Wherever you find the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) - with more than 130 country offices across the developing world - you find the UN Volunteers (UNV) programme working alongside, helping combat poverty, disease and disaster and provide new opportunities and hope.

Take Mozambique. In February 2000, raging floods swept through the Southern African country, devastating entire villages and leaving thousands of families homeless. In response, UN Volunteers serving in the country immediately responded, often at great personal risk. Two had to be rescued from treetops after days sharing branches with several villagers. The

UN Volunteers worked in camps, coordinated waves of relief support from overseas and distributed food and supplies. All made a difference.

Similar selflessness by UN Volunteers takes place every day, all over the world. And it represents just the tip of an enormous iceberg of literally millions of people providing voluntary support to communities through service organizations, through mutual aid and self-help at the grassroots itself, or in other ways. The challenge now is to better harness that enormous power in the broader fight to help meet the development targets that the world committed to in last year's historic UN Millennium Declaration, including the overarching goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015. In this connection it is encouraging to see that the contributions of voluntary action to social development and building social capital are beginning to be better understood and recognized, including in recent UN reports and resolutions.

From helping give young people new skills for today's competitive, knowledge-driven job market to assisting villages better market goods and services through cooperative associations; to simply working to break the stigma still surrounding so many people living with HIV/AIDS, volunteers can and will in many cases prove the difference between success and failure.

UNV has a critical role in helping make this happen, drawing on both its 30-year experience and its current role as focal point for the International Year of Volunteers. It is already doing so, not just in traditional areas but by tapping new and innovative forms of voluntary action, most notably helping tap the enormous potential of the Information and Communications Revolution for the benefit of developing countries.

Through the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS), an initiative launched by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, UNV last year began mobilizing high-tech volunteers from across the world to help people in developing countries to apply IT to meet their development challenges. UNV also worked closely with UNDP and Cisco Systems to initiate online volunteering through the pioneering Netaid.org web site, helping link up thousands of home-based volunteers, willing to donate time at their computers to benefit developing countries.

But whether working face to face or online through a computer, at root all UN Volunteers share a common motivation: to make a real difference in the lives of people everywhere, particularly the disadvantaged. Their strength lies in their diversity, their skills and above all, their commitment to give of themselves to help improve the lives of others - values that lie at the heart of the United Nations itself.

Mark Malloch Brown