The UNEG-UNV Young and Emerging Evaluators (YEE) programme began in 2024 with its first cohort, including 10 UN Volunteer assignments in 8 countries. These volunteers were at an early stage in their careers and under the age of 35. Of these, 50 percent were women.
UNEG-UNV Partnership for Young and Emerging Evaluators
Capturing the Full Value of Volunteering in Crisis Contexts
Numbers are not enough. Measuring volunteering must go beyond hours and activities to show real change in people’s lives, communities and support systems.
The webinar opened with remarks by Olga Zubritskaya-Devyatkina, UNV Regional Manager for Arab States, and was facilitated by Professor Matt Baillie Smith and Dr Bianca Fadel of Northumbria University. Drawing on Chapter 6 of the 2026 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report, it brought together researchers and practitioners from crisis-affected contexts.
If Solidarity Is The Principle, Volunteering Is Its Discipline
Late in the evening, after the desks have emptied, a volunteer stays behind at a reception centre to help a family fill out forms in a language they do not yet command. No one records the moment. Yet for that family, something shifts. The world, which had narrowed, opens a little again.
This is how solidarity begins. Not as an abstraction, but as an act.
Our age has no shortage of upheaval. Displacement today is not episodic; it is widespread. Conflicts endure, climates shift, and fragile systems strain under repeated shocks. In such a world, sympathy alone is insufficient. It must be organized, sustained, and given direction. Solidarity must become service.
Las causas estructurales de la violencia—La voz de una Voluntaria ONU en Ecuador
Ecuador es un país de una notable belleza natural y un rico patrimonio cultural. Sin embargo, bajo esta diversidad subyace una necesidad cada vez más profunda de inclusión de los pueblos indígenas y las comunidades locales. Los pueblos indígenas han enfrentado marginación y, aunque la Constitución consagra el principio de interculturalidad, el diálogo genuino sigue siendo frágil y desigual. En este complejo contexto, Noémie Dreux desempeña un papel fundamental. Es Voluntaria ONU Especialista en Prevención de Conflictos y Violencia para el Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD). Su asignación como voluntaria está financiada por el Gobierno de Francia.
"Ecuador está marcado por una larga historia de exclusión de los pueblos indígenas y un diálogo intercultural frágil, lo que continúa generando tensiones", explica Noémie. "A pesar de que la Constitución reconoce al país como intercultural y plurinacional, aún existe una comprensión limitada de lo que estos conceptos significan realmente, tanto en principio como en la práctica."
From Field to Policy: Volunteerism in the Dominican Republic
My first experience of volunteering had no official name. It happened in a classroom in Santo Domingo, as a little girl, long before I knew what the United Nations was. What I knew then, and what fifteen years in international development have only confirmed, is that participation is not a favour institutions grant to people. It is a right. And building the conditions for it to truly happen is one of the hardest and most important things we can do.
In 2013, that conviction brought me to join as a national UN Volunteer Specialist with UNDP in the Dominican Republic. Together with over 1,000 volunteers, I coordinated a national survey across all 32 provinces in which more than 220,000 Dominicans participated, placing the country 8th out of 193 nations in a global citizens' consultation on development priorities. That experience confirmed something I have carried ever since: when people are genuinely invited to shape decisions that affect their lives, they show up. Every time. Because participation is not charity. It is dignity.
Don’t Scale Back—Scale Up: Iraq’s Race to 3,000
By late 2025, the clock was closing in—and the numbers weren’t.
UN Volunteer, Harith Sami Abdulhameed, who had been working as a Sustainable Development Goals Assistant with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Iraq, stared at the data with growing urgency. A city-wide survey in Baghdad—measuring how young people experienced healthcare, education, and government services—had gathered just 1,700 responses. It needed 3,000.
There were only 7 to 10 days left.
For many teams, this would have marked the end of ambition—a quiet acceptance of the gap. But Harith and his colleagues saw it differently. If the data mattered, the effort had to match it. So they made a bold call: don’t scale back—scale up. Within days, their small team of 20 Online Volunteers would become 70.
The young matter