Book Aid International, a charity that supports literacy by increasing access to books, is returning to Sierra Leone. The charity, which ships around a million books each year to libraries in sub-Saharan Africa, sent a shipment of 38,000 brand new, carefully-selected books to Freetown to help the country rebuild after the Ebola crisis. 

African countries, today, are exerting every effort to overcome the challenges they face with their own resources and through their one mechanisms. Turkey is an ardent supporter of African solutions for African issues. [...] Humanitarian diplomacy is one of the main components of Turkey’s approach towards Africa. Hosting the first-ever United Nations World Humanitarian Summit on 23-24 May is a clear sign of Turkey’s outstanding position in this field. 

That is the essence of the change in global politics that enables the rise of public diplomacy. The theory is not complicated, but putting public diplomacy to work requires imagination and persistence.

Rather than encouraging people to tear up the dance floor or smoke weed, the singer-songwriter hopes his new tune, “Begin Again,” will inspire peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Lawrence’s song is one of 30 original compositions on the benefit album “2 Unite All,” which was released last month. The album enlists legendary talents like Roger Waters and Peter Gabriel to deliver music with themes of unity, forgiveness, and starting over.

An international forum held in Barcelona this week provided representatives of civil society and local government a chance to tell their uplifting stories of effort [...] to receive and integrate refugees into their communities. Organised by the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia, the one-day event saw a series of experts, officials and activists give their accounts of schemes and initiatives to care for new arrivals and, in the process, cast a much more favourable light on Europe.

“We started this program aiming to nurture the workforce essential for Ethiopia’s industrial development, placing priority on the descendants of those who sacrificed themselves for us,” said Choi Song-shik, chief of the Korean TVET program and a retired engineering expert from the Seoul chamber.

The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) may well be a signature initiative of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, designed to create for himself a dynamic, if not dubious, humanitarian legacy, but it could hardly have been more heartily welcomed than in Turkey, the country where the 2016 WHS will take place later this month.

In northern Syria, a small core of Irish aid workers are among the group of international aid agencies helping to lessen the load for Um Mohammad and more than a million people caught between the warring sides. Aileen Wynne (25), from Raheen in Limerick, who studied human nutrition at University College Cork, became an aid worker after travelling to India. She has spent 16 months working with Syrian refugees.