01 July 2005

The importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the fight against poverty was underscored in the report of the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the Millennium Summit. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has long identified the potential of ICT as a means to create earnings opportunities, improve access to education and facilitate information and knowledge-sharing.

Volunteers from a variety of organizations, including the UN Volunteers programme, bring ICT expertise in virtually any field related development, including health, education, environment, governance, gender equity, prevention of HIV/AIDS and support to those affected by HIV/AIDS, and development and sustainability of small-medium enterprises. This includes humanitarian assistance activities.

In this context, the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme contributes to these efforts by both mobilizing its own volunteers to engage in information communications technology for development (ICT4D) activities, and by managing the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS), an initiative that promotes volunteer involvement as critical to efforts to apply information communications technology for development (ICT4D)

UNV has helped place and/or support more than 230 volunteers applying ICT to development in more than 50 developing countries, including 28 Least Developed Countries (LDC), making it one of the largest ICT volunteering initiatives. These volunteers support projects in a variety of thematic areas (education, governance, health, HIV/AIDS, etc.). More than 60% of these volunteers are from developing countries.

UNITeS works through a coalition of organizations, lead by UNV -- nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academic institutions, development and volunteer-sending agencies, and private sector companies -- who place and support volunteers in ICT4D. This means that UNITeS supports volunteers from initiatives other than UNV. Volunteers that UNITeS supports includes graduate students from George Mason University (USA), Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and its family of other universities (Spain), Kwansei Gakuin University (Japan), and the University of Colima (Mexico).
These qualified university volunteers serve on a short-term basis in the field on ICT-related projects. UNITeS, through its Knowledge Base, supports volunteers from initiatives other ICT4D initiatives as well. Accessible via the UNITeS web site, as well as its online UNITeS Community, UNITeS encourages all volunteers who are applying ICT4D to promote volunteerism during their assignments, to multiply their impact and to demonstrate that volunteerism is essential to the success and sustainability to ICT projects.