14 September 1998

BONN: Twenty years back, the Buenos Aires Plan of Action called on the developing countries to "create, acquire, adapt, transfer and pool knowledge and experience for their mutual benefit and for achieving mutual and collective self-reliance".

The idea was to strengthen what had become known as Technical Co-operation among Developing Countries, more familiar as "TCDC".

In 1978, as now, most UNVs were themselves citizens of the developing world. Last year they represented 109 nationalities and accounted for 68% of serving UNVs. That's part of UNV's uniqueness. In a way it's only fair, reflecting world population distribution and compensating for the fewer chances that people of those countries have to volunteer beyond their borders than their industrialised world opposite numbers. As well as fairness, however, there are sound reasons.

A man or woman from the same latitude, bloc or region in "the South" has at least as much - sometimes more - to offer in helping a neighbour as anyone from "the North". They can be attuned to the culture, used to working with minimal resources, adapted to how things are done, in ways less open to persons from other continents or different economies. A Filipina UNV field worker once summed it up well: she felt she'd gained the confidence of the women of the Sri Lankan village in which she was working because they saw her as "foreign but not too foreign".

TCDC also remains a political necessity. The developing nations realise that mutual solidarity is vital in the face of the sheer strength of globalising economics and politics, dominated by the industrialised world.

UNV is implicitly TCDC. Of African UNV specialists and fieldworkers in 1997, 79% served within the African continent and 21% outside Africa. Of Arab UNVs, 34% in other Arab countries and 66% beyond the Arab world.

For Asian/Pacific UNVs the figures were a neatly balanced 50% in their countries and 50% in other continents. For Latin American and Caribbean UNVs, 42% in their countries and 58% outside them. Across the board, 62% serving within their continents and 38% elsewhere.

The UNV from Argentina working in Angola, for example, or from Yemen in Kazakhstan, brings a special dimension of TCDC solidarity in addition to technical competence. But those statistics make another and important statement, too: that the donor/recipient paradigm is increasingly irrelevant.

In Shakespeare's "Hamlet", a father advises his son "Neither a borrower nor a lender be": don't put yourself under obligation to others and don't risk your property on them. Safe, but hardly solidarity. Surely one of the best things about UNV is that three quarters of the nations which receive UNVs also supply them. Through UNV nations participate both as borrowers and lenders. Modest it may be, but it contributes to understanding and peace.