23 May 2003

Santiago, Chile: Volunteers are deeply embedded in most cultures and should be recognized and further encouraged in their activities to strengthen civil society, Ad de Raad, Deputy Executive Coordinator of the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme, said.

"We have known for a long time that volunteerism constitutes an enormous reservoir of skills, energy and local knowledge," Mr. de Raad told an International Meeting on Mobilizing Social Capital and Volunteer Action in Latin America in Santiago which is being sponsored by the Chilean and Norwegian Governments and the Inter-American Development Bank. "Volunteerism and volunteers are the heart of social capital."

Addressing what he called a "strong link between the mobilization of social capital and volunteerism as a development concept", he said voluntary action needs to be factored into the national development planning of countries across the globe.

"If the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half by 2015 is to be achieved, the significant contribution of volunteerism, as one manifestation of social capital, needs to be much more widely understood and recognized," he noted.

Countless civil society organizations are engaged in promoting volunteerism both directly, in terms of the support they provide through the services of volunteers, as well as by involving citizens as volunteer-participants in their activities, he said. "Increasingly we also witness the involvement of both the public and private sectors in the promotion of volunteerism. The question is what can be done to facilitate greater volunteer action by an ever-broader cross-section of the population and to influence this volunteer action towards tackling issues such as poverty, environment, health and education."

He recalled that resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly in 2001 and 2002 provided guidance on how to actively promote volunteerism. UNV, he said, is playing its part by, for example, "embedding" many of the 5,000 UN Volunteers who serve globally each year into projects and programmes that help direct voluntary action toward meeting development goals at the local level. Additionally, UNV's "recruitment, orientation, monitoring and evaluation procedures have all been extensively reviewed to ensure that strengthening the promotion of volunteerism is a clear and explicit feature of every UNV assignment".

Citing examples of UNV activity in Latin America, Mr. de Raad said more than 600 UN Volunteers -- many of them lawyers, judges and forensic experts -- have assisted the UN Mission in Guatemala in monitoring the implementation of the country's peace accords since 1995. UNV also worked with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to set up a network of UN Volunteers supporting government agencies and non-governmental organizations to implement the Convention on the Rights of the Child by raising awareness of child rights and advocating for supportive legislation in Belize, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.

In addition, he noted that UN Volunteers help promote the rights and strengthen the voice of people living with HIV/AIDS -- citizens who are often socially excluded -- in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.