United Nations Volunteers (UNV) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) signed a new partnership agreement on 8 April 2024 spanning till the end of 2025.
This partnership aims to build on the progress and achievements made during the previous UNV and ILO partnership from 2017-2022, particularly the development of survey tools for the statistical measurement of volunteer work . It seeks to expand the technical support to Member States interested in measuring volunteer work using the UNV-ILO survey tools, to arrive at a more uniform measurement approach across countries and to increase the available data on the scale and scope of volunteering.
UNV and ILO also aim to produce new evidence on volunteering in specific areas of mutual interest, for example on the interrelatedness of volunteering and unpaid care work, volunteering and ageing societies, and digital volunteerism.
Measuring the scale and scope of volunteering worldwide through official statistical sources remains challenging. Currently, less than 70 countries, mainly from the Global North, are known to have measured and included volunteering data in their official statistics.
With the mandate of UNV to advocate for volunteering as a means of sustainable development and ILO to advance social justice and promote decent work – the partnership underpins how important it is to measure volunteer work.
Data, evidence and knowledge products on volunteerism can be found on the UNV Knowledge Portal on Volunteerism.