At a clinic at La Fossette Health Center in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, nurses vaccinate babies, among other health care services. The pandemic could further erode Haiti’s stability, experts say, given its precarious economic and political state. DANIEL LANARI/USAID
Solar panels installed on the roof of the United Nations in New York, Aug. 27, 2019. The complexity of the UN system makes it difficult for outsiders to assess its success in reducing its climate footprint. Moreover, some UN staff want the organization to be more of a global role model for environmental action. MARK GARTEN/UN PHOTO
Members of the child-protection team from the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo, participating in a soccer match. The player’s shirt, translated from French, says “child recruitment is a crime.”
Every time the budget committee of the United Nations meets, as it did in June, child-protection advocates enter a familiar existential crisis: will the United States and China cut UN budgets specifically allocated to specialists on child protection in peacekeeping missions?
Amina Mohammed, right, the deputy secretary-general of the UN, signed a partnership agreement with the World Economic Forum, led by Borge Brende, left, to speed up progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general (behind Mohammed) and Klaus Schwab, the Forum’s chief executive, joined the ceremony in June.
Mansour Al-Otaibi, Kuwait’s ambassador to the UN, in his office in New York. He is leading the monthly rotating Security Council presidency in June for his country’s last time in this role for what could be decades. STÉPHANIE FILLIONGeopolitically, Kuwait’s plate is nearly full for its Security Council presidency in June, with rising tensions with Iran to mediate and the American-led peace plan for Palestine and Israel possibly unveiled, although that appears to be more unlikely by the day.
Simon Handy, who specializes in African politics and conflict, worked for the UN in the Central African Republic, during its most violent upheaval. The experience still haunts him. SOUTHERN AFRICAN LIAISON OFFICE
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with President Trump at lunch with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc in Hanoi, Feb. 27, 2019. Pompeo and Trump marked international women’s month in March by actively eroding the reproductive health rights of women globally. RON PRZYSUCHA/STATE DEPARTMENT
Here’s how the United States government marked the 2019 monthlong celebration of the world’s women in March:
In Dakar, staff members from UN Women Senegal and other UN agencies attend a presentation on sexual harassment in the workplace, part of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 2016.
As multilateralism takes a beating from President Trump amid the “new world disorder,” as one European diplomat put it, three women who know the United Nations inside and out through previous top leadership jobs have originated a Group of Women Leaders for Change and Inclusion.
United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, left, was the guest of honor at an official reception in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), Congo, on Sept. 13, 1961, with Cyrille Adoula, the head of the country, right, and his deputy, Antoine Gizenga (with glasses). Five days later, the secretary-general, the author’s father and others were dead in a mysterious plane crash in the region. UN PHOTO
My clock radio clicked on. The morning news bulletin announced that United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane was missing.
It was Sept. 18, 1961. I was 16.
Achim Steiner, center, is a longtime specialist who now runs the UN Development Program, based in New York. The current restructuring of the UN may be sidelining Steiner, jeopardizing development work.
As the first effects of Secretary-General António Guterres’s ambitious organizational reform plans become apparent, former and current officials of the United Nations Development Program see the future of the internationally influential agency as uncertain if not in peril.
