Blog: UN Reform and Innovation

Sometimes the things that bring the greatest benefits to our lives are also the most underappreciated. Example: toilets. Can you imagine your life without one?

Worldwide, 2.5 billion people don?t have access to basic sanitation like toilets and latrines. As UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson, a leading advocate for clean water and sanitation, points out, ?More people have cell phones than toilets in today’s world.?

Following the devastating destruction by Typhoon Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda) that hit the Philippines on November 8, the United Nations, the Government of the Philippines, and other humanitarian organizations are mounting a massive coordinated humanitarian response to provide families with immediate lifesaving aid.

On Wednesday evening, big names and bold voices like Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson, Her Majesty Queen Rania, and Priyanka Chopra joined UN Foundation board members, UN supporters, diplomats, and business leaders at our Global Leadership Awards Dinner.

I want to be sure this is on your radar: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will take up the United Nations Disability Treaty again today, Tuesday, November 5, and we need to rally in a big way if we have a shot at getting it ratified.

This month, three big scientific advances were announced at the MIM Pan-African Malaria Conference. All of them are bad news for malaria. Each of these advances has the potential to strengthen the fight against malaria over the next decade and help us to eliminate this disease.

In many communities, girls are forced to marry young, without access to voluntary family planning services. This means they often have children as children themselves. They’re unable to go to school and are at a high risk of medical complications from pregnancy.

Last week we celebrated United Nations Day, a day that marks the anniversary of the entry into force in 1945 of the UN Charter. It was also a day to reflect on the UN’s invaluable contribution to peace and common progress and to assess what we have accomplished and where we are headed.

Every baby should have the same opportunities to good health. Fear of diseases that have proven to be preventable by vaccines just shouldn’t exist. It isn’t right that in village where I was born children are still to this very day getting polio, the disease that paralyzed my left leg. As a father, I now fear even more for those children and their parents.

When Franklin Roosevelt called on Americans to celebrate the first UN Day, the term “United Nations” had just been coined to describe the alliance that stood against fascism’s march. But for a dedicated group of internationalists, it was more than a slogan, more even than an alliance, it was the embodiment of an idea that would come to final fruition with the signing of the UN Charter on October 24, 1945.