By Resolution 47/3 of 1992, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed December 3rd of each year as the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD). This celebration is an opportunity to pause and assess the progress made in the development of persons with disabilities, identify the difficulties encountered, and look to the future while taking into account new challenges. It is also a time to showcase their abilities, potential, and talents, and to mobilize the international community to support the dignity and well-being of persons with disabilities.

By Resolution 45/016 of December 14, 1990, the UN General Assembly decided to celebrate the International Day of Older Persons (IDOL) on October 1 of each year. The first edition took place in 1991. This resolution responded to the international community's growing concern about aging, the first global manifestations of which had been reflected nearly a decade earlier in the first World Summit on Aging, held from July 26 to August 6, 1982, in Vienna, Austria. The UN's desire to see States take aging-related concerns into account in their policies and programs in order to provide adequate responses to the specific problems and expectations of older persons subsequently materialized in a series of measures and meetings, including:

In memory of the massacre of innocent children in SOWETO in 1976 by the racist apartheid regime then in power in South Africa, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU), established, through Resolution CMRes-1290 (XL) of July 18, 1990, the Day of the African Child, which is celebrated annually on June 16.