The author, an Australian who has been researching the lives of women and girls worldwide, risked traveling in Afghanistan by herself, yet she said she would return, despite the problems she met. Here, a woman heading into the village of Ishkashim, near the Tajikistan border. JOHANNA HIGGS
Ambassador Anatolio Ndong Mba of Equatorial Guinea in his office in New York, Jan. 30, 2019. On the wall is a portrait of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. The country is leading a Security Council trip in February to its fellow West African nations of Ivory Coast and Guinea-Bissau. STÉPHANIE FILLION
Protests against a new overtime law in Hungary, Dec. 12, 2018, Budapest. Women who defend human rights are subjected more than ever before to a range of threats, from online trolling to torture, a new Swedish report finds.
Secretary-General António Guterres holding a global town hall meeting with United Nations staff members, Jan. 17, 2019. The authors cite instances of tough resistance to Guterres’s systemwide gender parity strategy, including from certain staff unions. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO
The General Assembly elected five nations to two-year terms on the Security Council, starting on Jan. 1, 2019: Belgium, Dominican Republic, Germany, Indonesia and South Africa. Heiko Mass (left), Germany’s foreign minister, congratulates Christoph Heusgen, his country’s ambassador to the UN. Walter Lindner, state secretary of Germany, right; June 8, 2018. MANUEL ELIAS/UN PHOTO
A session of the 139th Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Geneva, October 2018. Changes in the makeup of national legislatures were pronounced in 2018, with a record number of women elected in America, for example. Such radical shifts in national lawmaking bodies could endure in 2019, yet younger people are not running for office in droves.
In 2018, 55 percent of the world’s population lived in urban settings, and a UN report projects that by 2030, Delhi will overtake Tokyo as the largest city. In the New York-Newark metro area, above, the population of 18.8 million in 2018 is projected to hit 19.9 million by 2030. Paradoxically, areas of intense population growth may present more opportunities for women but not necessarily for their security. JOHN PENNEY
A project of the UN Development Program has enabled the Aatral Arasi Palmyrah Crafts, a group in Sri Lanka, to grow. The author of this essay says, however, that in postwar societies, the private sector must play a major role in rebuilding societies to ensure lasting economic recovery.
Another year of Secretary-General António Guterres’s reform of the peace and security pillar of the United Nations is ending without fully addressing a main obstacle to peacebuilding in conflict-torn countries under UN intervention: sustainable economic recovery.
Fred Eckhard, who was UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s spokesman, in Koudougou, Burkina Faso, with girls helped by a charity he runs, Chance for Change, in their last year of secondary school. Half of them made it to higher education through the charity. Its treasurer, Noëlie, is at Eckhard’s right. FRED ECKHARD
So many nonprofits seem to be after your money these days. Even if you are eager to give it away, you want to be convinced that a given group is the most deserving.
At least 100 women will hold nearly one-quarter of the seats in the US House of Representatives as of January 2019. That could mean more support for women’s rights, including from a New York Democrat, Eliot Engel. Here, protesters in Seattle, 2018.
