At the end of October 1970, I received a request from the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to advise on the establishment of a United Nations Volunteer Service (UNV). The background to this request was that I had been instrumental in the establishment of the German Voluntary Service in 1962 and later served as one of the directors of the Service from 1966-1969.

Putting everyone’s wellbeing first We commissioned the final project evaluation in March 2020. Setting out to identify barriers to disability inclusion within the UN system, we did not expect the evaluation itself would encounter an unprecedented obstacle: the start of the evaluation coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. As per the Independent Evaluation Office’s guidance, we put a principle of ‘Do No Harm’ first and undertook an all-virtual evaluation process with remote data collection to protect the well-being of everyone involved.

With experience as a UN Volunteer and now, as UNDP Resident Representative, I can confidently say UN Volunteers share three essential and common traits in order to rise to the occasion:

Under the World Health Organization (WHO)’s End Tuberculosis Strategy, countries around the world have set ambitious targets to reduce the number of TB cases and deaths, as well as catastrophic expenses due to TB, by the year 2035, with interim milestones set for 2020 and 2025. Even before the onset of COVID-19, we were running out of time, and now, because of the pandemic, the targets are in jeopardy.

We shall, as one UN organization, keep promoting the principle of volunteerism and integrating it into our thinking and daily aspirations. Whether we are UN Volunteers or UN staff of any agency, we are practicing and promoting volunteerism in what we do and what we work for. Whether it is about new ideas, initiatives, contributions, coaching others, spending additional working hours or operating in hardship conditions – you name it – we volunteer without noticing, because it is part of our value system.

Mihoko joined the Resident Coordinator's Office in April 2018, serving through the Global Human Resource Development Programme for Peacebuilding and Development (HRD) of the Government of Japan. She supported bringing together different UN entities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of activities at the country level. To do so, she developed strategies and activities to actively involve the private sector in development.

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.

What do the hidden figures tell us? Looking beyond averages will tell a slightly different story about how we fare with achieving gender balance in volunteering - at UNV and at the global level.  For example, if we disaggregate data on UNV gender averages, we will see that in some regions such as in Western and Central Africa, the average drops to 40-60 in favour of male volunteers, whereas in Latin America, the number of women volunteers tend to be higher. 

As I reflect on this year’s International Women’s Day’s theme “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world”, I cannot help but be tempted to reconsider women’s triple roles of productive, reproductive, and community work in society, often referred to as their triple “burden”. What if this triple burden, which predisposes women to be the hardest hit by this pandemic, was the stepping-stone that will make women the backbone of recovery in communities?

Following the outbreak of the pandemic in Kenya, 50 UN Volunteer health experts were deployed through a UN joint programme to support the COVID-19 response at county level, where the unexpected surge of infections had overstretched healthcare service-delivery capacity, impacting lives and livelihoods.