25 June 2004

“Every person, regardless of their situation or circumstances, has something to offer to humanity. Every individual has the capacity for caring and the capacity for working in solidarity to alleviate human suffering and contribute to human dignity.”
Juan Manuel Suarez del Toro, President of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)

In addition to the more than 5,600 UN Volunteers serving worldwide every year, thousands more are leaving study rooms and offices, or logging onto their computers at home, to take up some of the new and diverse opportunities opened up by UNV to volunteer for development. Engaging the energy and resourcefulness of young people worldwide is a key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. To promote a culture of volunteerism among youth, UNV has established an internship programme providing opportunities for university graduates to engage in development at home and abroad.

In Bolivia, as part of UNDP and UNV’s Youth with People Participation project, 1,200 university graduates will serve as volunteers over the course of the next three years, working with local municipalities and communities throughout the country to fight poverty. In addition to making their time and skills available to poverty eradication efforts, the project will also help young people to better understand the nature of development challenges in their country. “Once they have completed this experience, their vision, view and feelings about Bolivia will be different, as they will then know another side of our diverse and multicultural nation,” says the country’s President, Carlos Mesa, of the project.

Graduates on international assignments engage in activities ranging from developing micro-credit schemes in the Central African Republic, to helping strengthen childprotection legislation in El Salvador and labour laws in China, organizing HIV/AIDS prevention activities in Sudan and enhancing human rights awareness in Comoros. “ This volunteer experience has been a source of incredible personal and professional growth for me,” says Marta Moroni of her time as education specialist with the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) in Suriname. “It has really strengthened my commitment to development.”

Stimulating corporate social engagement, UNV works with a growing number of businesses in both, the North and the South, to encourage employees to volunteer for development. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italian volunteer Giovanni Rosatti, a programmer from a car manufacturer, trained over 50 disadvantaged youth in computer sciences, electronics and new technologies. Nearly half had secured employment within a month. At the request of a local food manufacturer in Fiji, Malaysian and Indian corporate volunteers drew from the islands’ diverse agricultural crops to develop new products using indigenous roots and fruits, helping businesses not only to increase their revenues but also family-run farms to get their products to the market.

Signing in as Online Volunteers, more than 12,000 individuals worldwide offer their services from home. The UNV-managed Online Volunteering service, one of the largest of its kind, matches the supply of skills and knowledge of volunteers with the demand of hundreds of organizations that request them. Alarmed by the rate of HIV/AIDS-related deaths in his village, Nduka Ozor, coordinator of a local youth centre in Nigeria, sought information on the disease to help educate the community. Some 4,000 kilometres away, engineering student Yasemin Gunay in Turkey was the first to respond to his posting for volunteers and helped the youth centre expand its library on HIV/AIDS by more than 1,000 publications. These, and a local campaign, helped raise awareness on ways to combat HIV/AIDS amongst the population.