This story explores how sustainable development could be achieved through new models, more specifically passing from top-down commitments to a bottom-up delivery. The financing conversation must evolve to a local scale, and Resident Coordinators of the UN are playing a catalytic role in order to achieve this goal. Indeed, “the SDGs can be won at the last mile—but only if we start putting the first dollars where they matter most.”

Beyond Capitals: Financing the Frontlines of Sustainable Development

- Gaza: UN rights office condemns killing of Palestinian journalists 
- Afghanistan: UNICEF urges safe returns amid education concerns 
- World Steelpan Day: Celebrating a Caribbean instrument with global impact 

Audio Credit: Emma Trager-Lewis, UN News
Audio Duration: 4'4"

UN News Today 11 August 2025 -Gaza update, Afghan returnees, World Steelpan Day

CLIP - Olga Cherevko, OCHA, on the situation in Gaza

- Report reveals ‘systematic torture’ and other crimes in Myanmar  
- Gaza hospitals overflow with people injured while seeking food: WHO 
- UNESCO chief condemns killing of six journalists in Gaza City 

Audio credit: Anna O'Donnell, UN News
Audio duration: 3'54"

UN News Today 12 August 2025 - Myanmar report, Gaza health, UNESCO condemns journalist killings

Gaza: Thousands of sick children like Janah need urgent medical evacuation, says UN aid office

Veteran UN aid worker Olga Cherevko on Wednesday described the moment she recognized a young girl requiring treatment in a Gaza hospital after a year's interval, once again suffering from malnourishment.
"I remembered her long eyelashes," Ms. Cherevko told UN News, describing seven-year-old Janah, who she came across at Gaza City's Patient Friendly Hospital on Tuesday.
"The first time I met her was in the IMC Field hospital in southern Gaza in April of 2024. Back then, she was severely severely malnourished and was getting treatment. And she gradually became better and was released eventually and went home. And unfortunately yesterday when we found her in the hospital, she has been hospitalized again because the malnutrition became aggravated and the condition that she has also is not properly diagnosed and cannot be properly diagnosed. This is why she is on the list of people to be evacuated and medically evacuated and properly treated outside. 
"There are thousands and thousands of children on this list of patients to be evacuated, so it's important that these these evacuations continue to make sure to save as many lives as possible. And one thing important to note is that even with preexisting conditions, when children or adults become malnourished, the whatever condition they have is exacerbated so much more. And of course, they don't heal as fast. And their situation becomes worse and worse; it wouldn't be this way if they had proper nutrition, because these conditions existed before the starvation crisis, and these children and adults, they they weren't getting as sick as they are now."


20250813-Gaza-OlgaCherevko-Janah

- Türk: Sri Lanka must seize opportunity to 'break with entrenched impunity'
- UN Human Rights urges Uganda urged to conditionally release opposition leader
- Myanmar: Hunger surging in Rakhine state, warns WFP 

Audio Credit: Daniel Johnson, UN News
Audio Duration: 4'44"

UN News Today 13 August 2025 -Impunity in Sri Lanka, Opposition leader in Uganda, Hunger in Myanmar

People in Haiti are living through “hell on earth,” according to William O’Neill, the UN’s designated expert on human rights in Haiti.  

Armed gangs – predominantly in the capital Port-au-Prince – are parasitically extracting financial resources from the population and perpetrating horrific acts of violence, he says – but they’re just one cog in a larger cycle of impunity, corruption and violence. 

Following the release of the most recent report on human rights in Haiti, UN News’ Naima Sawaya spoke to Mr. O’Neill about whether a path forward to peace even exists. She began by asking if he had ever met a gang leader. 

Audio credit: Naima Sawaya, UN News

‘Hell on earth’: Desperation in Haiti as human rights violations abound

- Türk: Peru amnesty law is an ‘affront’ to victims of country’s war 
- Syria: Violence in Alawite areas may be war crimes, say rights investigators  
- Gaza 40C heatwave piles pressure on scant water supplies: UNRWA 

Audio Credit: Daniel Johnson, UN News
Audio Duration: 4'09"

UN News Today 14 August 2025 - Amnesty law in Peru, Possible war crimes in Syria, Heatwave in Gaza

•	Plastic pollution treaty talks adjourn in Geneva without consensus
•	From Sudan to Yemen, conflict is fuelling cholera, warns WHO
•	Gaza: Nearly all people with disabilities have lost assistive devices

Audio credit: Daniel Johnson, UN News

UN News Today 15 August 2025 - Plastic pollution treaty, cholera, Gaza update

An education specialist who left Somalia as a child when the civil war broke out in 1991 has now returned to support the Ministry of Education as they expand national testing.  

The programme which enabled this specialist, named Shire Salad, to return — Migration for Development in Africa or MIDA — is run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and recruits diaspora experts who have  a “personal desire to give back."  

MIDA then pairs these experts with local professionals who work together to advance the development of hospitals, schools and other institutions. While the diaspora experts ultimately leave, the hope is that their skills will remain.  

UN News’ Naima Sawaya spoke with Mr. Salad about his experience returning to Somalia after so many years.  

Returning home to Somalia with grey hair and a desire to give back

• More young lives lost and devastated in Russian attacks on Ukraine: UNICEF 
• Gaza food assistance below half WFP’s daily target 
• Impacts of Somalia drought made worse by funding cuts: OCHA

Audio credit: Daniel Johnson, UN News


UN News Today 18 August 2025 - Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia drought

Bringing together the United Nations development system to deliver on the Global Goals for people and planet.

Beyond Capitals: Financing the Frontlines of Sustainable Development

UN Sustainable Development Group

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