When looking at the context in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 67.5 per cent of volunteer work is informal, the question that arises is: How can volunteering help power development and respond to local challenges? The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Argentina Accelerator Lab (Co_Lab) teamed up to learn how.
The 21st century has featured unprecedented challenges and technological development. Volunteering provides great opportunities towards the advancement of the SDGs agenda and, hence, doing a critical analysis of its future perspectives is very important.
That is why UNV and the UNDP Accelerator Lab (Co_Lab) teamed up with Territorios en Acción, Shaping Horizons and more than 100 volunteers from Latin America and the United Kingdom.
The challenge: the socioeconomic crisis provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The goal: to prototype an innovative model of volunteerism based on networking and technology and to identify solutions applied by communities that promote financial inclusion and socioeconomic recovery.
The methodology: combining the solution mapping and decentralized innovation methodologies.
The outcome: By analyzing experiences and specialized bibliography, the partners developed a prototype contribute to the promotion of volunteerism, making use of the most successful models to date and facilitating good practices and new pathways.
Based on these concepts, they used volunteering models to prototype a mapping of local and regional solutions and a decentralized acceleration of social entrepreneurship aligned with socioeconomic recovery and financial inclusion, in order to promote the Sustainable Development Goals and learn from the process.
The resulting report is intended to guide policymakers, providing basic concepts and recommendations that will contribute to the design, implementation and evaluation of volunteer programmes to drive the 2030 Agenda.
Would you like to explore further? Read the full report in English and Spanish: Volunteering to Accelerate Development: Concepts and Prototype.