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 .

Join the online course on measurement of volunteer work run by ILO and UNV in September 2021

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. 

UNV and the International Labour Organization (ILO) will partner on the deployment of UN Volunteers in support of the organization's work, following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding. Moussa Oumarou, ILO Deputy Director-General for Field Operations and Partnerships, and Olivier Adam, Executive Coordinator of UNV, signed the agreement on 9 March 2020, at ILO headquarters in Geneva.

For COP 23, UN Volunteers has recruited more than 650 volunteers to support a wide range of operational tasks throughout the event. They all attended a full-day training on October 30. Follow the involvement of volunteers during COP 23 here (hover over the image and scroll down):

The ILO Department of Statistics and the UN Volunteers have joined forces to scale up efforts to improve the global availability, quality and use of statistics on volunteer work. Starting this month, the ILO-UNV partnership will focus on assessing the current status of volunteer work statistics around the world; engage directly with countries to identify good practices and challenges in volunteer work data collection and analysis; and develop practical survey approaches and tools to support countries’ efforts.