The good international news of a year marked by war

UN agencies and NGOs value the wave of global solidarity and improvements in peace or social advances

MADRID, 18 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The year 2022 has been the year of the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the local and global consequences of this conflict in the center of Europe have not prevented other milestones from being achieved throughout the entire planet which, taking into account the Looking back, they also want to value UN agencies and NGOs.

In fact, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) celebrates the "exemplary" and "unprecedented" response that has been given at the European level to the war in Ukraine, for example with the activation for the first time of a directive of temporary protection from which the Ukrainians who fled their country en masse after the outbreak of the conflict in February have been able to benefit.

"This mechanism allows access to immediate protection and the granting of work and residence permits to Ukrainians, stateless persons and third-country nationals with legal residence in Ukraine who cannot return to their country", emphasizes the organization's spokesperson in Spain, María Jesús Vega, who now asks to go further. She hopes to "take note" of this "quick and agile" response to apply it to other scrolling contexts as well.

He also applauds the "solidarity" of a population that "literally turns" to respond "in a thousand ways" to emergencies like the one in Ukraine. Or that of administrations at all levels that mobilized in record time to attend to refugees.

"This very positive experience has taught us that the processing and response to refugees can be simplified and expedited when the will and resources are put in, when all the actors and administrations are coordinated and political considerations are put aside," he points out.

The "immense wave of global solidarity" is also the global good news in the eyes of Save the Children, in a year marked by a war, that of Ukraine, which has had "extremely serious" consequences for the population, in the words of the director of International Cooperation of the NGO, Vicente Raimundo.

In this sense, he recalls that everything is a matter of will: "The social mobilization that we have seen in this regard in 2022 has been unprecedented, as has the response from Europe, which has opened its borders to the population fleeing this conflict, demonstrating that when there is political interest, foster care is not a problem".

World Vision, on the other hand, highlights the ceasefire agreement signed in November between the Government of Ethiopia and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tigray (TPLF), to the extent that there are millions of people who "need urgent support" in the northern part of the African country.

The communication director of World Vision Spain, Eloisa Molina, points out that the NGO is "happy" for this milestone and advocates working "immediately" to expand activities and move towards a "lasting peace". "We want this to be a permanent cessation of violence," says Molina.

In the Nigerian state of Zamfara, in the north, children no longer die from lead poisoning, the result of a therapy by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) started after eleven years ago more than 400 minors died in just six months in various villages due to environmental contamination derived from mining.

The coordinator of the project, Benjamin Mwangombe, recalls that "people transformed the villages into processing places and polluted the environment for many years", both the air and the land. For this success, the participation of local communities has been key, also with a view to not repeating the same situation in the future.

Focusing on Europe, the person in charge of Advocacy and Studies of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Spain, Cristina Junquera, highlights the progressive implementation of the European Child Guarantee. In Spain, the National Action Plan for its implementation was approved in July.

As Junquera indicates, this initiative advocates providing all children and adolescents in the EU with six basic rights: "education and child care, education and extracurricular activities, at least one healthy meal per school day, health care, adequate housing and food healthy".

However, at the same time it warns that not everything is done and "the most important part of the plan" remains, that is, putting it into practice and reaching your goals. In order to "keep the bar high" and that "ending child poverty is not diluted in the long run", it is necessary for all the actors to participate and coordinate.

The Deputy Executive Director of UN Women, Anita Bhatia, agrees with the European focus, highlighting in particular the EU directive to promote gender equality in business leadership, since "it will help to break the glass ceiling that still prevents the advancement of women and will also increase transparency in recruitment processes.

"Increasing the presence of women in the highest positions in companies is important, symbolically and in its own right, because the evidence shows that it is good for companies and economies themselves," she says. The UN estimates that companies with at least 30 percent female workers and more than 20 percent in management positions are 1.4 times more likely to have sustained and profitable growth.

In addition, Bhatia stresses that women leaders are also "models" to open the "path of leadership for others." Not surprisingly, she adds, "86 percent of women say that when they see more women in leadership, they're encouraged that they can get there on their own.

Plan International, for its part, welcomes the decision of the UN COP27 summit on the establishment of a fund for loss and damage with which to advance climate justice and support developing countries, a "historic decision" that It comes "after years of effort" and whose implementation must be "urgent".

Children and adolescents appear as agents of change in the face of an emergency that requires immediate action. The general director of Plan International, Concha López, demands that all countries, "particularly the Spanish Government", have "ambitious" climate policies that take into account the rights of children and adopt measures that allow anticipating and mitigating the impacts of the crisis.