20 June 2006

Geneva, Switzerland: Thank you Kemal for sharing with us your personal reflections on the UNV programme and for the solid support and encouragement you have provided since you became Administrator. This will continue to be important as we ensure that the diversity and plurality that UNV brings to the operational activities of the United Nations will always complement and enrich the coherence and alignment that we strive for, with UNDP in particular and, by extension, with all other parts of the UN system.

Distinguished delegates, UNV last reported to the Executive Board in 2004. In its decision at the time, the Board encouraged us to enhance analysis to facilitate a good understanding of UNV’s activities and their impact.

The report in front of you has been prepared with that encouragement in mind. I hope that my introduction and our deliberations will set the stage for better understanding of what UNV does and what it aspires to in the contemporary context of mobilizing resources and developing sustainable capacities for the achievement of the MDGs.

Many things have happened over the last two years. Let me start with some statistics. Demand driven as UNV is, its size is certainly an indicator of programme health and relevance.

I am therefore pleased to report that there has been further significant growth in activities. Compared to two years ago, the number of assignments has grown by some 45 per cent to close to 8,500 in 2005. The total financial equivalent of activities has now reached some US $170 million per year.

These volunteers were engaged in the activities of partner countries and more than 25 different UN departments, agencies, funds and programmes, including in the context of 13 peacekeeping missions. UNV is a growing resource which extends the outreach and enhances the responsiveness of United Nations action for development and peace building.

With an average age of 39 years, with the requisite professional skills and qualifications and some 5 to 10 years relevant working experience, UNV volunteers served in 144 countries and came themselves from more than 165. The majority – 76 per cent – come from developing countries themselves. Almost half of those volunteer in their own country with the other half carrying out international assignments. This remains to be a very strong and concrete expression of South-South cooperation and a core characteristic of UNV’s work. And every country, through its people, and through the UNV programme, is a donor country.

These were some of the statistics.

The last two years have however also shown considerable progress in making sure that the whole of UNV is much more than the sum of the 8,500 assignments.

The central driving force behind this is the increasing acceptance that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) can only be achieved with the full involvement of people all over the world. Citizens need to take ownership of the Goals and use their ingenuity and creativity if absolute poverty is to be reduced. Efforts on the part of national governments to meet MDG targets, even when supported by the international community, will have limited impact without significant volunteer contributions, in particular at the national and local level. Citizen involvement is both an imperative and an opportunity, and volunteerism – when adequately supported and promoted – can be a highly effective channel through which such action can be mobilized.

We capture that idea by calling it or "Volunteerism for Development"– V4D. For volunteerism for development to flourish there needs to be a supportive environment or volunteer infrastructure in place. Such infrastructure includes recognition of the role and contribution of volunteerism, appropriate legal frameworks, national volunteer schemes, volunteer centres and so on.

It is significant that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution just last December, co-sponsored by many member states, from the North and the South, that again recognized that volunteerism is an important component of any strategy aimed at poverty reduction, and that it acknowledged the special role of the UNV programme.

National governments are increasingly calling upon UNV to assist them to build up volunteer infrastructure to help harness the potential that volunteerism represents as a national resource for development.

It is against that background that UNV advocates globally for recognition of volunteerism for development. That is why, for example, we collaborated closely with Member States to ensure that the outcome of the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan in 2005 took full account of the very significant role and contribution of volunteerism in disaster mitigation and preparedness. Another example of advocacy work was the first International Conference on Volunteerism and the MDGs that was organized by the Government of Pakistan, jointly with UNV and UNDP. And, of course, I cannot omit mentioning the WorldVolunteerWeb for which, just last week, we received the World Bank’s Web4Dev Award, in the category of “Humanitarian and Development Activism”. The WorldVolunteerWeb was judged to be a model best practice that shows evidence of positive impact on humanitarian aid and development and demonstrates a measurable contribution to the mission of the organization.

But advocacy alone will not yield results if we are not successful in efforts to mainstream and integrate volunteerism into development programming. The increasing references to voluntary action in national human development reports and in country level UNDAF formulation exercises are evidence of progress in this regard.

Against that background, it is logical that the UNV of today aims at mobilizing growing numbers of volunteers over and above the more than 8,000 UNV volunteers. The report points to many examples of that.

In Mali, for instance, UNV works with UNICEF to mobilize thousands of volunteer community workers for child health programmes; in Egypt, UNV is collaborating with the Government and UNDP in a programme which involves young leaders at village level as national UNV volunteers to mobilize over a thousand other young volunteers to disseminate messages about the health related consequences of female genital mutilation; Another example is Cape Verde, where UNV together with UNCCD has helped establish a volunteer corps for the environment to engage young people in combating land degradation. And let me not forget the exciting and rapidly growing area of volunteer mobilization through our online volunteering programme. We introduced that programme just a few years ago and by now some 8,000 online volunteers, from close to 170 different countries, have supported more than 800 development organizations at all levels. An interesting statistic of the programme is that volunteers come from the South as much as from the North and that 60 per cent of them are women.

So, I have talked about Advocacy, Integration, and Mobilization. Those make up the three, mutually reinforcing components of the UNV business model that is introduced in the report.

That still leaves the question of how best to capture results and impact. In order to achieve greater analysis and better reporting on results and impact, we carried out an extensive process which included: (i) examining a very wide sample of progress reports from UNV volunteers themselves; (ii) conducting a survey through questionnaires in 70 countries; (iii) a survey amongst all our field and headquarters based colleagues; and (iv) 15 country level results workshops in which a cross section of stakeholders at the country level participated.

As a starter, these consultations confirmed the appropriateness of a close alignment of a UNV specific results framework with the UNDP MYFF. We had already opted for such alignment before, for reasons of clarity, simplification, coherence and harmonization. The UNV specificity is therefore defined as an additional dimension to that existing framework. As the Administrator pointed out in his introductory remarks, future refinements to the MYFF will thus automatically be part of refinements of UNV’s own results framework, thus maintaining coherence and complementarity.

At the heart of the UNV specificity are what we call, three areas of distinctive contribution. It is in those areas where the application of the V4D concept, through the implementation of the business model, can make a particular and unique difference. The first distinctive contribution focuses on enabling disadvantaged groups and communities to gain wider access to opportunities and services and to enhance the delivery of these services. The second focuses on inclusion and participation and involves promoting the involvement of all stakeholders, in particular the disadvantaged, in processes that affect their well-being. The third distinctive contribution focuses on community mobilization through voluntary action.

The report describes a range of representative examples of such distinctive contributions.

Let me briefly mention a few:

I mentioned already how the growth in numbers of UNV volunteers has been accompanied by a trend towards diversification of opportunities to volunteer, including through a rapid expansion of online volunteering.

In the area of post-crisis recovery, there was a significant increase in UNV’s involvement in humanitarian programmes of OCHA, UNHCR, WFP and other partners. A 55 per cent increase over the previous biennium was recorded in UNV’s peacekeeping portfolio with over 2,500 UNV volunteers attached to 13 of DPKO’s field operations. There were also increases in UNV’s collaboration with UN and UNDP support to electoral processes. In Afghanistan, for example, over 600 UNV volunteers, including 200 from Afghanistan itself, were involved in operational and capacity-development activities at community level in connection with the Presidential and national elections. UNV received special recognition for this through the first ever Peacemaker Award granted by the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies of the University of Sydney, Australia. Similar work took place in Liberia, Burundi and elsewhere.

UNV’s work in the area of disaster response, well demonstrated around the Indian Ocean Tsunami, is described in the report. However, increasingly UNV is looking towards disaster preparedness as an important manifestation of the contribution of volunteerism. This is well illustrated by the example of Pakistan where, in the aftermath of the earthquake, UNV assistance was requested to help establish a national volunteer movement to assist in developing the country’s capacity to address any future disaster with the speed and efficiency called for.

Let me conclude, Mr. President, by mentioning some of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Awareness of the role of volunteerism to contribute to meeting the MDGs is growing steadily. Growing also is the interest of donor and programme countries alike in seeking ways to nurture and encourage voluntary action in its many and diverse forms. UNV is a highly demand driven programme. Its primary concern and challenge is to ensure that the programme’s capacity at field and headquarters level keeps pace with the expanding demand for support. Well prepared and dedicated staff, a broad partnership base, and sound knowledge management, will all have to contribute to ensuring that the programme remains highly responsive to the requirements of programme countries.
Integrating volunteerism for development into the UNDAF processes from the preparatory phase will have to be high on the agenda in the period ahead. Close collaboration with UN Resident Coordinators, UNDP Country Directors and UN Country Teams in this regard will be critical. In this connection, the newly introduced UNDP Integrated Package of Services with its references to V4D provides an important entry point.

Let me also say something about gender. We see signs of progress in the area of gender. Examples of distinctive contribution cited in the report refer to the gender dimension and some, such as the gender budgeting initiative in Latin America launched with UNIFEM last year, are directly concerned with highlighting the important links between volunteerism and gender analysis. Overall, our efforts in gender mainstreaming, and the crosscutting theme of gender equity, will have to include deliberate steps to analyze UNV supported projects, preparing inventories of current skills and building awareness. On the issue of ratio of female to male UNV volunteers, we have set ourselves a target of reaching a level of between 45 to 50 per cent female UNV volunteers by the end of the biennium 2008-2009.

Support to UNV’s Special Volunteer Fund continues to be critical in enabling the programme to take initiatives and develop new models and approaches to volunteering for scaling up and replication. I emphasize that the SVF is small and that it does not need to be big. But if we believe in the UNV that I present to you, than we need to believe in the SVF. Therefore, we would like to express appreciation to all those countries which continued to contribute to the Fund over the biennium, including those that have been able to increase their contribution. Special recognition has to go to Madagascar, which contributed to the SVF for the first time, and to Morocco and the Philippines, which renewed their contributions after a gap of several years.

Regarding partnerships, we will continue to support efforts of our partners in the UN system, as well as civil society and private sector to identify, recognize, and strengthen the contribution volunteerism makes in delivering their respective mandates and missions.

At the end of the day, the power of volunteering for development is in its simplicity. Every single country represented in this room has facets of volunteerism ingrained in its culture and traditions. It is the glue that holds societies together and a tremendous way for people to participate and make a difference. While the concept is a very old one, what is new is the idea that volunteerism can and should be tapped and channelled towards meeting current development challenges. It may be ambitious, but so are volunteers.

We look forward very much to receiving your guidance on the path UNV is taking and your suggestions on ways to further strengthen its efforts to support the work of the United Nations across the range of development and humanitarian issues.

Thank you.