palestine, in a different way.

Ramallah, State of Palestine:  I love people, cities and towns. For that reason, I chose to be a spatial/urban planner and I plan for people. When we plan, people should be at the centre of the process; and we should aim to improve people’s lives. People, cities, towns and villages cannot be viewed separately, they are so interconnected. As long as people are there, cities always develop and never stop.

Being a UN Volunteer allows you to perform a wide range of activities and have direct contact with people while getting involved with the population to tackle challenges to peace and development. Children are always an important target group.With this in mind, we held a workshop to promote issues relevant to children, such as responsible consumption and sustainable production and distribution systems of goods we consume in the Oruro department. These issues are an important part of the environmental problems and health consequences we currently face.

Municipal Child Protection Offices are scattered across Bolivia, with limited human resources and logistical support. The Plurinational State of Bolivia, together with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), decided to apply a community-based protection plan to support the work of these offices through the Community Promoters for Human Rights strategy.

Teresa Calderón is a national UNV Health Specialist. She supports the National Zero Malnutrition Programme through community health actions with a focus on nutrition, providing technical assistance to improve the quality of health care for Bolivian families, especially mothers and children. One of her field visits was to the remote and isolated community of Ucumaci in a very arid region of the country. She was very impressed by the health centre she visited there, which she described as an oasis in the middle of the desert.

As a UNV Water and Sanitation Officer, Koenraad Vancraeynest is happy to be able to contribute to small-scale rural water and sanitation projects that have a big impact on daily life, especially for women and children. In one of his field visits to a small and isolated rural community, a mother explained to him that, before the water system was built, she had to wake up before sunrise every morning to get water for her children. Today, she can get water in a second by just opening the tap on her patio.