Refugee UN Volunteers are integral and invaluable members of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) team in Slovakia. They mirror to UNHCR colleagues the day-to-day life, challenges and resilience of Ukrainian refugees. Tetiana Korshun and Olena Bilinska, UN Volunteer Protection Assistants with UNHCR in Slovakia,​​​ are based in Kosice and Bratislava, respectively. They support UNHCR in communicating with refugee communities.

 The war in Ukraine triggered a drastic increase in humanitarian needs, as services were disrupted, and civilians fled the fighting. The United Nations, non-governmental and refugee-led organizations, charitable funds and national volunteer centres have been working around the clock. However, the longer the war continues, the more extensive the aid, protection and health needs will become.

How to apply To become a volunteer, candidates must register and complete a profile through UNV's Unified Volunteering Platform.

I served at the UNDP Istanbul International Center for Private Sector Development in Türkiye as a Research and Partnership Analyst with a focus to ensure the engagement of private-sector partnerships for developing digital skills and the green economy. 

Since 2007, more than 95 UN Volunteers have been engaged with OCHA in Latin America and the Caribbean and 30 in Europe and Central Asia. In Ukraine, OCHA successfully used UN Volunteers to scale up its humanitarian response to COVID-19 in the face of escalating needs. 

Are you ready to volunteer?  Find out what national UN Volunteer opportunities are currently advertised in response to the war in Ukraine in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. UN VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES  

Online Volunteers are valuable assets in implementing projects that require data analysis and digital technologies. The SDG AI Lab at UNDP Istanbul International Center for Private Sector in Development (IICPSD) brought together over 100 Online Volunteers from 45 countries under its Volunteer Data Scientists initiative, a partnership with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme. 

When Aidana Yergaliyeva (Kazakhstan), Dayanch Hojageldiyev* (Turkmenistan), Malika Djalalova (Uzbekistan), Sara Kajevikj (North Macedonia), Parandzem Paryan (Armenia), Faris Mahmutovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Rusudan Khotivari (Georgia) joined their teams, many countries faced – and still face – difficult COVID-19 situations. But that didn’t scare them off.

Hudoykul grew up in Urgut district in the Samarkand region of Uzbekistan. He said that as a child, he learned to always put in that “extra effort” to “fit in” so that others would accept him. And he did fit in – excelling at most subjects in national and international law at university.