In 2015 UNDP’s country office in Ukraine established a health procurement project and became the first in Europe and Central Asia to do so. Alongside delivering vital medicines, the project’s key priorities were to provide support to the Government in creating a central procurement agency and establishing a modern health supply system in the country. The Health and Transparency programme, which took the lead in implementing the initiative from the UNDP, was supported by both National and International UN Volunteers.

Zhao had just started his UN Volunteer assignment with UNDP, during the coronavirus outbreak. Having the option to also travel to his hometown for the Spring Festival, with the impending crisis in hand, Zhao decided to stay back in his duty station to support the prevention and response efforts for COVID-19 instead.  Zhao’s hometown Yuhang District, Hangzhou City, in China’s Zhejiang Province, is about 1,300kms apart from his duty station in Chengbu Miao Autonomous County, Shaoyang City, Hunan Province.

Viktoriia Unuchko started as a UN Youth Volunteer Administrative and Communications Assistant. She supports the Sustainable Development and Environment Portfolio within the UNDP/Global Environment Facility project "Removing barriers to increase investment in energy efficiency in public buildings in Ukraine through the ESCO modality in small and medium-sized cities".

UNV, in partnership with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), a Bonn-based development agency providing services in the fields of sustainable development and international education, were proud to host Pedro Conceição, lead author of the 2019 HDR, in a presentation of the report's essential findings.

Newton Mutunga served as a UN Volunteer Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) Officer in Darfur. Recruited in 2015, he was posted in the Marra Mountains (Jebel Marra), where armed conflict persists and increasing numbers of people have been forced to leave their homes. You can read more about Newtons’ UN Volunteer experience in Sudan here.

While equipping youth volunteers with the necessary skills to help progress the implementation of SDGs, the workshop also encouraged participants to explore the interlinked contributions of volunteers in the context of the 2030 Agenda. This was done through knowledge sharing and leadership building.

For the first time, the Peruvian government organized a national event to convene volunteer leaders from all 24 regions of the country to jointly reflect, learn, collaborate and celebrate volunteer efforts in involving individuals, especially those left behind, in addressing development challenges. 

The CDR Awards recognize innovation in the day-to-day work of human resources practitioners from the international public sector in the fields of recruitment and employee engagement. With support from public and private sector organisations, the CDR Awards provide the opportunity to showcase, share and learn from the collective experience in successfully addressing strategic or operational challenges, as well as recognize the potential of creativity and the people behind it. What issue did we set out to address?