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Geneva/New York, October 22 – The World Health Organization and Wikimedia Foundation announced join efforts to defeat widespread misinformation online while people worldwide need facts and trusted sources of news to fight the pandemic.

Wikipedia, which is administered by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, will provide its formidable global network of over 250,000 volunteer editors to assist WHO in disseminating more than 5,200 Covid-related articles in 175 languages.

Both organizations said the collaboration will make trusted, public health information available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license as Covid-19 showed signs of strong resurgence and the public everywhere demand facts about the coronavirus.

“Through the collaboration, people everywhere will be able to access and share WHO infographics, videos, and other public health assets on Wikimedia Commons, a digital library of free images and other multimedia,” they said in announcing the join venture. 

“Equitable access to trusted health information is critical to keeping people safe and informed during the COVID-19 pandemic,”  WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Our new collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation will increase access to reliable health information from WHO across multiple countries, languages, and devices.”

WHO said it had been fighting “infodemic” since the beginning of the pandemic. It defined infodemic as “an overabundance of information and the rapid spread of misleading or fabricated news, images, and videos.” 

Wikipedia editors have also been at the forefront of the fight against misinformation.

“Access to information is essential to healthy communities and should be treated as such,” said Katherine Maher, CEO at the Wikimedia Foundation. “This becomes even more clear in times of global health crises when information can have life-changing consequences. All institutions, from governments to international health agencies, scientific bodies to Wikipedia, must do our part to ensure everyone has equitable and trusted access to knowledge about public health, regardless of where you live or the language you speak.”

The two organizations said in  news release that while they are building up their collaboration, the public in the meantime can access WHO’s mythbusting series of infographics on Wikimedia Commons. In the coming months, the Wikimedia Foundation and WHO will continue uploading resources to Wikimedia Commons and collaborating with Wikipedia volunteer editors to better understand gaps in information needs on Wikipedia articles related to COVID-19 and how WHO resources can help fill these gaps. 

Additionally, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, other organizations, individuals, and websites can more easily share these materials on their own platforms without having to address stricter copyright restrictions.

New York, October 17 – A simple daily meal of rice and beans may cost $1.25 in New York but it costs $399.82 for a poor in South Sudan where Covid-19 impacts are added to years of conflict, climate change and economic troubles, which drive up the levels of poverty, the World Food Program said in its newest “Cost of a Plate of Food 2020” report. South Sudan tops the list of 20 countries with extreme poverty, 17 of them are sub-Sahara region countries.

The Rome-based WFP said the same basic meal costs $90.73 for a person in Burundi, $73.76 in Haiti, $60.52 in Sudan, $46.19 in Mozambique, $32.12 in Congo and $32.12 in Burkina Faso because poverty affects some 270 million around the world. The UN said half of the world population live with $2.50 a day and an estimated 900 million people cannot read or write.

 (The report uses an average per-capita income across each country to calculate what percentage people must spend to buy a basic meal like rice and beans. The price a New Yorker may pay for a similar meal is calculated by applying the meal-to-income ratio for a consumer in a developing country to a consumer in New York.)

WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian organization, won the Nobel Peace Prize 2020 for its work in combating hunger around the world, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.

List of countries experiencing extreme poverty: South Sudan, Burundi, Malawi, Haiti, Sudan, Mali, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Tajikistan, Gambia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Benin, Zambia and Mauritania.

The release of the report coincided with the annual International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on 17 October, which warned that Covid-19 will have a long-term impact on poverty, threatening efforts to boost economic recovery, reduction in inequality and ending extreme poverty.

 “This new report exposes the destructive impact of conflict, climate change and economic crises, now compounded by Covid-19, in driving up hunger,” said WFP’s Executive Director David Beasley. “It’s the most vulnerable people who feel the worst effects. Their lives were already on the edge – prior to the coronavirus pandemic we were looking at the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II – and now their plight is so much worse as the pandemic threatens nothing less than a humanitarian catastrophe”.

“People in urban areas are now highly susceptible too, with COVID-19 leading to huge rises in unemployment, rendering people powerless to use the markets they depend on for food. For millions of people, missing a day’s wages means missing a day’s worth of food, for themselves and their children. This can also cause rising social tensions and instability”.

The report said conflict is the main driver for hunger in many countries as it displaced people from their homes, land and jobs, which resulted in the loss of incomes and ability to buy food in order to survive.

Among the top 20 countries with extreme poverty, South Sudan’s years of conflict have displaced over 60,000 people, crippled their daily lives as they had to abandon land and harvests.

In Burkina Faso, a surge in conflict along with climate changes resulted in tripling the number of people to 3.4 million people facing hunger.

 The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs  said in a policy brief on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty that the pandemic will have a long-term impact on poverty and prospects for fully eradicating poverty by 2030 now appears “highly unlikely” despite efforts to boost economic growth  around the world. Eradicating poverty by 2030 is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The brief said as many as 100 million people could slip into poverty this year because of the pandemic.

 “It is no longer unimaginable that the global number of people living in extreme poverty will continue to go up in the coming years, pulling hundreds of millions of people into extreme vulnerability, if the horrendous consequences of the pandemic for developing countries are not effectively managed”, the brief said.  
 

Oslo/New York, October 9 – The United Nations World Food Program has won this year’s coveted Nobel Peace Prize for its intensified efforts to provide life-saving food provisions to millions of people facing starvation under conflict and the pandemic.

The Nobel committee announced the winner for the prize in Oslo, saying that WFP, a UN agency, addressed hunger that also contributed to bring peace to countries devastated by conflicts.

“In the face of the pandemic, the World Food Program has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said. “The combination of violent conflict and the pandemic has led to a dramatic rise in the number of people living on the brink of starvation.”

“The world is in danger of experiencing a hunger crisis of inconceivable proportions if the World Food Program and other food assistance organizations do not receive the financial support they have requested.”

The Nobel committee said WFP recognized early in 2020 that the combination of conflict and the pandemic would result in more than doubling the number of people facing food insecurity to 265 million and immediately intensified programs to assist them.

WPF was established in 1961 and has been working in scores of developing countries affected by conflicts, natural disasters and famine.

The UN has won seven Nobel Peace Prizes before 2020:

It was awarded to the UN peacekeeping forces in 1988; the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1981; the International Labor Organization in 1969; UNICEF in 1965; UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskhjold in 1961; the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1954 and Ralph Bunche, the US envoy to the UN, in 1950.

New York September 29 – Government leaders and international organizations joined the United Nations to seek solutions for the current virus-inflicted devastation and plan for the post-pandemic era.

One million people have died from the coronavirus and over 32 million have been infected, a situation the UN said has surpassed a health and humanitarian crisis to become an unprecedented global development emergency.

It said the pandemic is expected to push some 100 million people into extreme poverty and an estimated additional 265 million people could face acute food shortages by the end of 2020, including over 17 million people in South America suffering severe food insecurity, a jump from 4.5 million just months ago.

The International Labor Organization estimated that the equivalent of 500 million jobs have been lost so far this year, a situation that will spread economic inequalities, disproportionately impacting developing countries and vulnerable groups.

Governments around the world have so far spent $11 trillion in response to the financial impacts caused by the pandemic and high-income economies were responsible for 88 per cent of the total amount, the UN said. Emerging and developing countries were responsible for 2.8 per cent of the amount.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres hosted the virtual high-level meeting on Financing for Development in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond with the participation of Canadian Prime Minister

Justin Trudeau and Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness as co-sponsors to find solutions to the global financial crisis and to maintain current efforts to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Guterres said the pandemic has caused the largest economic contraction since World War II with global income from work declining by more than 10 per cent so far this year with the massive job losses and government expenditures have skyrocketed while tax revenues plummeted.

“The Covid-19 pandemic is a catastrophe,” Guterres said. “But it is a generational opportunity to shape our future for the better. I have spoken of the need of a New Global Deal.”

The UN leader said a global economic recovery and an end to the pandemic would be possible only if the world can mobilize resources for diagnostics, treatment and vaccines.

He said the WHO’s program known as ACT-Accelerator requires a total resources of $38 billion to deliver over 2 billion vaccine doses, 245 million treatments and 500 million tests.

“We cannot reopen the global economy fully until we stop this virus in its tracks,” he said.

“At this moment, we have the opportunity to re-imagine our economic systems, reaffirm our common understanding of a more sustainable and inclusive recovery and re-establish momentum toward achieving the SDGs to build back better,” Trudeau said. “Only together can we lay the foundations of a better world.”

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New York, September 22 – The United Nations urged its member states to show unity and solidarity in order to defeat the virus as it opened the 75^th General Assembly session. But the call by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was met by the ongoing fight between the United States and China over the handling of the pandemic that has infected over 27 million people and killed over 900,000 this year.

“We must be united,” Guterres said in an address to the 193-nation assembly which has to hold the week-long session virtually because of the deadly virus. Government leaders sent pre-recorded speeches to be broadcast to an assembly hall nearly deserted as each country was represented by just one diplomat.

Guterres said, “As we have seen, when countries go on their own direction, the virus goes in every direction. We must act in solidarity. Far too little assistance has been extended to countries with the fewest capacities to face the challenges.”

He said governments that have used populism and nationalism to fight the virus have

failed and have made the health crisis worse.
“Too often, there has been a disconnect between leadership and power,” he said. “And power is not always associated with the necessary leadership.”

The UN celebrated this year the 75^th anniversary of its establishment. But the pandemic has mostly closed its headquarters and canceled its meetings.

US President Donald Trump asked the international organization to hold the Chinese government “accountable for their actions” and for spreading false information through the World Health Organization.

“Seventy-five years after the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, we are once again engaged in a great global struggle,” Trump said.

Politico reported that Trump invoked the “fierce battle” the United States waged against the “invisible enemy, the China Virus.”

“The United Nations must hold China accountable for their actions,” he added.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said the world should expect a repeat of the global health crisis and therefore should join hands in fighting the current pandemic, the Xinhua news agency said.

“COVID-19 reminds us that we are living in an interconnected global village with a common stake,” Xi said in his virtual address to the assembly as reported by Xinhua.

“No country can gain from others’ difficulties or maintain stability by taking advantage of others’ troubles.”

“To pursue a beggar-thy-neighbor policy or just watch from a safe distance when others are in danger will eventually land one in the same trouble faced by others.”

“This is why we should embrace the vision of a community with a shared future in which everyone is bound together.”

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