Deputy UN Chief Urges Crowd: “Don’t Give Up on Change”

Global Citizen Festival stage 2025

Deputy UN Secretary-General Amina Mohammed thanked the crowd at New York’s Global Citizen Festival on Saturday for raising their voices for justice and “refusing to give up on a better world.”

The music event, held in Central Park during the final weekend of the UN General Assembly’s high-level week, is the flagship event of Global Citizen, the world’s largest movement to end extreme poverty. This year’s lineup included international stars such as Shakira, Cardi B, and Rosé.

Ms. Mohammed took to the stage to remind festival-goers that only five years remain to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals—a blueprint for a fairer future for people and the planet. “We still have a ways to go,” she said. “We're moving, but it's just not fast enough, and the clock is ticking really loud.”

As Special Advisor to former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, Ms. Mohammed played a key role in advancing the Goals and securing consensus from UN Member States in 2015. Speaking on Friday, she reiterated that $4.3 trillion is needed annually to finance the Goals and ensure no one is left behind.

“What really matters is giving peace a chance—for the women in Sudan, the children in Gaza, and the people in Ukraine. We need peace everywhere,” she declared. She also called for measures to prevent artificial intelligence from creating new divides, for women’s inclusion in all decision-making tables, for quality education, and for protecting the planet “from the Amazon to the Congo and every corner of the world.”

The deputy UN chief encouraged attendees to see solutions where others see dead ends and to use their voices to “cut through the noise, demanding everyone do better and rejecting the globalisation of indifference.”