So many nonprofits seem to be after your money these days. Even if you are eager to give it away, you want to be convinced that a given group is the most deserving. But how can you tell when a charitable group is effective, making the best use of your donation without wasting it on … Read more
In the wake of a spate of school shootings in the United States this year, students of high school and college age are forming political campaigns for change as the country moves toward critical legislative elections in November. These young people are registering voters, although many of them are too young to vote themselves, and … Read more
BOBIGNY, France — On March 20, French President Emmanuel Macron stood before a crowd at the prestigious Académie Française in central Paris. With his trademark confidence and fastidious affect, he made his case for French as a global, 21st-century language unburdened by the oppression associated with colonialism. “By making the language of the colonizers their own language, … Read more
If you want to understand how Donald Trump’s America is being perceived by women in the global South, my students are a good place to start. I teach international relations at an all-female liberal arts college in Chittagong, Bangladesh, which follows a Western curriculum and is attended by 700 enthusiastic young women from 16 countries … Read more
An important meeting on global education with a dozen education ministers from across the world was held at the United Nations headquarters last week. As the meeting unfolded, we were sitting in our office a few miles away, across the East River in Brooklyn, at the New York City College of Technology, part of the … Read more
They have years to go before they could conceivably sit in the Security Council seat as the United States ambassador to the United Nations, participate in a high-level summit on refugees or cast a vote for their country in the General Assembly. But for a select group of New York City students, the ways of … Read more
TIMBUKTU — Down the road from the 700-year-old iconic Djinguereber mosque in this north-central Malian city lies the Al Qadi library, a private, family-owned collection holding hundreds of manuscripts from nearly a millennium ago. The manuscripts are priceless treasures of African history that experts say cover a range of topics, from minute religious law disputes to … Read more
More than 700 educators and students, meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York recently, called on the international community to protect refugees’ lives, encourage countries to take in “large numbers of refugees and migrants” and do more to ensure they get an education and are protected from sexual and gender-based violence. Acting as President … Read more
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — The 2008 United States presidential election was an incredible time for me, here in West Africa. The election contributed to shaping my leadership skills and affected the course of my life. I used to take part in events at the US Embassy in Abidjan, our country’s commercial capital, as a member … Read more
In a crucial political year when candidates’ knowledge — or ignorance — of international affairs and foreign policy are topics among public debate in the United States, a new survey of what young Americans of college age, many of them first-time voters, really know about the world produced some sobering findings. The joint survey, commissioned by … Read more
For the class of 2016 at the United Nations International School in Manhattan, graduation on June 2 was a special event, held in the United Nations General Assembly Hall. The speaker was Secretary of State John Kerry, who seized the moment in a turbulent, narrowly focused political year in the United States to praise international … Read more
While governments bask in data showing that the development goal of universal access to primary education has largely been achieved, attention is turning to what that really means in the classroom. Educators and human-rights advocates question whether acceptable standards are being met in many schools, as evidence mounts of the proliferation of private education in … Read more
He can’t risk the lives of family members by identifying himself by name, but he is willing to tell his story, a reflection of what has happened to intellectual life in what was once a center of higher education in the Middle East. He was a respected professor at Damascus University whose world fell apart … Read more
“Sport is the only area of human existence that has achieved universal law,” said Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee when he announced that elite athletes who were refugees could compete in the 2016 Olympics under that flag. “Regardless of where in the world we practice sport, the rules are the same … Read more
The first United Nations development aid program financed solely by African countries for their own benefit was announced recently at the UN headquarters in New York. Unitlife, which was presented as world leaders convened at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly, will tax the sale of oil, gold and other natural resources in … Read more
Challenged by the staggering agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to abolish most of the world’s ills within 15 years, research organizations, advocacy groups and objective demographers had begun to do the math well before the goals were adopted globally in September 2015. Success or failure rests on complex equations with interlinked or competing … Read more
When member countries of the United Nations agreed to the Millennium Development Goals 15 years ago, advocates for stronger rights for women and girls were disappointed as governments (and the Vatican) balked at reasserting the bold promises of the international conferences of the 1990s in Cairo and in Beijing. Later campaigns, inside and outside the … Read more
Khalid al-Asaad, an internationally recognized Syrian scholar of antiquities, was beheaded by ISIS on Aug. 18 for refusing to disclose the location of archeological treasures apparently removed for safekeeping from Palmyra, one of the Middle East’s most important archeological landmarks and a Unesco World Heritage Site in Syria. This latest tragedy inflicted by ISIS highlights the … Read more
In the few months remaining before a new set of development goals are set to be adopted in the United Nations to replace the Millennium Development Goals, specialists in many fields will be drilling down into why some of those MDGs have fallen short — sometimes far short — of their aspirations, especially in the … Read more
FORTALEZA, Brazil — Bom Jardim, home to some 200,000 people, is one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in this city. Located at the southwestern tip of the metropolis, with long streets laid in a grid, the signs of poverty appear everywhere: cracked cement or none at all, half-built houses and other makeshift architecture … Read more
