06 February 2007

Bonn, Germany: UN Volunteers HQ staff welcomed to Bonn on 1 February, Mr. Ad Melkert, Associate Administrator of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). UNV is administered by UNDP and falls within the Associate Administrator’s portfolio of responsibilities. In the spirit of UN reform Melkert stressed the importance of the continued close working relationship between UNDP and the UN Volunteers programme.

For Ad Melkert this visit to the United Nations Campus in Bonn, was a brief trip back in time. As a Dutch parliamentarian, Melkert had visited his German counterparts in what is now the home of UNV, but earlier housed the offices of Germany’s lawmakers while the government still resided in Bonn.

As a volunteer himself at the beginning of his career, Ad Melkert spoke of the virtues of volunteerism as a basic construct for societies, highlighting the special contribution that volunteerism can make to development and the achievement of the MDGs. At the core of his discussions with UNV senior staff was how UNDP will capitalize on the core strengths of the UN Volunteers programme – with some 8,000 volunteers from 160 nationalities who worked in the field in 2006 alone – to ensure civic engagement and ‘volunteerism for development’ (V4D) are a central part of UNDP programming in the field. Indeed it is imperative under the new Strategic Plan (2008-2011) to maximize the contribution of UNV in all four-focus areas of the plan: poverty reduction and the MDGs, democratic governance, environment and sustainable development, and crisis prevention and recovery.

Yet volunteerism does not only serve a vital role in long-term development. Volunteers can and usually do, as witnessed by the Tsunami and the earthquake in Pakistan, spearhead the recovery effort in the early phases – an area which UNDP has been tasked to lead the UN system in the context of the High-Level Panel report recommendations.

“UNDP has knowledge in crisis recovery and disaster mitigation, and can advise….but that’s not enough,” explained Melkert “we need to constantly update and validate our advice. That is where there is a natural connection between UNDP and UNV with its network of volunteers in the field, and where policy is put into practice and vice versa.”

UNV volunteers have repeatedly put policy into practice. V4D is about building local capacities, for example in India, where a team of national UNV volunteers made up of architects, engineers, health workers and community mobilizers implemented information and communication technologies as a successful tool for disaster management and preparedness in India. Again in May 2003, it was that very team that helped the Government of Sri Lanka put life back into order after the worst flooding in 50 years afflicted the island.

Or it’s the pilot project “Community in Action” in the Brazilian city of Salvador da Bahia. National UNV volunteers established the project to establish and incorporate a surveillance and monitoring system for disaster prevention into local development processes. University students were central in mobilizing the community and the municipality to spread awareness about natural disasters and increase organizational capacity of community groups to take preventive actions.

Such efforts have exemplified the unthreatening yet trustworthy nature of volunteerism that has made UNV so successful. UNV Executive Coordinator Ad de Raad put it best when he referred to a recent evaluation study: “The success of UNV can be attributed to our ability to combine the authority of the UN with the flexibility associated with NGOs.”