It was early 2015 when I heard about UNV at an international job fair in Berlin. I had graduated with a law degree and newly qualified as a magistrate, with professional experience at the European Commission in Brussels. I was looking for opportunities that would take me far, and not place me behind a desk handling legal cases. While at the job fair, I attended an information session on German lawyers at the UN. Coincidently, the person leading that session was a former UN Volunteer, and that's how my journey in the UN system began.

The Libya Education Response Monitoring Dashboard documents that some 326,000 people in Libya are in need of education support. UNICEF works to ensure access to safe, inclusive and quality education, particularly for children affected by the protracted crisis. In strengthening support to humanitarian coordination among education actors in the country, UNICEF has a special focus on engaging with community-based organizations and the Ministry of Education.

The National Youth Volunteering Platform will establish a structured volunteering programme for the first time in Iraq. This platform will give young people a chance to register, search and apply for volunteer activities, in line with their skills and interests. Opportunities will be provided by various partners and organizations, including private companies, non-governmental organizations and institutions.

When I got the opportunity at UNDP in 2019, I was working at the university as a teaching assistant. I thought UNDP would give me a chance to grow and also contribute to everything that I wanted to do in society. I was already interested in inclusive development, inclusive governance, social justice, climate change, and I wanted to play a part in addressing social inequalities.

Most people remember where they were when the disaster struck. I was serving as UNV Programme Officer in Timor-Leste at the time, where hundreds of international UN Volunteers supported the nation-building efforts of the then-newest member of the United Nations family. On home leave celebrating Christmas with my family in Germany on that very day, I felt the urge to support the people in the affected areas.

The AI-powered, cloud based Unified Volunteer Platform fundamentally transforms the way UNV’s partners communicate and connect.  Part of the ongoing digital transformation, it has been designed to facilitate all elements of UN Volunteer and Online Volunteer mobilization, recruitment and management. 

In today’s work culture, workload has increased tenfold and organizations facing workforce shortages and complexity of business processes feel pressure to improve. Will UNV be able to achieve greater productivity with the use of software robotics, as staff increasingly get nervous about automation? In 2020, UNV fielded 7,639 onsite UN Volunteers in 2020, administering thousands of new recruitments and contract renewals over the course of the year.

The path to a more inclusive UN system has been paved by the engagement of UN volunteers with disabilities in UN entities around the world. Yet, barriers still exist – both within and outside of the UN system. Social stigma via institutional and economic constraints on physical participation and communication, persist.  Barriers have hampered efforts and limited successes yet are also motivation to work tirelessly towards inclusive change.  

To date in 2020, at least 71 UN Volunteer with disabilities are deployed with our UN entity partners. We say at least, because these figures only factor in those volunteers who voluntarily disclosed their disability. There are many more, serving on regular volunteer assignments.