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What you need to know from the 73rd United Nations General Assembly.
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Good morning from Turtle Bay, Welcome to the first business day of #UNGA week — when a spate of signature events kick off on the sidelines of negotiations at the United Nations headquarters, including the Concordia Summit and the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Summit happening today. If you started your rounds on Sunday, you may have already made your way to the PMNCH Accountability Breakfast, the Social Good Summit, or the MIT Solve Challenge Finals. On the practical front, here's an update about NYC street closures — and some advice for navigating the week. Now, here are some of the biggest stories and conversations everyone's talking about at this year's UNGA. Ever onward, — Team Devex (Amy Lieberman, Michael Igoe, Adva Saldinger, Catherine Cheney, and Kate Midden) |
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A NEW HIGH-POWERED PARTNERSHIP TO PREVENT FAMINE The World Bank has partnered with several U.N. agencies, humanitarian organizations, and global technology firms to develop the first global mechanism dedicated to preventing future famines. Here's what you need to know: 1. What it is: Through a new model called Artemis, the Famine Action Mechanism, or FAM, will use the predictive power of data as an early warning system to identify when food crises might turn into famines. 2. Why it exists: Organizations want to know when to deploy resources to help avoid famines. FAM harnesses technology to assess factors such as conflict or poverty or climate change that contribute to food insecurity. 3. How it works: Artemis takes in significant amounts of data from different sources, from cell phones to social media to satellite images. It finds links that can better inform programming and provides countries with the best information to guide critical decision-making, such as when, where, and how to deploy resources to prevent situations from becoming worse. 4. Who gets it: FAM will initially be rolled out in a select group of vulnerable countries, where the partners will test the usability of Artemis on the ground and at global levels. 5. What's next: FAM's founding partners will meet to discuss the implementation of the initiative at the World Bank Annual Meetings in Indonesia this October. |
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1 THING OF NOTE  |
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3 QUESTIONS FOR UNDP'S LEADER Adva Saldinger spoke with United Nations Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner on the sidelines of the Social Good Summit. Read the full story here. At the beginning of the year, UNDP launched its strategic plan. How's it going? We're in the midst of rolling out and implementing it. We have very little time to do so because within the U.N. system, there's a great deal of reform expectation by the secretary-general. It's also a moment — and this was foreshadowed in the strategy — where we need to reinvent the way we think about development, development partnerships, and cooperation. We need to study where the energy and innovation is emerging within a society, and think about how we are a partner to a government that wants to bring the best of its own private sector, its academic community, its civil society community into co-creating and co-designing solutions we know we can solve but have perhaps too often failed to make breakthroughs on.  Are you getting buy-in across UNDP as you move to implement U.N. reform? Our mandate for reform is prescribed by the SG and member states. It's not so much manner of buy-in; this is our new mandate. UNDP is so integral to a national development path for 170 countries; we bring such a level of connectivity between what’s happening locally and what's happening globally — and this is the art development cooperation. How is UNDP working to bridge the development-humanitarian divide? My comrade-in-arms [U.N. OCHA chief] Mark Lowcock is as committed as I am to making this more than an appeal. We have traveled to Somalia and Ethiopia together; we are getting ready to travel to Lake Chad Basin. We saw at the Lake Chad pledging conference a remarkable joint convening of humanitarian community pledging both immediate humanitarian support but also a significant amount of finance for development work. I've appointed a new assistant secretary-general to lead our crisis bureau to signal that we are totally committed to working with humanitarians in crisis response. |
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3 BIG REPORTS 1. Goalkeepers: Redux. The Gates Foundation released the second edition of its Goalkeepers report ahead of its signature event at UNGA, focusing on the growing population of young people, including projected populations in sub-Saharan Africa. 
2. The Global Fund Results report. The Global Fund released its annual progress report, which showed that the partnership has saved 27 million lives since its inception in 2002. 
Source: Global Fund Results Report
3. Commitments to Every Woman Every Child's global strategy for women's, children's, and adolescents' health. The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health issued a report detailing commitments made to EWEC to end all preventable maternal, newborn, and child deaths, including stillbirths, by 2030. 
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TRILLION DOLLAR QUESTION: HOW TO KEEP GOVERNMENTS AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR ACCOUNTABLE? Global health leaders came together for the annual accountability breakfast — a pre-UNGA event by the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health and chaired by former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet — to explore how social and financial accountability factor into meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. Here are the key takeaways:  Cross-sector cooperation and integration must be strengthened. Health can't be delivered in silos; it's essential to look not just at access to care without also look at the quality of care. The future of health financing is ultimately going to be countries' own budgets. Governments need to create the right policy and tax frameworks — and the private sector has to be a responsible actor and pay its taxes. The global health community needs to shift its mindset. Often the conversation about health expenditure is focused on donor financing, when it should be centered on domestic resources. The economic argument can generate buy-in for health spending. Health investments yield high returns. The numbers can help generate the political will to expand health budgets. Civil society must keep governments and the private sector accountable. Civil society voices need to have a seat at the table to inform policies. |
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HOW THE US FEELS ABOUT UN REFORM Mostly OK — but skeptical. Devex reporter Amy Lieberman caught up with Cherith Norman Chalet, the newly appointed U.S. representative for U.N. management and reform, to talk about resident coordinators, the U.S. vision for impending reform, and the fate of voluntary funding. Read the interview. |
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1 LIVE EVENT: HEALTH SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE On Tuesday, we're partnering with MSD for Mothers, the Global Financing Facility, and USAID for a conversation about innovative financing models for health. There's a stellar line-up of global health leaders, including Nigeria's health minister, leaders from USAID, the director-general of development cooperation for the Netherlands, and more. Register to join us via livestream here:  |
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MEDIA ROUNDTABLE |
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5 stories to watch during the UN General Assembly in New York
Devex The U.S. and the world need a UN that works Editorial board, Bloomberg As UNGA kicks off, Guterres calls for urgency Raj Kumar, Devex
The results are in: The Global Fund has saved 27 million lives!
Katie Ryan, ONE Campaign Opinion: Skilled health workers are the foundation of a healthy world Vanessa Kerry, SEED Global Health, on Devex What to expect from President Trump's week at the UN General Assembly Jordyn Phelps, ABC News |
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Thank you for reading. If you have thoughts, feedback, story ideas, or questions you would like to share, please tweet us @devex or send a note to [email protected].
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©Devex is the media platform for the global development community.
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