Online Volunteers in times of war: helping from a distance
When war broke out in Ukraine, Oksana Udovyk was in dire need of additional expertise to support the response. The head of Experimentation at the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Accelerator Lab in the country selected four Online Volunteers to help create emergency web pages, maps and chatbots. Little did she know that they would soon become a source of energy for the team.
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.