“Between the Chamber and the Window: A Summer at UNICEF, and the work of protecting children in both the real and the digital world”
By Varsha Thakur (UNC MEITE ’27)
Summer 2026 AFE Blog Post Series
Varsha at the UNICEF NY Headquarters
When I received confirmation of my internship with UNICEF, the aspect I was most excited about was how an international organization marking 80 years of its formation, one that has been relentlessly working toward the protection of children, is adopting AI — in which forms, to what extent, and with what safeguards in place. On my very first day at UNICEF, I found out the office I was assigned to had built its own AI tool.
I am interning with the Office of Internal Audit and Investigations at UNICEF headquarters in New York. It is the part of the institution that examines fraud, misconduct, and cases of sexual exploitation and abuse, both inside UNICEF and among the implementation partners who carry out its work on the ground. Most of what I do is confidential, so I cannot write about specifics. What I can share though is that the learning has been precise and demanding. I have been exposed to the legal and procedural dimensions of investigations, including evidence analysis, documentation, interviewing, due process, and the institutional standards that guide international civil servants.
Working in OIAI has made a few things clear to me: UNICEF is often seen through its most visible work, but behind that work is another layer of oversight, investigation, safeguarding, risk management, ethics, and accountability. It has helped me see how child-centered work depends on institutional integrity. What stays with me is the attention to detail each case is given, the sensitivity to cultural context, and the commitment to staying impartial throughout. A commitment to children cannot exist without a commitment to integrity, and that integrity is more than a value. It is the slow, careful work of checking, documenting, and being willing to question.
The UN from the East River Ferry
Early on, I learned the office had developed its own AI-enabled tool, called MITHRA, to support investigative work. Given the sensitive nature of the documents, evidence, people, and reports involved, OIAI built its own tool to protect the safety, privacy, and confidentiality of its work. MITHRA helps with transcription, translation, and a document library of internal audit reports, policies, annual reports, and more. It can translate across more than 120 languages, including Maithili, my mother tongue. I was thrilled and curious to get to work on it and contribute to strengthening the model through feedback loops.
I strongly believe that learning and promoting the ethical, just, and fair use of AI is urgent, especially where children are concerned. The reason it matters so much is that this technology cuts two ways at once, and UNICEF sits squarely in the middle of that.
On one side, AI can widen access to learning and help systems respond faster to children in need. On the other, it is already producing harms we are only beginning to name — deepfakes, hyper-sexualized images of minors, privacy concerns, commercial exploitation, and a kind of isolation and digital divide that decides which children get the upside and which get only the risk. According to a study across 11 countries, conducted by the UN agency, the international police organization INTERPOL, and the ECPAT global network working to end the sexual exploitation of children, at least 1.2 million young people disclosed having had their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes in the past year. With AI being actively integrated on almost every digital platform, and many children accessing it from young ages, the need to ensure that the digital spaces are safe and healthy for children is urgent.
Children make up roughly a third of internet users online, yet their safety is still often treated as something to add later, after the technology is already built. UNICEF has been part of global conversations on AI governance precisely to push children back to the center of that design. Sitting where I sit, I can see why the cause of digital safety cannot wait. The office I work in exists to catch harm, misconduct, and fraud inside institutions. That same instinct now has to extend into the spaces where children actually spend their time, which are increasingly digital ones.
Varsha’s Work Desk
My internship experience extends well beyond my desk. I get to sit in on meetings, conferences, and annual board sessions at the UN Secretariat.
On June 8, I attended the Secretary-General’s annual memorial service in the Trusteeship Council Chamber, one of António Guterres’s last in office. It honored UN personnel who lost their lives in the line of duty in 2025. The names read out were not only those of peacekeepers and diplomats. Many were teachers, mentors, clerks, and medical workers, and more than half of the staff who died had served with UNRWA in the State of Palestine. The Secretary-General said, “These tragedies weigh heavily on us all and should shock the conscience of the entire world.”
Secretary-General’s Annual Memorial Service, 2026. Trusteeship Council Chamber, UN Secretariat
That day, I kept thinking about how formal the phrase “line of duty” sounds until you are sitting there hearing the names, and how often the people lost were the very ones whose whole job was to teach and protect children in the most volatile regions of the world.
This week I attended the 5th Plenary meeting of the UNICEF Executive Board, where the Executive Director spoke about the deep implications of fiscal burden on whether children can realize their right to essential services and care. She noted that nearly 400 million children live in countries where debt repayments are outpacing investment in health, education, and nutrition.
She also spoke about rapidly evolving digital environments presenting both extraordinary opportunities and significant risks. It struck me that these are not two separate problems. The governments least able to afford child-safe digital systems are often the same ones drowning in debt, which means the digital divide and the fiscal divide tend to fall on exactly the same children. It left me thinking about the need for continuity in humanitarian and peacebuilding work, the need to protect the most vulnerable, the need to build trust in these programs, and the recognition that the domains of threat today are not only physical, but digital as well.
I did not arrive at this view from nowhere, and it is worth saying how I got here.
My first encounter with the United Nations was not academic. It was at home in India, where my father insisted that my sisters and I read the newspaper every day. He would then quiz us at random, asking us to name the P5 countries of the Security Council. The UN was a name in the headlines and the foreign news pages, and I was too young to understand what it really was.
Later, I studied political science and international relations, where I learned about the UN system, its formation in the backdrop of World War II, and how it tries to bring some order to an international arena that is so often described from the realism lens as anarchic. I also learned the limits of institutions, and the gap that so often opens between ideals and implementation. It took me almost a decade after that degree to walk into these buildings.
None of this would have been possible without the Rotary Peace Fellowship. Opportunities and exposure are hard to come by, and my life has given me some I am very grateful for. I give my education the biggest credit for that.
The internship is not only meetings, tasks, and big questions, of course. I am living in Brooklyn for the summer, and the city sets its own pace. Living in New York nearly guarantees ten thousand steps a day. I am also living with a cat for the first time, which has been its own lesson in routine. Pudim, the cat of Paula (my fellowship batchmate), is my flatmate this summer. One of my favorite things about sharing space with him is observing him. He will sit at my window for hours looking at the trees and the birds, and for some reason it reminds me of the slower pace of my own childhood — of the time I used to take just to watch the sky, the trees, the birds.
Pudim on the Windowsill
On weekends I try to see a little of the city. I visited the Brooklyn Bridge, a place I had seen so many times in movies before seeing it in person. I mean, who has not seen Shah Rukh Khan strike his iconic pose on that bridge in Kal Ho Naa Ho? I also went to a Greek food festival with a lovely colleague who is from Greece and now settled in the U.S. with her family. The music, the food, the families gathered in one place reminded me how culture travels and survives. New York makes you feel like you belong in a remarkably short span of time. I have not seen all of it, as most of my hours are spent in Manhattan around the UN Plaza, the commutes in between, and the basic chores of living, but I do hope to see a few more of the famous spots before the internship ends. One day I am in a meeting about how a tool handles sensitive data, and the next I am working out a subway transfer. Both experiences belong to the same summer, and running underneath both is the same sincere question: What do we owe the people on the other end of the systems we build?
The Brooklyn Greek Festival, 50th Anniversary
I am very aware of my own privileged position as I write this. It is relatively easy to sit and think about AI when millions of children are struggling for their most basic needs, and many are simply trying to survive in conflict-affected areas. The question today is not whether we have AI. The question is how, for whom, at what cost, and to what end. Exactly halfway through my internship, I can say that I do not have all the answers. What I do have is a stronger resolve to keep working at the intersection of education, technology, and peacebuilding.
About the author: Varsha Thakur is a Class 24 Rotary Peace Fellow currently interning with UNICEF’s Office of Internal Audit and Investigations in New York. She is pursuing a Master of Arts in Educational Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (MEITE) at the UNC School of Education, and previously earned a master’s in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Delhi. Her work sits at the intersection of education, technology, and peacebuilding.
References:
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2025, November 20). Children want to shape their rights in the digital world. https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2025/11/children-want-shape-their-rights-digital-world
Russell, C. (2026, June 16). Opening statement: UNICEF Executive Board annual session of 2026 [Speech transcript]. UNICEF. https://www.unicef.org/executiveboard/media/39486/file/2026-AS-Item-2-Executive-Director-Opening-remarks-2026-06-16.pdf
UNICEF. (2026, February 4). ‘Deepfake abuse is abuse’: Statement by UNICEF on AI-generated sexualised images of children. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/deepfake-abuse-is-abuse
United Nations. (2026, June 8). More than half of staff who died in service worked in Gaza, UN chief says at memorial. UN News. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167669