N'Djamena, Chad: We are Alladoum Assidjim and Laura Rutishauser, a national UN volunteer aged 33 and an international UN volunteer from Switzerland aged 29, working together to provide Chadian youth with local volunteering opportunities. In order to do so, we are supporting the set up of Chad’s National Volunteering Programme (CNVP), with our partners the UNV programme, UNDP, the French Embassy and France Volontaires, at the request of the Chadian Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports.

A groundbreaking partnership between the Burkina Faso Ministry of Youth and Employment, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme and France Volontaires in 2007 led to the development of the first national law on volunteerism in West Africa, and mobilized more than 13,000 youth volunteers to support national development, including more than a thousand young volunteer teachers who served in classrooms that otherwise would have been closed due to a lack of staff.

Peacekeeping has proven to be one of the most effective tools the United Nations uses to maintain international peace and security throughout the world. UN Peacekeepers provide security and the political and peacebuilding support to help countries make the difficult, early transition from conflict to peace. Today is a day to pay tribute to all the men and women who have served and continue to serve in United Nations peacekeeping operations for their professionalism, dedication and courage, and to honour the memory of those who have lost their lives in the cause of peace.

In the run up to the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme hosted a live Facebook chat on 27 May 2013 with Isabelle Blanc, an international UN Volunteer who is serving with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

Thanks to UN Online Volunteer Dominique MacNeill from France, the website of the Gender-Based Violence Information System (GBVIMS) (www.gbvims.org) is now available in French. The GBVIMS is an inter-agency partnership of various UN agencies and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and enables humanitarian actors responding to incidents of gender-based violence to effectively and safely collect, store, analyze and share data reported by GBV survivors.

In addition to the 8,000 UN Volunteers that the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme mobilizes every year, around 10,000 UN online volunteers provide their support over the Internet to organizations working on the ground.  Via UNV’s Online Volunteering service, they carry out assignments for organizations to help developing countries eradicate poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  They support democratic governance, crisis prevention and recovery, and promote environmentally sustainable development.

France directly supports UNV activities and in 2019 presented its National Situational Analysis on Volunteering, a source for generating evidence and data on volunteerism.