XUNICEF News and Views

From the book “Bangladesh. Defying the odds”, by Pascal Villeneuve In the field of international development, where true success stories are scarce, Bangladesh stands apart. Bangladesh emerged from the ashes of a war of independence in 1971 as the world’s second poorest nation. Many observers doubted that it could survive as an independent state. Since then, the country has increasingly silenced the skeptics. Home to over 160 million people, Bangladesh has made some of the biggest gains in the basic condition of people’s lives ever seen anywhere Slow shutter speed photo of a bus making its way through Dhaka’s heavy traffic. The face showing on the side of the bus represents Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975), the architect of independent Bangladesh and first President One achievement is particularly telling. The fertility rate (the average number of births per woman) followed an impressive downward trend, from 7 births per woman in 1971 to 2 births per woman in 2018. This is a major ach...

Goma, 14 July 1994. Within Rwanda, the genocide was still raging. It is reckoned that more than one million people – overwhelmingly Tutsi, but also moderate Hutu, Twa (pygmies) and others who opposed the genocide – were systematically killed in less than three months. I had arrived in Goma on 7 July, traveling from New York where I was a programme officer in the Africa section. In the previous days, the Security Council had adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a humanitarian operation headed by France, named “Operation Turquoise”. I had been assigned the task of coordinating UNICEF support to Operation Turquoise. As I was planning to travel from Goma to the Cyangugu-Kibuye-Gikongoro triangle inside Rwanda, where the Zone Turquoise was being set up, we heard rumors that hundreds of thousands of people were on the move and approaching Goma. Located at the border with Rwanda in what was still Zaire, Goma became the scene of a mass exodus of Rwandan ethnic Hutus. Over a pe...