UNESCO Courier is the main magazine published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It has the largest and widest-ranging readership of all the journals published by the United Nations and its specialized institutions.

History and profile

UNESCO Courier was started in 1948 by Sandy Koffler (1916–2020). There was a gap in publication from 2013 until 2017. The magazine has changed a great deal over the years, both in content and in form. But it pursues its original mission: promote UNESCO's ideals, maintain a platform for the dialogue between cultures and provide a forum for international debate. The printed UNESCO Courier covers issues of literacy, human rights, environment, culture, science and arts. Available online since March 2006, The UNESCO Courier serves readers around the world: It is available for free on PDF in the six official languages of the organization (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Chinese), as well as in Portuguese and Esperanto. A limited number of printed issues are also produced. The magazine is also translated into Sardinian and Sicilian. The texts of current issues are available in Open Access under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO) license. In 2023 a machine-readable digital corpus of Courier’s articles was published on Zenodo, making the archive of Courier’s English-language edition usable for text mining.

Editors-in-chief

Current Director is Matthieu Guével and Editor-in-Chief is Agnès Bardon. Previous directors: