While COVID-19 severely impacted the most vulnerable communities, its effects were also felt across UN programme countries, reversing many positive gains in sustainable development. To support countries and UN partners in their response to the pandemic, the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme invested its resources to deploy UN Volunteers with partners, financed through its UNV Special Voluntary Fund.*

The scope of my work is centered on preventing non-communicable disease risk factors, which include tobacco consumption, alcohol abuse, unhealthy diets and physical inactivity. These all contribute to the increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, hypertension and cancer, to name just a few. People who suffer most from the complications of COVID-19 are those with non-communicable diseases. Thus, I am determined to help countries prevent these diseases.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased demand for remote work and data access. At the same time, countering stereotypes and misinformation has become necessary for the progress of the pandemic response efforts. However, in many countries, the information systems and architecture necessitated by remote environments have lagged behind. As a result, access to health information and healthcare has been complicated.

During 2020, the WHO Country Office in Kazakhstan initiated and conducted several missions in collaboration with Dr Joanna Zwetyenga (Denmark), Technical Expert on Laboratory issues, Biosecurity and Biosafety from the WHO Regional Office in Europe. The first mission concluded with Dr Zwetyenga developing an action plan to strengthen laboratory response to COVID-19, with recommendations to train national mentors to support the laboratory capacity of staff conducting testing for SARS-CoV-2.

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.

In crises and emergency situations, volunteering provides governments and civil society organizations with greater flexibility and response capacity. This is particularly true in humanitarian crises, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic

I am currently serving as a national UN Volunteer in Liberia for the Spotlight Initiative. My role is to develop an outreach strategy and distribute awareness-raising materials for the Coronavirus pandemic, in cooperation with the Ministry of Health. We engage with community members and religious leaders to promote preventive measures for vulnerable community members, including women, girls and persons with disabilities.

UN Community Volunteers Blessing Iyala and Aisha Abdel-Latif are working to empower internally-displaced women from Borno State in Nigeria. They facilitate informative and sensitization sessions in local languages for the women and girls and manage one-on-one cases for survivors of gender-based violence survivors. So far, over 200 women and girls have benefitted from their support in learning various livelihood skills.