Nobel Laureate Prof. Wangari Maathai, boxing champion Conjestina Achieng, and artists from the Kenyan music scene joined with the UN System in Kenya to launch a communication and advocacy campaign focusing on the need to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Kenya by 2015. The MDGs, adopted by the world’s governments at the Millennium Summit in 2000, are a set of eight time-bound measurable objectives for reducing poverty and hunger, improving health and well-being and protecting the environment.

The UN-led campaign, developed and produced in Nairobi, is built around eight one-minute public service announcements (PSAs) that highlight the role of the UN in assisting Kenya achieve its MDG objectives, including preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. National television and radio stations KBC, KTN and Citizen will begin to broadcast the PSAs in the run up to the 2005 World Summit, which takes place in New York on 14-16 September. At the Summit a record number of Heads of State will debate essential UN reforms and review progress towards the MDGs.

“The year 2005 is crucial in our work to achieve the Goals” said the Acting Resident Coordinator of the UN in Kenya and UNICEF Kenya Representative, Mr. Heimo Laakkonen. “Instead of setting targets, this time world leaders must decide how to achieve them. A major push is needed if we are to achieve the required objectives by 2015,” Mr Laakkonen continued, noting that while most regions were showing good progress toward most of the goals, results are much less encouraging in sub-Saharan Africa.

For more information contact Nasser Ega- Musa, email: nasser.ega-musa@unon.org. Visit www.unicnairobi.org

Visiting a camp in north-western Kenya, the chief of the United Nations refugee agency on 30 August promised that thousands of people driven from their homes in South Sudan by two decades of fighting could return to the region after the rainy season ends in October. "You have the same rights as I do, the right to a home in your homeland," UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) António Guterres told representatives of the 89,000 refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma camp, on the second to last leg of a 10-day mission that included stops in Sudan and Chad.

"I am going to be very clear. There will not be any kind of forced return. Return will only be voluntary. Nobody will be forced to go back. This is the first guarantee," Mr. Guterres said, pledging that UNHCR would help some of Kakuma's 66,000 South Sudanese refugees go home as soon as the rainy season ends. He outlined measures the agency was taking to prepare for their return, including building schools, de-mining roads and rebuilding health facilities, and urged the refugees to work with the new South Sudanese authorities to consolidate peace in their homeland.

Representatives of 5,000 southern Sudanese who arrived in Kakuma after the signing of the January peace accords told Mr. Guterres they fled militia fighting that had continued after the agreement was signed. Mr. Guterres also spoke to a group of 100 refugees from the western Darfur region, scene of a separate war between rebels, the Government and allied militia, who walked for nine months to reach the safety of Kakuma.

For more information visit www.unhcr.org

The United Nations environmental agency on 26 August announced a multi-million dollar project to help some of the world’s poorest people better cope with drought and pest infestations, targeting 20 pilot areas for restoration of damaged forests, soils, water and other key life-support systems in southern Niger and northern Nigeria. The wide-ranging, $14.5 million project, being launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), aims to strengthen the way natural resources are managed, boost legal and institutional frameworks and streamline cooperation between the two countries, thus helping to alleviate poverty and increase food production, while improving the health and viability of fragile ecosystems.

The multi-billion dollar GEF was established by donor governments in 1991 with projects managed by implementing agencies which include UNEP, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and World Bank. UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer noted that world leaders will be meeting at a summit at UN Headquarters in New York next month to review implementation of the MDGs. “It is my sincere hope that, as underlined by this new project, they will fully agree that the environment is not a luxury but is ‘natural capital’ needed for overcoming poverty and delivering peaceful, long-lasting, development,” he said.

Niger, ranked second to last on the UN poverty index, has been racked by drought and, more recently, locust infestations, leading to an estimated third of its more than 11 million people suffering severe food shortages. Experts believe that the country is now more vulnerable to natural disasters like droughts and plagues as a result of human pressures such as over-grazing, felling of forests for fuel and water pollution.

For more information visit www.unep.org

After returning from a visit to drought-stricken, locust-devastated Niger, where the people are struggling to recover from widespead malnutrition, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for better early warning about potential emergencies, more focus on prevention, the strengthening of regional institutions and a “look in the mirror instead of pointing fingers.”

In an opinion piece carried in the Financial Times and Le Monde newspapers, Mr. Annan also called for help for some 20 million Africans who are at risk of similar severe hunger and food insecurity. “One of the proposals I have put before next month's World Summit calls for a 10-fold increase in the UN's Emergency Fund, which would enable UN agencies to jump-start relief operations,” allowing governments, the UN and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to take adequate preparatory measures and deploy personnel with greater speed, he said.

The summit of more than 170 heads of State and Government will meet from 14 to 16 September at UN Headquarters in New York to discuss UN reform and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of targets designed to halve or eliminate a host of socio-economic ills. Niger is grappling with a devastating array of challenges, including hunger, prolonged drought, accelerating desertification, locust infestation and regional market failures, but the Government and civil society groups have mobilized to help those most in need, Mr. Annan said. “I saw profound suffering in Niger, but I also saw signs that the country can come through this crisis, with lessons for all of us.”

For more information visit www.un.org

With Somalia’s transitional authorities deadlocked over the government’s location and the deployment of foreign peacekeepers, a senior United Nations official will hold consultations this weekend with the heads of regional organizations aimed at healing a rift that has stalled the latest attempt to re-establish a central authority in the war-shattered Horn of Africa nation.

François Lonsény Fall, Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Special Representative for Somalia, was expected to meet on 27 August with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, Amre Moussa. On Sunday, he will travel to Ethiopia to meet with the Chairman of the Commission of the African Union (AU), Alpha Omar Konare. While in Addis Ababa, he is also expected to meet with the Ethiopian authorities.

Earlier this month, Mr. Fall held private talks in the town of Jowhar with senior Somali officials who pledged to work with the UN to end the stalemate over the relocation of the fledgling government and its institutions from Kenya to Somalia, which has had no functional central authority for 14 years following the collapse in 1991 of the government of Muhammad Siad Barre. Mr. Fall remains in close contact with the leaders of the Somali Transitional Federal Institutions, and according to the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNOPS), President Abdulahi Yusuf Ahmed and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi maintain that Mogadishu is not secure and the seat of government should be temporarily established in nearby Jowhar and Baidoa until the capital can be made safe.

For more information visit www.un.org

With peace talks between the Sudanese Government and rebel factions based in the western Darfur region set to reopen on 15 September in Abuja, Nigeria, the United Nations Security Council 0on 30 August strongly urged the parties to quickly reach agreement to end the two-year civil war that has killed nearly 180,000 people and driven more than 2 million from their homes. “Only through a political solution can a durable peace and reconciliation be achieved in Darfur,” said Ambassador Kenzo Oshima of Japan, which holds the Council’s rotating presidency for the month of August, reading a statement to the press following closed-door consultations on the African Union (AU) led peace talks.

The Council urged the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudanese Government to negotiate “constructively and urgently” to reach an agreement during the talks, which were suspended in early July after the parties signed a "declaration of principles" aimed at ending large scale fighting in Darfur.

The Council expressed support for that agreement, which Mr. Oshima said serves as a framework for further good-faith dialogue on more extensive negotiations pertaining to wealth- and power-sharing as part of a comprehensive settlement to the crisis in Darfur. “The members of the Security Council hope that the example set by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement reached at Naivasha for North-South reconciliation will have a positive impact on the Abuja Talks and on the future of Darfur within a stable and united Sudan,” he added, referring to the peace deal which in January ended a separate, two-decade war between southern-based rebels and the Government.

For more information visit www.un.org

Breaking off his holiday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan is returned to New York on 30 August to throw his support behind efforts to produce a comprehensive document for the September World Summit, barely two weeks before the gathering brings together nearly 180 Heads of State and Government at United Nations Headquarters.

At the same time a UN spokesperson reiterated Mr. Annan’s full support for including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the Summit and said any effort to remove the eight targets that seek to cure of a host of global socio-economic ills by 2015 would hurt billions of people. Spokesperson Marie Okabe was asked at the regular noon briefing if Mr. Annan would urge UN members to resist calls by the United States to take out references to the MDGs at the Summit, convened to discuss UN reform and the status of the MDGs, five years after they were adopted at the 2000 UN Summit.

“The Secretary-General and the United Nations stand fully behind the Millennium Development Goals, which are internationally accepted and which have the broad support of Member States and civil society,” Ms. Okabe replied. “Any effort to eliminate the MDGs from the Summit outcome would be a step back to the global fight against poverty and for the billions living in poverty,” she added of the goals, which seek to halve extreme poverty and hunger, slash maternal and infant mortality, and increase access to health care, education, water and sanitation, all by 2015. The UN in Kenya

Nobel Laureate Prof. Wangari Maathai, boxing champion Conjestina Achieng, and artists from the Kenyan music scene joined with the UN System in Kenya to launch a communication and advocacy campaign focusing on the need to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Kenya by 2015. The MDGs, adopted by the world’s governments at the Millennium Summit in 2000, are a set of eight time-bound measurable objectives for reducing poverty and hunger, improving health and well-being and protecting the environment.

The UN-led campaign, developed and produced in Nairobi, is built around eight one-minute public service announcements (PSAs) that highlight the role of the UN in assisting Kenya achieve its MDG objectives, including preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. National television and radio stations KBC, KTN and Citizen will begin to broadcast the PSAs in the run up to the 2005 World Summit, which takes place in New York on 14-16 September. At the Summit a record number of Heads of State will debate essential UN reforms and review progress towards the MDGs.

“The year 2005 is crucial in our work to achieve the Goals” said the Acting Resident Coordinator of the UN in Kenya and UNICEF Kenya Representative, Mr. Heimo Laakkonen. “Instead of setting targets, this time world leaders must decide how to achieve them. A major push is needed if we are to achieve the required objectives by 2015,” Mr Laakkonen continued, noting that while most regions were showing good progress toward most of the goals, results are much less encouraging in sub-Saharan Africa.

For more information contact Nasser Ega- Musa, email: nasser.ega-musa@unon.org. Visit www.unicnairobi.org

Visiting a camp in north-western Kenya, the chief of the United Nations refugee agency on 30 August promised that thousands of people driven from their homes in South Sudan by two decades of fighting could return to the region after the rainy season ends in October. "You have the same rights as I do, the right to a home in your homeland," UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) António Guterres told representatives of the 89,000 refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma camp, on the second to last leg of a 10-day mission that included stops in Sudan and Chad.

"I am going to be very clear. There will not be any kind of forced return. Return will only be voluntary. Nobody will be forced to go back. This is the first guarantee," Mr. Guterres said, pledging that UNHCR would help some of Kakuma's 66,000 South Sudanese refugees go home as soon as the rainy season ends. He outlined measures the agency was taking to prepare for their return, including building schools, de-mining roads and rebuilding health facilities, and urged the refugees to work with the new South Sudanese authorities to consolidate peace in their homeland.

Representatives of 5,000 southern Sudanese who arrived in Kakuma after the signing of the January peace accords told Mr. Guterres they fled militia fighting that had continued after the agreement was signed. Mr. Guterres also spoke to a group of 100 refugees from the western Darfur region, scene of a separate war between rebels, the Government and allied militia, who walked for nine months to reach the safety of Kakuma.

For more information visit www.unhcr.org

The United Nations environmental agency on 26 August announced a multi-million dollar project to help some of the world’s poorest people better cope with drought and pest infestations, targeting 20 pilot areas for restoration of damaged forests, soils, water and other key life-support systems in southern Niger and northern Nigeria. The wide-ranging, $14.5 million project, being launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), aims to strengthen the way natural resources are managed, boost legal and institutional frameworks and streamline cooperation between the two countries, thus helping to alleviate poverty and increase food production, while improving the health and viability of fragile ecosystems.

The multi-billion dollar GEF was established by donor governments in 1991 with projects managed by implementing agencies which include UNEP, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and World Bank. UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer noted that world leaders will be meeting at a summit at UN Headquarters in New York next month to review implementation of the MDGs. “It is my sincere hope that, as underlined by this new project, they will fully agree that the environment is not a luxury but is ‘natural capital’ needed for overcoming poverty and delivering peaceful, long-lasting, development,” he said.

Niger, ranked second to last on the UN poverty index, has been racked by drought and, more recently, locust infestations, leading to an estimated third of its more than 11 million people suffering severe food shortages. Experts believe that the country is now more vulnerable to natural disasters like droughts and plagues as a result of human pressures such as over-grazing, felling of forests for fuel and water pollution.

For more information visit www.unep.org

After returning from a visit to drought-stricken, locust-devastated Niger, where the people are struggling to recover from widespead malnutrition, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for better early warning about potential emergencies, more focus on prevention, the strengthening of regional institutions and a “look in the mirror instead of pointing fingers.”

In an opinion piece carried in the Financial Times and Le Monde newspapers, Mr. Annan also called for help for some 20 million Africans who are at risk of similar severe hunger and food insecurity. “One of the proposals I have put before next month's World Summit calls for a 10-fold increase in the UN's Emergency Fund, which would enable UN agencies to jump-start relief operations,” allowing governments, the UN and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to take adequate preparatory measures and deploy personnel with greater speed, he said.

The summit of more than 170 heads of State and Government will meet from 14 to 16 September at UN Headquarters in New York to discuss UN reform and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of targets designed to halve or eliminate a host of socio-economic ills. Niger is grappling with a devastating array of challenges, including hunger, prolonged drought, accelerating desertification, locust infestation and regional market failures, but the Government and civil society groups have mobilized to help those most in need, Mr. Annan said. “I saw profound suffering in Niger, but I also saw signs that the country can come through this crisis, with lessons for all of us.”

For more information visit www.un.org

With Somalia’s transitional authorities deadlocked over the government’s location and the deployment of foreign peacekeepers, a senior United Nations official will hold consultations this weekend with the heads of regional organizations aimed at healing a rift that has stalled the latest attempt to re-establish a central authority in the war-shattered Horn of Africa nation.

François Lonsény Fall, Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Special Representative for Somalia, was expected to meet on 27 August with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, Amre Moussa. On Sunday, he will travel to Ethiopia to meet with the Chairman of the Commission of the African Union (AU), Alpha Omar Konare. While in Addis Ababa, he is also expected to meet with the Ethiopian authorities.

Earlier this month, Mr. Fall held private talks in the town of Jowhar with senior Somali officials who pledged to work with the UN to end the stalemate over the relocation of the fledgling government and its institutions from Kenya to Somalia, which has had no functional central authority for 14 years following the collapse in 1991 of the government of Muhammad Siad Barre. Mr. Fall remains in close contact with the leaders of the Somali Transitional Federal Institutions, and according to the UN Political Office for Somalia (UNOPS), President Abdulahi Yusuf Ahmed and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi maintain that Mogadishu is not secure and the seat of government should be temporarily established in nearby Jowhar and Baidoa until the capital can be made safe.

For more information visit www.un.org

With peace talks between the Sudanese Government and rebel factions based in the western Darfur region set to reopen on 15 September in Abuja, Nigeria, the United Nations Security Council 0on 30 August strongly urged the parties to quickly reach agreement to end the two-year civil war that has killed nearly 180,000 people and driven more than 2 million from their homes. “Only through a political solution can a durable peace and reconciliation be achieved in Darfur,” said Ambassador Kenzo Oshima of Japan, which holds the Council’s rotating presidency for the month of August, reading a statement to the press following closed-door consultations on the African Union (AU) led peace talks.

The Council urged the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudanese Government to negotiate “constructively and urgently” to reach an agreement during the talks, which were suspended in early July after the parties signed a "declaration of principles" aimed at ending large scale fighting in Darfur.

The Council expressed support for that agreement, which Mr. Oshima said serves as a framework for further good-faith dialogue on more extensive negotiations pertaining to wealth- and power-sharing as part of a comprehensive settlement to the crisis in Darfur. “The members of the Security Council hope that the example set by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement reached at Naivasha for North-South reconciliation will have a positive impact on the Abuja Talks and on the future of Darfur within a stable and united Sudan,” he added, referring to the peace deal which in January ended a separate, two-decade war between southern-based rebels and the Government.

For more information visit www.un.org

Breaking off his holiday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan is returned to New York on 30 August to throw his support behind efforts to produce a comprehensive document for the September World Summit, barely two weeks before the gathering brings together nearly 180 Heads of State and Government at United Nations Headquarters.

At the same time a UN spokesperson reiterated Mr. Annan’s full support for including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the Summit and said any effort to remove the eight targets that seek to cure of a host of global socio-economic ills by 2015 would hurt billions of people. Spokesperson Marie Okabe was asked at the regular noon briefing if Mr. Annan would urge UN members to resist calls by the United States to take out references to the MDGs at the Summit, convened to discuss UN reform and the status of the MDGs, five years after they were adopted at the 2000 UN Summit.

“The Secretary-General and the United Nations stand fully behind the Millennium Development Goals, which are internationally accepted and which have the broad support of Member States and civil society,” Ms. Okabe replied. “Any effort to eliminate the MDGs from the Summit outcome would be a step back to the global fight against poverty and for the billions living in poverty,” she added of the goals, which seek to halve extreme poverty and hunger, slash maternal and infant mortality, and increase access to health care, education, water and sanitation, all by 2015.

For more information visit www.un.org

The International Federation of Journalists has sent a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, asking for an investigation of all the deaths of journalists in Iraq, which, according to figures cited by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), now total more than 80 since the war began in 2003. “We are studying it,” spokesperson Marie Okabe said, confirming receipt of the letter in reply to a question at the regular noon briefing.

“On the subject of the protection and the right to work of journalists, I just want to point out that the Secretary-General has repeatedly urged all actors in conflict situations around the world, governments, local authorities and armed forces to protect the right of all citizens to reliable information and the right of journalists to provide it without fearing for their security and their freedom or their life,” she added.

In the latest incident in Iraq, Reuters reported that a television soundman working for the agency was shot dead on Sunday and that an Iraqi Interior Ministry official quoted the police incident report as saying United States forces had opened fire.

For more information visit www.unesco.org

Ten years after the United Nations conference on women’s rights in Beijing and just weeks before a summit of world leaders at UN Headquarters in New York, Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 29 August called on the international community to turn their commitments into action to achieve full gender equality.

Since 1995 progress has been made, but old challenges such as discrimination and violence remain while new challenges have emerged, such as HIV/AIDS and trafficking in women and children, Mr. Annan said in a message, delivered by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour to Beijing 2005, the 10th anniversary commemoration there of the fourth World Conference on Women. “What were once called women’s issues have been transformed into matters of primary national and international significance. Stronger women’s networks and alliances have taken shape across issues and borders alike. And we understand, more than ever, that no single policy will ensure gender quality; rather a comprehensive policy approach is needed,” he added.

He noted the findings of the Commission on the Status of Women earlier this year that many gains had been achieved, including greater access to employment and decision-making, better education and a longer life. “But they stressed that old challenges remain, such as discrimination and violence, and that troubling new challenges have emerged, such as the terrifying growth of HIV/AIDS among women, and the odious, increasingly common practice of trafficking in women and children,” he said.

For more information visit www.un.org