XUNICEF News and Views

Former UN assistant secretary-general Denis Halliday travelled the world advocating for human rights. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill. It is with profound regret that we announce the passing of Denis Halliday. Denis was soft spoken, with a wry sense of humor but had the courage of his convictions, the latter demonstrated by his resigning in protest of "political maneuvers/policies".

Do some of you recall this old blue emergency handbook that could be found in all UNICEF offices and in most of the offices of our NGO partners in the 1980s and 1990s?

Confession number one: I have never before read any memoirs of aid workers. Confession number two: I like this one.

DEMENTIA Rules A special note from an elderly person on the occasion of Dementia Awareness Week.

Dear XUNICEF colleagues, We are thrilled to share that the XUNICEF blog now boasts over 1.4 million views, 11,000 articles, and 8,700 comments!

Violet-capped Woodnymph Here is some color to brighten up your day.

We recently travelled back to my home in the USA from our Albania base for my 45th high school reunion and to reconnect with friends and family.   While navigating all the polarizing politics was rather tricky - it was more peaceful to discover park benches t hat need more recognition--these oases of peace for sore feet and for gazing at beauty were at the stunning Sarah Duke Botanical Garden at Duke Universitty in Durham, North Carolina:

President Donald Trump points toward U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, after speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22. | Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Title: Trump administration opposes all options for new UN chief — and wants new candidatesAuthor: Daniella Cheslow Publication: POLITICO Date: October 9, 2026

Tomorrow we celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving and there was no better way to do so than watching a wonderful documentary film on the incredible story of the young Terry Fox who in 1980 embarked on a project to run across all of this huge country from east to west while having been amputed from one leg because of cancer. 

Francesca Albanese Publishes New Report on Media & Genocide

Jaguars of the Pantanal In August and September I joined a photography tour of the Atlantic Rainforest and the Pantanal in Brazil with Pantanal Photo Tours . The tour had been on my bucket list for some time and it exceeded my expectations.

Al Rasheed When Sanctions Forced Us to Rethink Everything: A Story of Creative Engineering in Crisis - Zaid Jurji In the 1990s, I had the privilege (and the challenge) of serving as Head of the Water and Sanitation Programme for UNICEF in Iraq. It was a delicate and demanding era. The country had just emerged from the first Gulf War and was gripped by severe international sanctions. Every solution had to be custom-built for a context defined by scarcity, restriction, and unpredictability.

What a lovely choice for the Nobel Peace Prize! Little Norway’s Nobel Committee sends a message to the big and mighty: nobody is above the law.

Recent Reader Comments Continously updated

Stockcake Title: Is AI writing UN speeches? Author: Sophia Cai and Ben Johansen Publication: POLITICO Date: September 28, 2026

Photo Illustration by Alma Haser for The New York Times Title: A New World Order Is Coming. We Aren’t Ready Author: Margaret MacMillan Publication: The New York Times Date: September 1, 2026

Interview with Graca Machel.

A health worker treats a child showing symptoms of malnutrition at a therapeutic feeding centre in al-Buraiqa, on the western outskirts of Aden, Yemen, on September 22, 2026 [Abdulnasser Alseddik/AP Photo] Title: How hunger is devastating Yemen's children Author: Not identified in the retrieved article Publication: Al Jazeera Date: 6 October 2026

Newly graduated students from Manba-ul-Jihad madrassa attend their graduation ceremony in Khost. Photo: AFP, 24 January 2025 Title: A Parallel Education System: The Taliban’s madrasa expansion and its implications for gender, society and regional security Author: Timor Sharan Publication: Afghanistan Analysts Network Date: 5 October 2026

You correctly guessed that the new book is about aid.  The title reeled me right in. An aid worker for 30 years, Susan M. Davis expertly sends up the aid industry and pokes fun at the everyday absurdities that seem to happen in the wake of development aid and relief. Being a trained engineer, most of her stories and examples are from the Water and Sanitation (WASH) sector, and the book will have special appeal to former WASH colleagues but it remains a good read for everyone.  Davis mostly writes from the perspective of her work with non-governmental organizations, the “partners" on which UNICEF has come to rely for much of what it does, and which UNICEF increasingly seeks to emulate - if only to conjure up that special grassroots feeling. Damning Assessments The assessment by Davis of the performance and impact of NGOs is absolutely

How We Built a Monitoring & Evaluation System That Passed a UN Security Council Audit

Guterres said there needed to be ‘a recognition, especially by superpowers, that their power isn’t so super. Their power has limits.’ Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images One of the better statements by the SG that I have heard during his tenure, this one tackled many issues that are usually couched in diplomatic vocabulary and political correctness. Guterres had the guts to speak his views as he has nothing to lose and so the jabs at the world's "powers" enabled him to get things off his chest as he ends his terms. In my view he rates an A for this one! Fouad

Un petit bijou de Simone de Beauvoir (Lisez-le jusqu'au bout) « *LA VIEILLESSE*»

Title: In 1995, Carol Bellamy became the first woman to lead UNICEF Author: Lenni Montiel Publication: LinkedIn

Image: Pexels - Ahmed Akacha Title: An outdated design for a multipolar worldAuthor: Manuel Manrique Castro Publication: Manuel Manrique Castro’s Substack Date: September 29, 2026

An audiobook of Kul Gautam's memoir, 'Global Citizen from Gulmi: My Journey from the Hills of Nepal to the Halls of the United Nations', is now available on Amazon Audible globally and on thuprai.com in Nepal.

It was encouraging to listen to the supportive statements made by about 130 Heads of State or Government at the 81st session of the UN GA. Most Delegations demanded greater efforts for ending armed conflicts and for peaceful negotiations, Will there be constructive follow-up? The President of the Republic of Korea asked in his closing statement “to dream for a better tomorrow.” Dreaming will not suffice. A lot of serious work is needed and a way needs to be found to redesign the Security Council. Everyone dreams, but few dreams result in actions. I usually have no idea what I dreamt. But some dreams are tangible and can inspire you.

On The American Dollar it is Written In God We Trust. But the Question Is: Do we Trust in God, or Must God Put His Faith in the Almighty Dollar* What a difference a Dollar makes.

  How UNICEF became the compromise In UNICEF we are rightly proud of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the organisation in 1965. Less well known is how nearly it went elsewhere.  Gunnar Jahn - Chairman of the Nobel Committee 1965 Four of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee wanted to give that year’s prize to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant. Their chairman, Gunnar Jahn, took a firm position opposing the award for U Thant.    The decision spared the Committee a public rupture, but left internal scars both in the Nobel Committee and in the UN. Looking back from today's vantage point, the decision also foreshadowed a growing tension between the UN's political and humanitarian arms—one that would soon become starkly visible in Nigeria/Biafra and Pakistan/Bangladesh. A long road to Oslo “No one keeps UNICEF going but the idea itself.” — Maurice Pate, declining the Norwegian proposal of 1960 to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize Over the years, friends an...

End games are often messy, and the end game for UNICEF's Mission in China was no exception. Only months earlier, UNICEF's experiment in training community health workers in Communist-controlled North China had seemed remarkably successful. UNICEF and the Chinese health authorities were planning to expand the programme. Yet by the end of 1949 the agreement that had made the programme possible would be abrogated by the government. What happened? Act I — Beijing, Early 1949 The Shijiazhuang Agreement was working well, and the first training course at the monastery near Shijiazhuang had gone well. Twenty graduates, including 11 men and 9 women, were now in the field. Both Dr. Leo Eloesser and Dr. Su Chin Kwan, CLARA's senior health official, were pleased with the results.

This is what aid cuts look like in Somalia - empty beds in a health centre, pregnant women and newborns unable to access healthcare.

The title does not refer to me, usually referred to as ‘Grumpy’, when I wake in the morning – though it could well do.

Title: The boomerang effect: New pathways between Europe and Canada Author: Manuel Manrique Castro Publication: Manuel Manrique Castro on Substack Date: September 24, 2026

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

  In April 2021 I wrote a mini-series of four articles on UNICEF's early days in China. Rereading them recently, it seemed to me that I was missing a piece on Leo Eloesser who played such an important role in China but also in UNICEF's thinking on community medicine and primary health care. He only worked with UNICEF for a very short time—5 years—but they were momentous years for UNICEF and for him. In this article I write only about his history before and after UNICEF. The story of his brief period with UNICEF will come in the next article, The Shijiazhuang Strategy . One of the most interesting, colorful, and important characters in UNICEF's early history was Dr. Leo Eloesser. In what remains the best and most comprehensive book on UNICEF's history, The Children and the Nations , Maggie Black describes how the newly arrived first representative of UNICEF in China, Dr. Marcel Junod, recruited Eloesser from UNRRA to serve as his emissary to parts of China under...

This article tells the story of the Shijiazhuang Agreement of August 1948 and UNICEF's first attempt to switch from distribution of relief supplies to capacity building through training of community health workers and village midwives. The Idea Had History The idea was certainly not new.

Welding of Supporting Cylinder Steel Columns In 1999, while serving as Head of the Water and Sanitation Programme at UNICEF Iraq, we were approached by the Baghdad Sewage Authority with an urgent plea.

With the UN General Assembly starting this week here is an analysis of how the UN is being dismembered and its organs diminished by the very members which started it.

I have just finished reading Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Hamid wrote it during the 2015 European refugee crisis and published it in 2017. It was clearly influenced by the Syrian crisis and that wave of migration. But Hamid leaves the country and time unnamed. The novel is about mass migration in general, a warning of the next, inevitable, and much larger wave, and that migration is a feature of today's world.

Some time agao, a  video in the XUNICEF blog reminded me of my motorcycle trips before and after my retirement.

In A Little History #8  I described the career of Dr. Marcel Junod before he joined UNICEF.  This article continues his story after arriving as UNICEF's first representative in China. Junod: February 1948 In February 1948, UNICEF's first Representative in China, Dr. Marcel Junod, arrived in the Nationalist capital, Nanjing. His wife and young son followed, arriving a couple of months later by ship via Manila.

The potential adverse effects of AI have been in the news for a few weeks.

Having been recruited by USAID to work in Albania during the Kosovo Crisis put me in an interesting position. 

Recently while organizing batches of photos, I noticed how some settings or objects appeared to look like photos from long ago

People have demonstrated unjustified trust in generative AI. Generative AI is inherently probabilistic—meaning it strings together likely patterns rather than verifying factual truths

The escalating global water crisis presents an immediate and severe threat to child survival, driven by the dangerous convergence of climate change, environmental degradation, and neglected infrastructure.

The search for the dead and missing continues, with the army taking a very active and effective lead-role.

Source - Wikipedia Emma Bonino, the prominent Italian rights activist and former European commissioner, has died at the age of 78. Celebrated for her pragmatism and unwavering dedication to her causes, she built unique alliances, including a close friendship with Pope Francis based on their mutual support for migrants.