UNGA80 reporters' notebook: Day 1

<div id="emjcl9m"><h2>Live from New York: It’s Bill’s night</h2></div> By Elissa Miolene and Jesse Chase-Lubitz, 9 p.m. ET Undoubtedly the glitziest events at UNGA began with branded popcorn and reusable cups of wine — and after a grand piano rendition of “What a Wonderful World” by musician Jon Batiste and a performance by Brazilian ballet dancer Ingrid Silva, Bill Gates walked across the stage. “Is it too much to ask that these rich countries — that are getting richer — continue to give that 1% [to development assistance]?” Gates said during his opening speech. “This is the moment to renew our commitment and build an even stronger movement.” Gates’ remarks were followed by inspirational interludes from American actor Olivia Wilde, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and community health worker Margaret Odera. But the context was set before Gates even began to speak, with a voice from the theater’s speakers telling the audience that despite the last 25 years of progress, the world has reversed course: More children will die in 2025 than one year prior. Latif Nasser, a science journalist, reporter, and host for the WNYC Studios podcast Radiolab, broke down why that was the case. With the help and levity of a live Sesame Street production, Nasser walked the audience through what raising a child actually takes — with the help of gynecologists, infectious disease experts, and Indonesia’s minister of health. The baby from the show ultimately survived the many tribulations thanks to an experimental tool that would genetically modify female mosquitoes to keep them from reproducing. And as a result, a chorus of trumpets celebrated our baby’s 5th birthday party. “Delivery of those innovations will depend on resources,” Gates said. “But this is a tough time for that. Many countries who have been very dependable in terms of generosity, and aid, and global health aid in particular, are cutting back.” Still, Gates said, there were those keeping the fight alive. Spain, for example, has doubled its contributions to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, since 2021 — and committed to funding development aid despite much of the Western world doing the opposite. The global health giant and the Spanish prime minister then sat down for an on-stage chat, which resulted in Gates calling the vaccine skepticism of U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy as “not well-founded,” and Sánchez standing behind his government’s decision to recognize Palestine as a state. It was a decision taken earlier this year by Spain, Norway, and Ireland, and one that’s gained more momentum during this year’s UNGA. On Sunday, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia recognized the embattled territory; on Monday, France followed suit. “This is great news for the international community, and great news for Palestine,” Sánchez said. His words were met with applause from the crowd, something that continued while the program turned back to its main event: children’s health. Ten individuals were honored for their work, from Ugandan entomologist Krystal Mwesiga Birungi to British footballer David Beckham. And at the end, Batiste summoned the audience into a dance party — with dozens of children, a preteen tap dancer, a nine-piece music ensemble, and a full marching band leading the way. “We can all choose where we stop,” said Wilde, closing the event. “And it is not here.” <div id="jcl8pm" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>Mission 300: Trump edition</h2></div> By Jesse Chase-Lubitz, 8 p.m. ET Behind closed doors at UNGA, Mission 300 leaders shared what they really think about the initiative’s future. The initiative, which is aimed at providing electricity to 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, was launched in 2024 by the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank. It brings together governments, development partners, and the private sector to tackle one of Africa’s most pressing challenges: energy. World Bank officials highlighted the pace of progress so far, pointing to millions of new connections since the initiative’s launch, emphasizing that this is a project to expand jobs and pushing against defining it as a climate project. “I’m going to be very open with you. I got really irritated that Power Africa became a climate project in the last administration,” said Andrew Herscowitz, the chief executive officer of Mission 300 Accelerator at The Rockefeller Foundation, referring to the initiative launched during the Obama administration under USAID that sought to achieve similar goals. Herscowitz said that while M300 has “climate aspects,” electricity is needed no matter the format. “People need to accept that the No. 1 priority is making sure that Africans have access to electricity so they have jobs,” Herscowitz said. “But if you have a bunch of people without jobs who can’t afford electricity, you’re never going to solve the climate issue.” The question of funding loomed over the conversation. Anna Bjerde, the managing director of operations at the World Bank, said that IDA replenishment, bilateral commitments, and private investment must all align quickly if the program is to stay on track. “If we want to achieve the [energy] connections by 2030, you actually need to commit the funds like in the next 24 months or so because it takes a couple of years at a minimum,” Bjerde said. She said that it’s important to front-load resources — get the money out the door faster — and build regulatory reforms in partner countries to clear the way for new capital. <div id="mi615pm"><h2>The new global health in-crowd</h2></div> By Michael Igoe, 6:15 p.m. ET Governments and the private sector are in; technical assistance and NGOs — except the faith-based ones — are out. That’s the short version of the Trump administration’s new “America First Global Health Strategy,” which State Department officials presented at an UNGA side event on Monday. Read more about that strategy here. They drove home the point with a panel discussion. Brad Smith, the Department of Government Efficiency alum and architect of the strategy, took the stage alongside two African health ministers — Mohammed Ali Pate of Nigeria and Sabin Nsanzimana of Rwanda — and two Bay Area private sector representatives: Zipline and Gilead. Having spent months vilifying foreign aid efforts and justifying their dismantling, Trump officials struck a different chord about what this work has achieved. Jeremy Lewin — who has taken control of foreign aid programs since arriving with DOGE early in the administration and playing a key role in USAID’s dismantling — said that many U.S. global health programs have been “tremendously successful in many respects.” But he said the Trump administration believes that “progress has stalled,” with “too much focus on creating parallel health care systems” and “promoting NGOs,” while “the countries and the private sector have been cut out.” “We want to help promote genuine self-reliance,” he said. <a rel="noopener" target="_self" href="#top"><b>Back to top ↑</b></a> <div id="mi1150am" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>Don’t mention it</h2></div> By Michael Igoe, 11:50 a.m. ET The global health sector is in crisis — just don’t talk about why. A Monday session on African health leadership came close to confronting the Trump administration’s draconian foreign aid cuts and new “America First Global Health Strategy” — until a deft moderator stepped in to intervene. As befits an early UNGA Monday morning, the discussion of a global health “tipping point” — convened by Global Health Corps and others — featured an hour and 20 minutes of resolve-steeling commitment to turn crisis into opportunity by investing in young African health leaders. That is, until an audience member pierced the optimism bubble with a blunt question about Trump’s new strategy, which was released last week and aims to replace NGO-led health delivery funds with a scaled-back, private sector-focused assortment of bilateral agreements. For African countries facing a steep health financing shortfall, is there anything good at all in Trump’s new plan? The audience member directed the question to the two panelists: Pathfinder International's Tabinda Sarosh and Nanthalile Mugala from Path. Femi Oke proved once and for all why she is the global health and development community’s preeminent moderator by swooping in and intercepting the question with an anecdote from World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (who was not present). Oke called the Trump administration’s foreign aid cuts and strategy the “elephant in the room of every conversation this week” — an elephant she’s tired of hearing about — and said it wouldn’t be “fair” to require the panelists to answer. Mugala from Path took a stab anyway: "Necessity is the mother of invention.” <a rel="noopener" target="_self" href="#top"><b>Back to top ↑</b></a> <div id="jcl1030am" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>From multilateralism to ‘minilateralism’</h2></div> By Jesse Chase-Lubitz, 11:30 a.m. ET An intimate gathering of big names in development kicked off the busy week with grave warnings about the future of global cooperation. “In the absence of an international rules-based order, we are no different from children on a playground running from the bully and hoping that we can get through lunch time without somebody taking our food,” said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley. “We potentially face a moment where numbness is the order of the day,” she added. Other leaders echoed this sentiment. Gordon Brown, the United Nations special envoy for global education and former prime minister of the United Kingdom, said that the decade could be defined “by the breach of international humanitarian and human rights law in almost every single conflict around the world, and by the shift from the rules-based order to a power-based order." But couching those warnings was a reality check — an acceptance of the retreat of governments in global development and a call to action for, well, everyone else. The experts, who spanned from David Miliband, the president and CEO of International Rescue Committee, to Mark Dybul, the architect of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and David Beasley, former head of the World Food Programme, among many others, walked a thin line between reality and optimism. They pointed to charities and the private sector as the development sector’s primary hope moving forward. “We will find the energy in minilateralism, rather than multilateralism,” said Miliband. “Multiple minilateralisms, if you like. It will not just be combined government institutions. It will embrace the risk-taking, the innovation, and the scaling capacity of civil society and the philanthropic sector, as well as in the private sector.” Ideally, he added, the government would “come in behind the solutions, rather than us expecting them to be the solution.” <a rel="noopener" target="_self" href="#top"><b>Back to top ↑</b></a> <div id="em1018am" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>A report card from the world: What does the public really think about the UN? </h2></div> By Elissa Miolene, 10:18 a.m. ET Today, just 32% of Americans approve of the United Nations’ performance — a 41% drop from when the institution was founded 80 years ago. Those are the early findings from a new Gallup study, the full analysis of which will reveal global perception of the U.N. next year. “Does that mean that the U.S. has given up on the United Nations?” Jon Clifton, the CEO at Gallup, asked a packed audience at the Concordia annual summit on Monday. The answer, he said, was no, noting that when Gallup asked Americans whether the U.N. should still exist, 60% still said yes. “This isn’t about getting rid of the U.N. They just want it to do better.” Next year, Gallup will be releasing a study that examines the perceptions of not just Americans, but those across the world. Though that work is currently in progress, the company has already analyzed 40 countries — a group that collectively gave the U.N. much higher marks. Fifty percent of people in those nations approved of the institution’s work, with countries known for receiving development assistance scoring the U.N. highest. Eighty-one percent of those in Madagascar, for example, approved of the U.N., while 80% of those in Tanzania felt the same. In fact, those who reported the lowest scores when it came to their household income gave the U.N. the highest marks, Clifton said. But for countries in conflict, those scores were flipped: People in Israel and the Palestinian territories gave the U.N. just a 9% and 18% approval rating respectively, and less than 30% of those in Ukraine approved of the U.N.’s performance. Those in Armenia, Libya, and Kuwait also ranked the U.N. poorly, Clifton added. Despite that, there is one group that’s pulling up support for the U.N.: Gen Z. Across the world, nearly 50% of those aged 13 to 28 years old approved of the institution — something that, for Clifton, felt like a sign of hope for international cooperation as a whole. <a rel="noopener" target="_self" href="#top"><b>Back to top ↑</b></a> <div id="ag5am" style="border-top: 3px dotted #ff9900; padding-top: 10px;"><h2>An UNGA unlike any other</h2></div> By Anna Gawel, 5 a.m. ET The 80th U.N. General Assembly kicks off today, accompanied by the usual rites of passage: black limo motorcades snarling already-gridlocked New York City traffic, frustrating security lines, jam-packed side events, countless catch-up coffees, sore feet, and speeches galore. But this year feels different. U.S. President Donald Trump — to no one’s surprise — has upended nearly every tradition the multilateralist establishment has come to count on. Not only is his speech almost guaranteed to spark fireworks, his razing of foreign assistance — which hasn’t spared the U.N. — has cast a shadow over the proceedings. Ostensibly, there should be at least some cause for celebration. It’s the U.N.’s 80th birthday after all, and it’s embarking on what many believe is a long-overdue reform agenda. But that agenda has, in a sense, been foisted on the U.N. by Trump’s drastic cuts, which have forced Secretary-General António Guterres to prepare for his own budget cuts, staff layoffs, and agency consolidations. To wit, in recent weeks, Guterres has released a revised 2026 budget, which cuts $500 million from its regular budget and eliminates nearly 2,700 posts. On top of that is serious structural reform, including the merging of several U.N. agencies’ departments, folding UNOPS into the U.N. Development Programme, and the U.N. Population Fund into UN Women, among other changes. That’s why many U.N. staff worry the reforms are more of a haphazard cost-cutting exercise than a carefully thought-out plan for making the U.N. more relevant. “I have no doubt there’s lot of efficiencies to be had, and people should be brave and try to tackle it,” Elizabeth Campbell, the executive director of ODI Global Washington, told my colleague and Devex’s resident U.N. expert, Colum Lynch, in a Devex Pro Briefing. But Campbell, a former senior U.N. and State Department official, noted that “reform is very, very difficult, extremely incremental and resistant at every turn. So this idea that somehow the U.N. itself would be able to effectively put forward a restructuring that would include collapsing a number of those [U.N.] organizations … I find that hard to believe.” Guy Ryder, the U.N.’s undersecretary-general of policy, doesn’t dispute that reforms are difficult and that member states will have the ultimate say over what stays and what goes, but he insists the reform agenda is not just a reactive, budget-slashing enterprise. “We are taking a strategic approach,” he told Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar, during a briefing right before UNGA. “The secretary-general is very deliberately investing in some areas and necessarily deprioritizing in others. But it’s a thought-through, reflective approach to the way we have to invest our time, effort, and resources in the future.” As the debate over that future unfolds this week, we’ll be covering every angle relevant to the development community. We have an entire news team on the ground at UNGA80, and we’re hosting our own three-day side event — Devex Impact House — that will feature discussions with dozens of speakers, from U.N. and U.S. officials to young voices from the global south. They’ll be exploring everything from cancer care, media freedoms, and artificial intelligence to U.N. fragmentation, climate change, and the future of foreign assistance. To learn more, check out Devex Impact House. And stay tuned here for updates from our reporters throughout the day. And for a preview of what’s to come at UNGA, check out the latest episode of our This week in global development podcast, Colum’s Devex Pro Briefing event, his special UNGA newsletter, and today’s Newswire! <a rel="noopener" target="_self" href="#top"><b>Back to top ↑</b></a>