Volunteer Sonali Rani Das works as a nurse and has been a member of the mobile medical team since 2011. Currently the team is seeing 200 patients a day, all presenting complaints about the recent catastrophic floods that hit Bangladesh.  We are seeing a lot of women and children. They have problems like skin infections, eye infections, scabies, diarrhoea and asthma. We have even seen snake bites. When I see the children, I take the mother’s blood pressure and check her over too,” she explains.

In 2014, Thunayya fled her city of Al Qunaytra and the war that enveloped it. She lived in the camp ever since, and decided to volunteer as a cleaner, earning about US$8.50 per day. At the age of 48, it was the first time Thunayya had ever worked, as she had to provide for herself and her 85-year old father, her only dependent.

For COP 23, UN Volunteers has recruited more than 650 volunteers to support a wide range of operational tasks throughout the event. They all attended a full-day training on October 30. Follow the involvement of volunteers during COP 23 here (hover over the image and scroll down):

The ILO Department of Statistics and the UN Volunteers have joined forces to scale up efforts to improve the global availability, quality and use of statistics on volunteer work. Starting this month, the ILO-UNV partnership will focus on assessing the current status of volunteer work statistics around the world; engage directly with countries to identify good practices and challenges in volunteer work data collection and analysis; and develop practical survey approaches and tools to support countries’ efforts.

Many families in a little village close to Funhalouro in the southeast of Mozambique are receiving food assistance that is helping them to survive. “We have lived through many dry periods, but a drought like this one I cannot remember. I have not seen a single drop of rain for months,” says Joaquina, who does not know her age, but estimates she is in her late 40s.

A Bangladesh Red Crescent mobile medical team has been set up in Bangladesh, and it is run by volunteer Dr. Mohsin Ahmed. He explains that food, water and shelter are the main concern of the people he is seeing, most of whom are women and children.

During a field monitoring mission as a UN Volunteer Associate Project Officer with UN Women in Tajikistan, I got to know the female leaders of two dairies which, independently from each other, approached me with their idea to produce a hard cheese as a more durable dairy product.

The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme in Myanmar, in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), runs a Disaster Risk Reduction Youth Volunteer (DRRYV) project in support of the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement.

The Young Person’s Guide: Changing the World Edition combines inputs from youth leaders and young people worldwide with expertise coming from 13 partner organizations in the private sector, civil society and international financial institutions.

If there is one area where anecdotes seem to rule and myths abound in the field of volunteerism for development, on which views are strongly held and interesting debates had, it is on gender and volunteerism.  As a women’s rights activist, I can receive strong reactions from allies when I talk about UNV’s mandate to promote volunteerism – often equated with romanticising women’s further unpaid contribution as a ‘triple burden’ – especially in low income countries.  At the same time, volunteer-involving organizations, the most vocal and visible of whom tend to be in the Global Nort