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Women need to be “front and centre” of the pandemic recovery as a matter of economics, efficiency, effectiveness and social resilience, the UN chief told the women’s commission on Tuesday. 

The UN Secretary-General has urged corporate leaders to achieve gender equality, highlighting the benefits for the private sector and society at large. 

António Guterres made the appeal in a video message to the ‘Target Gender Equality LIVE’ event, held on Tuesday during the latest session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). 

Target Gender Equality is an initiative by the UN Global Compact, which supports businesses in adopting sustainable and socially responsible policies. 

The UN rights chief said on Tuesday that empowering women and girls to participate fully in public life is both the right and “smart thing to do”, speaking on a day that saw history being made with the first ever address to the UN by a woman Vice President of the United States. 

This week, Syria marks a grim anniversary: 10 years since the start of the country’s grinding conflict. Today, one decade into the catastrophe, about half the country’s population has been uprooted, with some 12 million people internally displaced or living as refugees.  

As the Syrian war reaches its grim decade-long milestone, the UN envoy for the country told the Security Council on Monday that it will “go down as one of the darkest chapters in recent history” referring to the Syrian people as among “the greatest victims of this century”. 

Health officials from the UN and the European Union will meet this week on the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine after several more countries suspended its use, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. 

Agency chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists that WHO’s Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety has been reviewing available data on the vaccine and will meet with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on Tuesday.

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday that it was aware of blood clot concerns linked to “a specific batch” of AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, but maintained that to date, no-one has died from any coronavirus vaccine.

The development comes after several European countries suspended the rollout of the jab as a precaution.

The pain and deprivation of individual Syrians and the widespread destruction, a decade of conflict has wrought on Syria, has been documented in a series of images taken by 17 photographers working in the country.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died, and 12 million have fled their homes - half as refugees - as the 10-year-long civil war stretches into another decade.

The United Nations on Thursday launched a new global campaign, Only Together, aiming to advance fair and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines worldwide. 

The initiative underscores the need for global solidarity to ensure vaccines are accessible in all countries, initially targeting healthcare workers and the most vulnerable.  

Conflict drives hunger, and when that turns to famine, that then drives conflict, the UN chief told the Security Council on Thursday, adding that “if you don’t feed people, you feed conflict”.

“When a country or region is gripped by conflict and hunger, they become mutually reinforcing…[and] cannot be resolved separately”, Secretary-General António Guterres said via videoconference to the meeting which focused on how conflict and food security are interlinked.