Madame President, Ladies and gentlemen, UNV is a shared UN service hosted and administered by UNDP. Every year we enable thousands of global citizens to contribute to peace and development serving as UN Volunteers across the globe. I am taking the floor to share with the Conference two reflections and two acclamations.

It was all joy in August 2018 when I received an email that I had been selected as a United Nations Volunteer; I would be serving as a Public Information Officer with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). The excitement was palpable! I had been looking forward to working abroad and then out of the blue came this wonderful opportunity to volunteer in South Sudan – a nation with a chequered history, but with such huge potential. I didn’t expect it to be so sudden. Immediately, I started reading about the country, the geopolitical nuances, and my role.

The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Olivier Adam, Executive Coordinator of UNV, and Mr Jorge Chediek, UNOSSC Director and Envoy of the Secretary-General on South-South Cooperation.

For more than ten years, the African Union-United Nations Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) has maintained a large-scale peacekeeping operation following years of civil war. The mission is unprecedented in its ever-evolving nature, due to challenges posed by the harsh desert conditions of West Sudan.

South-South Cooperation is embedded in UNV’s Strategic Framework 2018-2021. Working closely with partners, UNV facilitates South-South cooperation by deploying UN Volunteers and promoting the value of volunteerism for peace and development. Volunteering and South-South Cooperation share common ideals that make them perfect partners: solidarity, respect and equality. Both have an opportunity to derive mutual benefit from their alliance. --UNV Executive Coordinator Olivier Adam

Volunteer programmes are frequently not well integrated into their own country’s broader overseas national development programming, with potential partnerships with official mechanisms, national strategies and development actors (including the government, the private sector and the third sector) limited by a lack of trust and experience.

Prior to my UNV assignment, I worked with the UNHCR representation in Ghana as a national staff member, thus UNV presented an excellent opportunity and platform to further develop a career in programme management in that it afforded me an opportunity to work and learn from more experienced colleagues. I was also particularly excited about international UNV as it was a platform where I could gain experience and knowledge of humanitarian response within the UN, particularly UNHCR.

East and Southern Africa are vulnerable to climate change, food insecurity and water scarcity. These issues have been exacerbated further by rapid population growth, urbanization and overgrazing. Over 36 million people face hunger across East and Southern Africa largely due to drought and high temperatures.

It’s Thursday morning and I have landed in Savannakhet in the south of Laos, on a monitoring mission for our project.The project I work for, SAFE Ecosystems project, targets the reforestation of 1,111 hectares of land, contributing to Lao PDR's target to achieve 70 per cent forest cover by 2020.

The two-day conference is co-hosted by the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme and the Beijing Volunteer Service Federation (BVF), and aims to continue building a strong Southern constituency and voice in international volunteering and co-create new ideas on how volunteering can be effectively mainstreamed to support national development priorities by low- and middle-income countries. It also aims to identify new opportunities for innovative partnerships to jointly overcome development challenges through international volunteering.