Red Crescent volunteers in northern Iraq and Iran are providing urgent search and rescue and first aid to victims of the devastating 7.3 magnitude earthquake that shook the region on 12 November 2017.
According to Iran Red Crescent, at least 328 people have been killed and 3,950 injured. In Iraq, the Iraqi Red Crescent report that nine people have been killed and more than 425 injured.
Red Cross staff and volunteers worked alongside emergency officials to rescue survivors and assist desperate communities that lost their homes and loved ones in the mudslides in and around the capital Freetown in August 2017.
The most severe mudslides – triggered by three days of heavy rains – occurred in the coastal suburb of Racecourse on the city’s eastern edge, as well as in Regent and Lumley where thousands of makeshift settlements are home to the city’s poorest communities.
Response teams, including dozens of Sierra Leone Red Cross (SLRCS) volunteers recovered people from the mud and debris, helping evacuate residents, transferring bodies to morgues and providing medical care to the injured.
Since 2015, failed rains, combined with an El Nino weather phenomenon, have left millions of people across Ethiopia in desperate need of food and water. Yonas Bade, a farmer and local volunteer, decided to build a road with his own means to ensure water distribution by the Ethiopian Red Cross Society.
Deep in the heart of the district of Kindo Koysha in southern Ethiopia, the road system is rudimentary. When volunteers from the Ethiopian Red Cross Society wanted to start distributing emergency water rations to the most vulnerable of families, getting there was a noted challenge. But, with people like Yonas Bade, a farmer and local volunteer on hand, it was a challenge that would be quickly overcome.
One of 20 volunteer teams made up of a doctor, a nurse and two civilians works across Bangladesh to treat people in remote communities who have been cut off by flood water or damage to roads. The teams hope to reach 30,000 flood survivors across the country to treat diseases caused by contaminated flood water.
Volunteer Sonali Rani Das works as a nurse and has been a member of the mobile medical team since 2011. Currently the team is seeing 200 patients a day, all presenting complaints about the recent catastrophic floods that hit Bangladesh.
We are seeing a lot of women and children. They have problems like skin infections, eye infections, scabies, diarrhoea and asthma. We have even seen snake bites. When I see the children, I take the mother’s blood pressure and check her over too,” she explains.
The Executive Board reaffirms the importance as well as the value-added of the United Nations Volunteers programme at the global, regional and national levels, including in poverty reduction, electoral support and the promotion of South-South collaboration. Furthermore, the Executive Board supports the relevant bridging role that UNV volunteers can play in the transition from humanitarian assistance to reconstruction and rehabilitation and to longer-term sustainable development.
The Executive Board notes the diversity in the range of work of the United Nations Volunteers and their roles, the growth of the United Nations Volunteers Programme overall, and in particular, the achievement of reaching the largest number of the serving volunteers. In addition, the Executive Board welcomes the decision to proclaim 2001 as the International Year of Volunteers.
Revised budget estimates for the biennium 1994-1995 and budget estimates for the biennium 1996-1997. The Executive Board takes note of the cost-savings that will occur as a result of decision 95/2 on the relocation of the United Nations Volunteers headquarters to Bonn, and urges the Administrator, in light of these savings, to increase programme activities involving the United Nations Volunteers.
The Governing Council invites all member States to increase their contributions to the Special Voluntary Fund to enable the United Nations Volunteers programme to meet its commitment with the least possible augmentation of project costs, bearing in mind that 75 per cent of United Nations Volunteers serve in least developed, land-locked developing or island developing countries.
The Governing Council decides that, for the time being, provision be made for up to 40 United Nations Volunteers Programme Officers to be financed from the United Nations Volunteers budget at an average annual cost of $25,000 per post...
Budget estimates for the biennium 1990-1991. The Governing Council approves a revaluation of the parameters for the United Nations Volunteers core budget to $17 million for the biennium, and of the per capita charge relating to the supplementary budget to $3,700.
