In an effort to promote global progress toward a more sustainable, peaceful, and prosperous world, UNITAR has been working since its founding in 1963 to bridge the capacity gaps that exist for individuals and institutions. By developing tailored learning solutions that facilitate the creation of flexible and intellectually stimulating environments for learning and collaboration and encourage participation, dialogue, local ownership, and knowledge base expansion for sustainable impact, UNITAR’s Division for Peace helps to accelerate the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 16 of Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions as well as the Agenda 2030.

You want to create a new exciting online course that will be taken by hundreds - or even thousands - of participants from all over the world. You want your project to have the greatest possible impact and reach, and to do so, the course needs to be available in different languages. But how do you go about it?

For the Division for People and Social Inclusion, multilingualism is key for the expansive outreach of our activities and events. Mr. Alex Mejia, Director of UNITAR’s People’s Division and Social Inclusion explains, “it is fundamental to embrace multilingualism for two main reasons. One because we are the United Nations, we are supposed to be multilingual, and two, we cannot teach other people to embrace multilingualism if we do not embrace it ourselves.”

Quito, Ecuador, 20 September 2022 - UNITAR in close collaboration with CIFAL Ecuador have continued to rollout the Autosobriety Training Programme to Prevent Drink Driving to expand its reach across different Provinces in Ecuador. Over 800 individuals working in different areas in the field of road safety were trained throughout 5 workshops that took place in the Provinces of Santo Domingo, Cotopaxi, Cuenca, Loja, and Portoviejo between June and July 2022.

Discover how UNOSAT's Emergency Mapping service has been delivering and disseminating products in different languages to maximize accessibility.

Citizen science data (CSD) presents untapped opportunities to track progress towards the SDGs offering multiple advantages for Governments and National Statistical Offices (NSOs): help fill in data gaps for indicators where traditional data collection instruments, such as, household surveys or administrative registers may not be well suited or may not have the sufficient coverage, improve the granularity of data and sometimes timeliness, and offer an effective and cost-efficient means for NSOs to address data needs of policy-makers in the context of limited or falling resources. Many citizen science data initiatives and datasets exist already. Why then have NSOs not been using citizen science data to any large extent to date? To begin with, NSOs require a better understanding of how such data can be useful in their specific context and requirements, as well as understanding what exactly needs to be done to leverage it. Citizen science practitioners, for their part, need to better understand policy applications and know how to ensure that the generated data meets necessary quality standards. This Policy Brief aims to bring greater understanding to these issues by drawing on a research conducted as part of the EU-funded Crowd4SDG project with contributions from several international organizations and research centers. It shows how NSOs can give value to CSD benefitting official statistics, policy-making and citizen science communities and helping ensure that no one is left behind.

UNITAR launches programmes relating to multilateral diplomacy in Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese.

The Stabilization Facility for Libya (SFL) project aims to bridge Libya’s period of transition from an initial humanitarian relief towards mid- and long-term structural and sector-specific support after the 2011 revolution by strengthening national unity and reinforcing state authorities.

16 September 2022, Hiroshima, Japan - Youth are invited to translate or review in their native language an online training on how artificial intelligence, or AI, affects human rights in a project co-organized by SALTO Participation & Information Resource Centre (SALTO PI), UNITAR and UNESCO. Applicants have until 26 September to apply.

October 2022, Hiroshima, Japan – Multilingualism is especially relevant for the United Nations and our partners as we work to bring course content to communities across the globe. The languages used determines which communities have access to knowledge. With that in mind, efforts to expand the languages available for online course content are under way, with the help of multilingual youth.