When Lu’isa Uai Taunga, an officer with the National Emergency Management Office in the Kingdom of Tonga, participated in the UNITAR Disaster Risk Reduction Training which wrapped up in November 2017, she left with renewed energy and ideas for new initiatives to prepare her community in the island group of Ha’apai in the event of a disaster.

I was a middle-class family child and during my upbringing, I saw many young people in my community whose parents struggled with paying their school fees, especially those for high education. I used to ask myself ‘what can I do to help people achieve their dreams?’

The UNITAR training took place just one week after his first session as a UN mandate holder — the youngest person ever appointed to a UN indigenous-specific mechanism and with the least amount of international experience. “There was no accommodation time, as the work of mandate holders is very responsible and challenging, and indigenous peoples around the world expect results and efficiency from experts.”

I was always a girl who thought that one day maybe I’ll be a big person.

Practitioners from all over Africa were put together with wonderful resource persons and experts, to reflect deeply on mediation, and most importantly, on prevention and transformation of conflict in Africa.

With the start of the reform process, I have discovered that elections were about much more than just dispute resolution, which I had been previously concentrating on, and becoming part of it required from me now a thorough understanding of the whole electoral framework.

"With the new electoral body for the 2011 elections, there has been so much improvement including the 2015 elections and we hope that the elections of 2019 will consolidate the successes furthermore.”

"The impact for peace training really opened my eyes to practical ‘learning by doing’ training techniques that I have integrated into my own money management training modules to a very powerful effect.” 

Megan Davis, an Aboriginal woman of the Cobble Cobble clan from Warra in South West Queensland was waiting at the gate of the Palais des Nations on a Saturday evening in July 2000 to board the bus to go to a small village outside Geneva to take part in the first UNITAR Training Programme to Enhance the Conflict Prevention and Peacemaking Capacities of Indigenous Peoples’ Representatives.

 “Coaching was something new for me. The session included techniques and simulations that gave a realistic dimension to the training, while providing us with practical experience in applying the various steps of the coaching process."