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By Vijay Prashad
SANTIAGO, Chile, Sep 12 2025 (IPS)

At eighty, the United Nations is bogged down by structural limitations and political divisions that render it powerless to act decisively – nowhere more clearly than in the Gaza genocide.

There is only one treaty in the world that, despite its limitations, binds nations together: the United Nations Charter. Representatives of fifty nations wrote and ratified the UN Charter in 1945, with others joining in the years that followed.

The charter itself only sets the terms for the behaviour of nations. It does not and cannot create a new world. It depends on individual nations to either live by the charter or die without it.

The charter remains incomplete. It needed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and even that was contested as political and civil rights had to eventually be separated from the social and economic rights. Deep rifts in political visions created fissures in the UN system that have kept it from effectively addressing problems in the world.

The UN is now eighty. It is a miracle that it has lasted this long. The League of Nations was founded in 1920 and lasted only eighteen years of relative peace (until World War II began in China in 1937).

The UN is only as strong as the community of nations that comprises it. If the community is weak, then the UN is weak. As an independent body, it cannot be expected to fly in like an angel and whisper into the ears of the belligerents and stop them.

The UN can only blow the whistle, an umpire for a game whose rules are routinely broken by the more powerful states. It offers a convenient punching bag for all sides of the political spectrum: it is blamed if crises are not solved and if relief efforts fall short. Can the UN stop the Israeli genocide in Gaza?

UN officials have made strong statements during the genocide, with Secretary General António Guterres saying that ‘Gaza is a killing field – and civilians are in an endless death loop’ (8 April 2025) and that the famine in Gaza is ‘not a mystery – it is a man-made disaster, a moral indictment, and a failure of humanity itself’ (22 August 2025).

These are powerful words, but they have amounted to nothing, calling into question the efficacy of the UN itself.
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The UN is not one body but two halves. The most public face of the UN is the UN Security Council (UNSC), which has come to stand in as its executive arm. The UNSC is made up of fifteen countries: five are permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the others are elected for two-year terms.

The five permanent members (the P5) hold veto power over the decisions of the council. If one of the P5 does not like a decision, they are able to scuttle it with their veto. Each time the UNSC has been presented with a resolution calling for a ceasefire, the United States has exercised its veto to quash even that tepid measure (since 1972, the United States has vetoed more than forty-five UNSC resolutions about the Israeli occupation of Palestine).

The UNSC stands in for the UN General Assembly (UNGA), whose one hundred and ninety-three members can pass resolutions that try to set the tone for world opinion but are often ignored. Since the start of the genocide, for instance, the UNGA has passed five key resolutions calling for a ceasefire (the first in October 2023 and the fifth in June 2025).

But the UNGA has no real power in the UN system. The other half of the UN is its myriad agencies, each set up to deal with this or that crisis of the modern age. Some predate the UN itself, such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which was created in 1919 and brought into the UN system in 1946 as its first specialised agency.

Others would follow, including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which advocates for the rights of children, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which promotes tolerance and respect for the world’s cultures.

Over the decades, agencies have been created to advocate for and provide relief to refugees, to ensure nuclear energy is used for peace rather than war, to improve global telecommunications, and to expand development assistance. Their remit is impressive, although the outcomes are more modest.

Meagre funding from the world’s states is one limitation (in 2022, the UN’s total expenditure was $67.5 billion, compared with over $2 trillion spent on the arms trade).

This chronic underfunding is largely because the world’s powers disagree over the direction of the UN and its agencies. Yet without them, the suffering in the world would neither be recorded nor addressed. The UN system has become the world’s humanitarian organisation largely because neoliberal austerity and war have destroyed the capacity of most individual countries to do this work themselves, and because non-governmental organisations are too small to meaningfully fill in the gap.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the entire balance of the world system changed and the UN went into a cycle of internal reform initiatives: from Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace (1992) and An Agenda for Development (1994) and Kofi Annan’s Renewing the United Nations (1997) to Guterres’ Our Common Agenda (2021), Summit of the Future (2024), and UN80 Task Force (2025).

The UN80 Task Force is the deepest reform imaged, but its three areas of interest (internal efficiency, mandate review, and programme alignment) have been attempted previously (‘we’ve tried this exercise before’, said Under-Secretary-General for Policy and Chair of the UN80 Task Force Guy Ryder).

The agenda set by the UN is focused on its own organisational weaknesses and does not address the largely political questions that scuttle the UN’s work. A broader agenda would need to include the following points:

Move the UN Secretariat to the Global South. Almost all UN agencies are headquartered in either Europe or the United States, where the UN Secretariat itself is located. There have been occasional proposals to move UNICEF, the UN Population Fund, and UN Women to Nairobi, Kenya, which already hosts the UN Environment Programme and UN-Habitat.

It is about time that the UN Secretariat leave New York and go to the Global South, not least to prevent Washington from using visa denials to punish UN officials who criticise US or Israeli power. With the US preventing Palestinian officials from entering the US for the UN General Assembly, there have been calls already to move the UNGA meeting to Geneva. Why not permanently leave the United States?

Increase funding to the UN from the Global South. Currently, the largest funders of the UN system are the United States (22%) and China (20%), with seven close US allies contributing 28% (Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, and South Korea).

The Global South – without China – contributes about 26% to the UN budget; with China, its contribution is 46%, nearly half of the total budget. It is time for China to become the largest contributor to the UN, surpassing the US, which wields its funding as a weapon against the organisation.

Increase funding for humanitarianism within states. Countries should be spending more on alleviating human distress than on paying off wealthy bondholders. The UN should not be the main agency to assist those in need. As we have shown, several countries on the African continent spend more servicing debt than on education and healthcare; unable to provide these essential functions, they come to rely on the UN through UNICEF, UNESCO, and the WHO. States should build up their own capacity rather than depend on this assistance.

Cut the global arms trade. Wars are waged not only for domination but for the profits of arms dealers. Annual international arms exports are nearing $150 billion, with the United States and Western European countries accounting for 73% of sales between 2020 and 2024. In 2023 alone, the top one hundred arms manufacturers made $632 billion (largely through sales by US companies to the US military).

Meanwhile, the total UN peacekeeping budget is only $5.6 billion, and 92% of the peacekeepers come from the Global South. The Global North makes money on war, while the Global South sends its soldiers and policemen to try and prevent conflicts.

Strengthen regional peace and development structures.

To disperse some of the power from the UNSC, regional peace and development structures such as the African Union must be strengthened and their views given priority. If there are no permanent members in the UNSC from Africa, the Arab world, or from Latin America, why should these regions be held captive by the veto wielded by the P5? If the power to settle disputes were to rest more in regional structures, then the absolute authority of the UNSC could be somewhat diluted.

With the genocide unrelenting, another wave of boats filled with solidarity activists – the Freedom Flotilla – attempts to reach Gaza. On one of the boats is Ayoub Habraoui, a member of Morocco’s Workers’ Democratic Way Party who represents the International Peoples’ Assembly. He sent me this message:

What is happening in Gaza is not a conventional war – it is a slow-motion genocide unfolding before the eyes of the world. I am joining because deliberate starvation is being used as a weapon to break the will of a defenceless people – denied medicine, food, and water, while children die in their mothers’ arms. I am joining because humanity is indivisible. Whoever accepts a siege today will accept injustice anywhere tomorrow.

Silence is complicity in the crime, and indifference is a betrayal of the very values we claim to uphold. This flotilla is more than just boats – it is a global cry of conscience that declares: no to the siege of entire populations, no to starving the innocent, no to genocide. We may be stopped, but the very act of sailing is a declaration: Gaza is not alone. We are all witnesses to the truth – and voices against slow death.

Vijay Prashad is Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
https://thetricontinental.org/

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By External Source
Sep 11 2025 (IPS-Partners)

 
Tom Dannatt is a Founder and CEO of Street Child, an international non-government organization active in over 20 disaster-hit and lowest-income countries – working for a world where all children are ‘safe, in school and learning’. Tom founded Street Child in 2008 with his wife Lucinda and has led the organization since its inception. Street Child leads the civil society constituency within ECW’s governance and, accordingly, Dannatt represents the constituency on the Fund’s High-Level Steering Committee.

ECW: In places like Nigeria, Pakistan and Uganda, Street Child is working together with local partners to provide children with holistic learning opportunities through ECW investments. How can we maximize the impact of these investments to ensure education for all?

Tom Dannatt: Street Child is really clear on this one – maximizing the role of local organizations is key to maximizing the immediate, and longer-term, impact of ECW’s investments. It has been a privilege for Street Child to work closely with ECW in recent years, through multiple grants, on practical strategies to bring this perspective to life. It is superb to see a prominent commitment to localization embedded in ECW’s strategy and being increasingly lived out through a growing norm of seeing local organizations playing significant roles in consortia delivering ECW investments.

An especially promising ‘next-level’ innovation that Street Child had the opportunity to trial in the present Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP) in Uganda is what we have called the ‘localization unit’ approach. This saw a minimum portion of the MYRP budget being reserved purely for local organizations to competitively apply for, amongst themselves – free from competition with INGOs. Street Child, as the localization unit manager, conducted a uniquely inclusive, transparent and supportive application process; and has since provided hands-on management and assistance to the five successful grantees to help them maximize the impact of their award and fulfill all necessary reporting and compliance demands.

I was in Uganda myself a few weeks ago (in fact, I had to join a 90-minute ECW High-Level Steering Group call by a dusty roadside, surrounded by a group of curious children!) It was mid-way through the final year of the MYRP, and I witnessed first-hand phenomenal, sophisticated, transformative programming being delivered by all five of these organizations – work of a quality that I am sure the most famous global charities would have been proud to have showcased to any donor. And here is the thing – for all five of these local NGOs, this was the first time they had ever received a grant from a global donor; but now, not only had they ‘smashed it’ in terms of delivering great impact with the ECW funds awarded, most of them had gone on – using the credibility of being an ECW-grantee and the experience gained of successfully managing an award from a demanding global donor – to win further institutional grants themselves. Without exaggeration, ECW’s bold initiative in establishing this ‘localizations unit’ has transformed the ability of these organizations to attract the support they so richly deserve – and their ability to serve refugee children long after this MYRP closes. This is real, lasting impact.

ECW: Street Child leads the civil society constituency of Education Cannot Wait’s High-Level Steering Group and Executive Committee. How is civil society coming together with donors, governments, UN agencies, the private sector and local non-profits to position education – especially for children caught in humanitarian crises – at the top of the international agenda?

Tom Dannatt: Street Child is proud to follow in the footsteps of Plan International, Save the Children and World Vision in leading the civil society constituency within ECW. What this means is that I, as CEO, sit on the High-Level Steering Group; and then my colleague Tyler Arnot, who many in the sector know well as co-coordinator of the Global Education Cluster, sits on the ECW Executive Committee. And together, we try to faithfully and fearlessly bring the voice of civil society into these key fora!

We take this role incredibly seriously: because it really matters. Civil society has been central to this mission from the very beginning. ECW itself was born out of years of sustained civil society advocacy to close the funding gap for education in crisis. And the need for civil society to bring the same vital, fresh ground-level perspective to ECW’s ongoing decision-making remains as strong today – not least given the winds of extreme change blowing through our sector today.

For Street Child to credibly and effectively represent the voice and views of civil society, it is essential that we regularly convene the sector, and we do – online, of course, but also in-person wherever possible. For example, this June on the sidelines of ECW’s Executive Committee meetings in Geneva, we brought together civil society representatives, local NGOs, youth constituencies and INGO partners to strategize on coordination, funding and sustaining support for Education Cannot Wait. We held two days of intensive, passionate discussion at the EiE Hub and then in the main conference centre which helped shape ECW priorities and ensured that the most vulnerable children remain central to decision-making at this critical moment in ECW’s evolution. Bad news: both rooms we booked were too small! Which, of course, is actually good news, because it shows how much passion there is in our community, how relevant they see our fora and the need to come together in these important but complex times.

Looking ahead, we will continue this work later this month in New York on the edges of UNGA, where Street Child will co-host a discussion with ECW focused on local leadership and locally-led partnerships in education in emergencies. Robert Hazika, the Executive Director of YARID – one of the five local NGOs who received awards from the Uganda localization unit that I mentioned earlier – will join us.

ECW: In the face of limited resources, why should donors and the private sector invest in education through multilateral funds such as Education Cannot Wait?

Tom Dannatt: The dangerous ‘lacuna’ that education in emergencies naturally rests in makes the case for investing in a strong, relevant and loud ECW, as a champion for the sector, incredibly important.

Education for children affected by emergencies is so obviously utterly vital – and right – few decent people would disagree. But it is so easy to miss because it sits in this tricky lacuna. Because, on the one hand, for too many humanitarians, education seems a less visceral and less apparently urgent ‘life-saving’ priority than food, water, shelter – a view can exist that education is inherently a long-term venture so ‘best left to the development community’. Meanwhile, much of that development community will look at a warzone, the aftermath of an earthquake or a refugee camp and say, ‘oh no, this is not the sort of context we are set up to work in’ … And so whilst everyone agrees that educating children in emergencies is critical – all to easily, no one does it: it falls between the cracks. And that is why ECW is so critical – yes to be a superb funder; but equally, and perhaps more so, to be this urgent loud voice for these ‘inconvenient children’ demanding the ‘developmental initiative of education’ in a ‘humanitarian situation’. And ensuring they do not fall between any of our structural cracks.

And then, of course, you have the unique character and fundamental qualities of ECW that make it a compelling proposition – a collective platform to impact education-in-emergencies that truly brings together governments, donors, civil society and the private sector – to coordinate, reduce duplication and ensure more resources flow directly to children’s learning, as quickly as possible!

A final word on the importance of speed and duration: we know that for every day a child is out of school, it becomes increasingly unlikely that they ever return, so ECW’s speed, especially through its First Emergency Responses is absolutely critical – and unique. On the other hand, most other humanitarian funds for education are often too short to ensure continuity of learning. Quality education cannot be provided in 6-12 months, and the Multi-Year Resilience Programmes allow for greater predictability in providing education services in a protracted crisis.

ECW: Education is life-building and life-sustaining. How can investments in quality education and foundational learning support our vision for a world without war, without hunger and without poverty?

Tom Dannatt: The first emergency I experienced professionally was Ebola, 11 years ago. I wouldn’t be talking to you today if it wasn’t for what I, and Street Child, learned in those days: it shaped us. But the point I want to remember here is where were the last, and hardest, places to shake Ebola from? It was the least educated villages.

Where have I heard young people talk the most casually about joining armed groups? In unstable societies offering little prospects or hope for the future.

If you come across a child alone at night on the streets of some West African market town and ask them how they came to be there – many times, the answer you’ll get is a story that begins in a village with no school and then a venture to the town to try and find an education that hasn’t worked out. These are the type of conversations that launched Street Child into the education sector more broadly, fifteen years ago. Children thirst for education. It is the world’s responsibility, whatever the circumstances, to meet that thirst.

Education underpins health. Education builds safety and security. Education builds hope and promise for the future – in dire settings such as emergency contexts, the importance and power of ‘hope’ cannot be overstated. Humans with hope can do extraordinary things.

When we invest in education in emergencies, we invest directly into the most powerful idea around – that today will be better than tomorrow. That is exciting anywhere, no more so than if you have the misfortune of growing up in one of the world’s most crisis-affected places.

ECW: We all know that ‘readers are leaders’ and that reading skills are key to every child’s education. What are three books that have most influenced you personally and/or professionally?

Tom Dannatt: What a question … On any given day, I could probably give a different answer, but here are the three that leap to mind today.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Lincoln biography they made into a film, is over 900 pages but so good that I’ve read it twice! Moral courage and vision, character, empathetic leadership, unity from division, strategy, humility and self-confidence … there is so much there. I like a good biography.

We started Street Child in 2008. I read Bottom Billion by Paul Collier in 2007 and was engaged by the core thesis that whilst much of the world was gradually getting better, there were corners of the world where the ‘rising tide was not lifting all boats’ because they were ‘detached’ from the factors gradually driving global prosperity up. And that these places were where extra effort and aid was especially needed and best directed. I see the work of Street Child, and of course ECW, very much in these terms – giving children in the toughest situations a chance to gain the skills that will allow them to take part in everything this world has to offer.

Finally, to switch off, I love a sports book. And if a better sports autobiography than Andre Agassi’s Open is ever written, I so much look forward to reading it. Searingly and surprisingly honest (one of the most memorable players to ever wield a racket, yet hated tennis most of his life!), vulnerable, compelling, yet ultimately incredibly inspiring.

 

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