United Nations
Art is Long, Life is Short
Between the many resolutions speeches reports and other documents that are produced each year the United Nations is awash in text. It is an ongoing challenge to create a coherent and useful picture of this corpus. In particular there is an interest in measuring how the work of the United Nations system aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is a need for a scalable objective and consistent way to measure how similar any given publication is to each of the 17 SDGs. This paper explains a proof-of-concept process for building such a system using machine learning algorithms. By creating a model of the 17 SDGs it is possible to measure how similar the contents of individual publications are to each of the goals — their SDG Score. This paper also shows how this system can be used in practice by computing the SDG Scores for a limited selection of DESA publications and providing some analytics.
A UN Framework for the Immediate Socio-economic Response to COVID-19
This report sets out the framework for the United Nations’ urgent socio-economic support to countries and societies in the face of COVID-19 (coronavirus) putting in practice the UN Secretary-General’s Shared Responsibility Global Solidarity report on the same subject. It is one of three critical components of the UN’s efforts to save lives protect people and rebuild better alongside the health response led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the humanitarian response as detailed in the UN-led COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan. The e-book for this policy brief has been converted into an accessible format for the visually impaired and people with print reading disabilities. It is fully compatible with leading screen-reader technologies such as JAWS and NVDA.