Jayne Cravens is an internationally-recognized trainer, researcher and consultant. Her work is focused on communications, volunteer involvement, community engagement, and management for nonprofits, NGOs, and government initiatives. She is a pioneer regarding the research, promotion and practice of virtual volunteering, including virtual teams, microvolunteering and crowdsourcing, and she is a veteran manager of various local and international initiatives. Jayne became active online in 1993, and she created one of the first web sites focused on helping to build the capacity of nonprofits to use the Internet. She has been interviewed for and quoted in articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, as well as for reports by CNN, Deutsche Well, the BBC, and various local radio stations, TV stations and blogs. Resources from her web site, coyotecommunications.com, are frequently cited in reports and articles by a variety of organizations, online and in-print. Women's empowerment and women's full access to employment and education options remains a cross-cutting theme in all of her work. Jayne received her BA in Journalism from Western Kentucky University and her Master's degree in Development Management from Open University in the U.K. A native of Kentucky, she has worked for the United Nations, lived in Germany and Afghanistan, and visited more than 30 countries, many of them by motorcycle. She is currently based near Portland, Oregon in the USA.
In late August, I had the honor of presenting a live webinar for the Beyond Africa Podcast. You can see a recording of the webinar on YouTube. You can also download the slides I used and see resources I used in the webinar and that I encouraged people to view after the webinar here on my web site.
The webinar opened with a question I have never been asked: why am I doing this? Why am I posting on r/UNPath and other online communities about how to work in international development? As briefly as possible, and among other reasons, because I don’t think there’s equity in who know about and has access to careers in international development, including at the United Nations. You can hear my full answer by listening to the webinar.
Please note that I did this pro bono for this group, but that I usually charge for my consulting, including delivering trainings.
A frequent lament of people on online groups who want to work for the United Nations is “It’s impossible because there’s no way for me to get the experience needed.”
These aforementioned blogs are about how to get expertise that can be applied to UN positions, usually at the P level and above.
But a lot of people want to work at a headquarters or break into UN work at the administrative level. They claim the aforementioned doesn’t apply to them and then, again, say, “It’s impossible for me to get the experience necessary.”
I spent an hour going through G-level positions currently being recruited at some UN agencies. I then made a list of some commonalities in the positions, which I have listed below, stripping out UN-specific references. And as I read through these, it was obvious to me that:
If you have been a longish-term leadership volunteer in your community, managing other volunteers, in any project – Habitat for Humanity, Meals on Wheels, an NGO that helps refugees, a children’s theater camp, a hospice, a food bank, etc. – you have probably done most of these activities.
If you have been a successful Girl Scout leader for more than two years, and been on the board or core organizers of your service unit in that time, you have probably done most of these activities.
If you have been a leadership volunteer at a local farmer’s market or artists cooperative for an entire season, you have probably done most of these activities.
If you have been on the board of a nonprofit for at least a year, you have probably done most of these activities.
Often it’s how you frame and phrase your responsibilities on your CV and applications as to whether or not you look qualified for a position.
I was part of a hiring committee that hired a guy with extensive hotel management experience for a G level administrative support position: his procurement skills, his experience in dealing with conflict, his organizational skills, his multi-language skills, his client-focused mindset and his experience with international clients were all represented on his CV , explicitly. He was an incredible and perfect fit for the job (he did also have a Master’s degree – I think it was in business).
Job responsibilities that show up on a lot of G-level positions that you can learn through leadership volunteering and through most administrative jobs at nonprofits and local government agencies as well:
Schedule internal and external meetings and events, and communicate these dates, or possible dates, to the team/partners.
Assist in organizing events, workshops, webinars, launches of publications, seminars, conferences and campaigns.
Support the team with planning and implementing of operational activities.
Gather relevant and corresponding data (socio-economic, gender, etc.) needed for project development, proposals, reports, presentations, etc.
Support activities contributing to the regular communication with project partners to monitor deadlines, commitments made, actions taken, etc.
Support in mapping and identifying relevant stakeholders or desired audiences or potential partners.
Populate and maintain a database of potential partners, or area NGOs, or area small businesses, or some other needed data set for a project.
Review and proofread drafts of reports, drafts of online materials, etc.
Closely follow up with other staff, consultants, partner organizations, etc. regarding collaborative projects, data, etc.
Review reports developed by others and edit/contribute as needed.
Verify the accuracy and validity of research conducted or feedback provided by others.
Continuously monitor and collect all data indicators relevant to the project.
Provide support in the dissemination and sharing of relevant data and lessons learned.
Keep pulse on emerging best practices nationally, regionally, and internationally that relate to the work.
Regularly read knowledge networks and communities of practice related to the project/program area.
Support program-related knowledge building, management and sharing activities for both external and internal audiences.
Assist in preparation of official correspondence to all relevant project partners, HQ, etc.
Provide inputs in the development and producing knowledge products, i.e. case studies, success stories, lessons learnt reports, press releases and etc.
Contribute to the creation of content for specific stakeholders, including presentation decks, photos videos, programme briefs, webinar/event cards, literature.
Monitor online platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. regarding mentions of the program and activities by partners/stakeholders.
Assist the Project Manager/other staff in preparation of the regular progress reports in line with reporting schedules, as well as any other reports requested by management, donor, government, press and/or other stakeholders/audiences.
Support other staff in implementing project M&E activities and providing on-going feedback and technical backstopping.
Make logistical arrangements for HQ staff visits and external visitors, preparing briefing kits and background materials.
Quit complaining that “the fix is in” and you can’t get a UN position unless you “know someone on the inside.” I’ve worked for the UN three times, at three different UNDP offices, in three different countries, and I knew NO ONE in those offices that hired me. I’ve been on several UN hiring committees and only one time in all those times was I pressured to hire someone who someone on the hiring committee knew – a practice common in the private sector! (I refused to change my score regarding her interview and qualifications, but she did still get hired somehow). Every other time, we hired the person obviously most qualified.
Get busy taking a hard look at all you have done to date and think about how to better frame it. And if you lack needed skills for the jobs you want, get busy with volunteering or working locally to get them!
A truth bomb from a Facebook group I follow, for people that want to work from home:
Most work-from-home jobs are customer service jobs, for insurance companies, airlines, subscription TV services, etc., and you don’t work when you want: you have a fixed, strict schedule. And these jobs don’t pay well. The trade-off is, of course, that you get to work from home, but if you think you are going to be doing child care at the same time, think again!
I work from home most of the time, and I don’t have a strict fixed schedule: I work in marketing and press relations for one nonprofit, I manage the online community for another, and I pick up marketing or volunteer management-related gigs here and there. I work from home 90% of the time, and I don’t have a strict schedule: I can walk my dog when I want, for the most part, I can take a break to watch a movie on TCM if I have time in the middle of the day, I can sleep late some days… but I have to work real hours most every day, and I can’t have distractions while I’m working. The deadlines are real. And I have to be available for phone calls and emails from clients. As flexible as my schedule is, there is NO room in it for child care.
The myths around working from home are important to me for three reasons:
There are so many work-from-home scams out there. I have a plate on my web site about What Work-At-Home / Remote Jobs Look Like and how to avoid scams because there are so many scams (and so many people falling for them).
There are so many desperate people in developing countries that believe the myths about working from home, that think it’s work you can do with just a smart phone and you can do whenever you might have some time, that you don’t need a computer or absolutely perfect and fast Internet access. They are among the prime targets for work-from-home scams.
The myths about working from home are similar to myths about virtual volunteering: that volunteering roles online don’t require a schedule (they do – extra time for online volunteering does not magically happen), that the deadlines aren’t strict (they are – if you don’t do an assignment, it often leaves the nonprofit scrambling to get something essential done that they were counting on you for), that you don’t need any skills (you do), etc. Here’s a list of myths about virtual volunteering, from the Virtual Volunteering Wiki.
There are a LOT of parallels between working online from home and volunteering online from home. My book The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is focused primarily on people who want to engage online volunteers, and covers how to create online roles, and how to properly onboard and support online volunteers during their engagement. If you are a manager of online employees, you might find it helpful. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.
If you have benefited from any of my blogs or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
I had never used Canva before August 2022. I’m not much of a graphic designer and would never be hired for such, but since I work mostly for nonprofits, I also usually don’t have a budget for a professional graphic designer, so I have to make due on my own. But my primary employer these days has an account with Canva and I’ve been able to use it.
Canva is really amazing and I use it often. BUT, I am also noticing something: a lot of graphics on social media produced by nonprofits and independent bloggers is starting to look the same. The drawn human images on Canva look very similar in style. And I live in a small community and I’ve seen one particular Canva design used by three different nonprofits for their galas – same image and colors.
Here are some tips for making your products produced via Canva unique:
Never use a template without a LOT of alteration. Add or change the graphics, change colors, change fonts, etc. Otherwise you risk having an image that looks almost exactly like someone else’s.
Never use photos from Canva. Use your own photos. Make sure your volunteers and staff have all signed photo releases, and use photos of them. Same for clients: make sure you have photo releases and, of course, that using their photos publicly is allowed.
Alter any ready-made images in your own designs. Flip some horizontally. Change the clothes colors for what the people in the drawings are wearing, for instance. Change skin tones. Change hair colors. If you can’t do this in Canva, use whatever graphic design software that came free on your computer to do it.
Follow nonprofits in your area on social media and read their posts regularly. This can help you avoid using similar designs.
Canva images tend to not be as diverse as you might need. It can be hard to find a family image with diverse members, for instance, or a family that might better represent a Latino family, a black family, a family where the mother is wearing a hijab or chunni, a family where the men are wearing a dastaar, etc. Or to find a classroom drawing with a diversity among students. I sometimes search for images representing a cultural group specifically so I can make sure my imagery of a family scene, a crowd scene, a classroom, etc. better reflects the community served by the local nonprofit I work for.
Standards in graphic design still apply when using Canva: you need to have excellent color contrast for text versus the text background, you need to have an overarching word, phrase or image, one that is bigger than everything else so that it draws in the viewer, you need to think about how you want someone’s eye to move across the graphic, the image should be easily and immediately understood, you need to make sure the graphic has all of the information needed or will be accompanied by the text of all that is needed, etc.
I’m not at all saying don’t use Canva. But don’t get complacent and confuse ease of use with good practice.
At the small Habitat for Humanity affiliate where I work, someone long before me set up a Google account at the organization just for photos – photos@OURNAME…. It was SUCH a smart thing to do and I wish I could thank the person! It makes it so easy to tell employees, board members, volunteers and ReStore customers where to send the photos they take, and it’s easy to save those photos from the gmail account to the Google photos space.
That same person also set up a Google account just for volunteer management – volunteers@…. and we use the email not only to give out to anyone that wants to volunteer, but also, we can use (and share) the associated Google calendar to show all staff when there are volunteer events.
Now if I could just get all staff to log into YouTube and subscribe to our agency YouTube channel and “like” each of our videos, so we could increase the number of people who saw them!
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Most nonprofits are terrified of being perceived as political. It’s not just a fear that they will violate the strict IRS rules regarding political activities by 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organizations; it’s also a fear that they will anger donors and other supporters with a statement that might in any way be perceived as political, and therefore lose funding and volunteers.
Nonprofits in the USA are prohibited from endorsing a political candidate, but not from encouraging their staff, volunteers, clients and supporters to vote. Nonprofits can also say if proposed legislation or a proposed policy has the potential to change how they do their work or affect their clients, adversely or positively.
Whether you choose to engage in those kinds of communications or dialogues or not, there is one thing all nonprofits need to be honest and open about: how the November 2024 elections may affect your work.
Do you know where the candidates for state and national offices that represent your area stand with regards to your cause? If an office holder that’s been friendly to your organization is voted out, will you already have a relationship with the new office holder or will you be introducing yourself for the first time when you add that person to your press release mailing list?
If a candidate has said he or she will work to eliminate funding that your organization has received and hopes to receive again, you need to let your staff know so they know the financial viability of the organization and can make plans for their own future accordingly. You need to have a list of funding you have received that is directly or indirectly tied to federal programs and consider what to do if that funding ends. And you might need to be working overtime NOW to increase your number of major donors (corporations, foundations, wealthy individuals) and individual donors to make up for potential financial shortfalls when budget cuts come if new representatives will be working to eliminate your government funding.
You also need to consider if budget cuts will increase demands on your services, and plan for that accordingly.
Elections matter. Cuts and proposed cuts under the Trump administration to the budgets of USDA, USAID, education, energy and environment had consequences for nonprofits and those they serve. AmeriCorps, VISTA, other CNCS programs were on the chopping block in 2017 and again in 2018 and 2019, and though those programs were ultimately saved in the past, I don’t think they will be again if those folks are elected again. All these budget and program cuts will be happening again – but in far greater percentages – in a second Trump administration. Expect far greater numbers of people in need of assistance at organizations that are helping with food and shelter. Expect government scrutiny and probable hostility to nonprofits serving women seeking abortion services, nonprofits serving LBGTQ people, and refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. Some staff may need to move on as soon as the results of the election are known, to avoid challenges to their own livelihoods and families, and to protect the safety of some family members.
Be realistic: do you have at least the start of a plan of what you are going to do if the election goes either way? The future of your nonprofit, and the cause you are addressing with your clients, depend on it.
This is an account written by an Afghan colleague, with grammar and spelling corrected by me. She was able to flee Afghanistan and now lives in an English-speaking country as a legal refugee. This account is regarding what life is like for her sister back in Kabul, Afghanistan:
When I lived in Afghanistan, I lived with my adult, unmarried sister and my widowed mother, without a male family member, in Kabul. My nieces also frequently stayed with us and I, an unmarried woman, was the head of the household. My brothers lived with their families in Kabul, but across the city from us, and we did not rely on them for shopping or for money. Because of my job, the job of my sister, and a small inheritance from my father, we could all live together, even sometimes travel together, in relative peace and prosperity.
I worked for the Afghan government, as did my sister. We are both university educated. She and I could go to and from work on our own, but when we left the house for appointments, shopping and other tasks, or to walk in a nearby park or to visit relatives, we were accompanied by each other or my mother. This was accepted by society in Kabul before the Taliban.
In the chaos of the Taliban takeover, I was able to flee Afghanistan along with my nieces and my mother. We were able to flee to a country where I had studied many years ago, and we now have asylum here. My nieces, then all under 18, now live in safety. But I had to leave my sister behind, as the government of the country where I live now was unsure if they could count her as my immediate family, and she insisted we go without her and not delay.
After we fled Afghanistan, my sister immediately lost her job, as all women working for the government did, per the orders of the Taliban. She immediately lost her right to go to appointments or shopping for food alone or even with just another female family member – it had to be with a male family member. And she was immediately living by herself. Her male relatives, my brothers, do not live immediately close to her. I am sorry to say our brothers are not helpful to her as they should be, for many reasons: one brother is busy trying to provide for his family, to feed his young sons and ensure their safety. Another brother is dealing with a great deal of drama with a former wife and former in-laws, who are threatening his well-being. Both of my brothers are reluctant to accompany my sister in public, both because they do not see it as a priority and because she has a speech impediment, and in my culture, people with disabilities are not treated well on the streets, with many people openly mocking such people, and my brothers do not know how to deal with such disrespect and mocking (my mother was treated with great respect and no one would mock my sister when she was present).
My sister is an educated, professional woman. She graduated from Kabul University with a Bachelor of Science and she loved her job with the Afghan Ministry she was a part of, working in a small department where she felt her work was very important – I cannot say much about her work for fear she could be identified. She never had health problems, other than her speech impediment, in all of our years together. All of that has changed now.
Her work and life puts her in danger with the Taliban: she is unmarried, she lives alone, she is university educated, she worked for the government, she worked for a program funded by foreign governments that Taliban sees as the enemy, and she has studied and worked alongside men that are not her family members. She sometimes even worked directly with foreigners who represented the US and Canadian funders of her work.
I try to talk to her every day on WhatsApp. I am in great fear for her. I am afraid I will die before I ever see her again.
My sister is now solely reliant on just a few trusted people bringing her food, and doing it in a way that neighbors never see her. She cannot go to doctor’s appointments. She will go days with no interaction with any other human being. The Taliban are targeting Shia Muslims and people of Tajik ethnicity with oppression and physical violence – this is what my family is. My sister’s neighbors support the Taliban and are of a different ethnicity than us, and while they know there is someone in the apartment where my sister is, they are not entirely sure which family members are still there. She lives in constant fear of her neighbors. We believe that if they knew she was there, alone, they would inform on her, to garner favor from the Taliban, and the Taliban would take over the apartment and turn my sister out to beg on the streets, or perhaps decide she has broken their law and punish her physically and put her in prison. She is now, in many ways, in a prison, as she cannot leave her home or even be seen by neighbors. The isolation, lack of human interaction, stress, lack of physical exercise, lack of exposure to the outdoors and lack of regular nutrition are causing her to experience intense headaches. She has recently informed me that she has fainted at least twice and is unsure how long she was unconscious.
And I know she’s not the only one. I know there are more women in her situation – and much worse.
I have filed all of the paperwork with the government where I live for my sister to join me, my mother and my sisters here. I have gone to public meetings with national officials to try to meet them in-person and petition them to help bring my sister here. It’s been almost three years since we fled. I wonder if she will die before her case is even decided, and I fear what a rejection will drive her to do.
It is impossible to find comfort in this land of safety when I know what my sister experiences in Afghanistan. And I know that even in this dire state, she is in a more advantageous position than so many other women, than most women, in the country, at least for now.
For the last decade – maybe the last 15 years – the web site home pages of nonprofits, corporations, even news outlets, were rarely the focus of most people’s regular attention; these organizations’ outlets relied on social media to distribute their information. Users read the information they wanted because they subscribed or followed or “liked” the entities or messaging they wanted to stay up-to-date about, and got more recommendations through algorithmically personalized recommendations. As The New Yorker put it:
News articles circulated as individual URLs, floating in the ether of social-media feeds, divorced from their original publishers. With rare exceptions, home pages were reduced to the role of brand billboards; you might check them out in passing, but they weren’t where the action lay.
But Twitter, now X, has imploded and is bleeding users. Facebook is overrun with ads and push marketing, burying the pages and accounts a user wants to see under a mountain of paid messaging. Social media infrastructure is crumbling, having become both ineffective for publishers and alienating for users. Social networks are overwhelmed by misinformation and content generated by artificial intelligence.
Surrounded by dreck, the digital citizen is discovering that the best way to find what she used to get from social platforms is to type a URL into a browser bar and visit an individual site. Many of those sites, meanwhile, have worked hard to make themselves feel a bit more like social media, with constant updates, grabby visual stimuli, and a sense of social interaction.
Large language models, or LLMs, are trained on massive troves of material—nearly the entire internet in some cases. They digest these data into an immeasurably complex network of probabilities, which enables them to synthesize seemingly new and intelligently created material; to write code, summarize documents, and answer direct questions in ways that can appear human…. Just as there is an entire industry of scammy SEO-optimized websites trying to entice search engines to recommend them so you click on them, there will be a similar industry of AI-written, LLMO-optimized sites. And as audiences dwindle, those sites will drive good writing out of the market.
I believe that web sites still matter. I believe domain names still matter, because so many people, and so many organizations, and so many cities and regions, have these same name, so search engine results aren’t always all you need.
Back in 2012, I wrote a blog called Why Your Organization Probably Doesn’t Need A Facebook Page. I added in 2017 that I still believe 90% of what was proposed in that blog, and reading it now, I still believe that. That doesn’t mean you should NOT have a Facebook page, but you should think very seriously what you want it to do. For the Habitat for Humanity ReStore I support, Facebook outreach has been fundamental to sales; take it away, and I think sales would drop at least 25%, maybe more. But I also work for a nonprofit that is much larger, that is focused on technology and nonprofits, and if their Facebook page disappeared tomorrow, no one would notice.
Your organization, your program, your city – it needs a permanent home on the web, a place that all your other online activities point back to, the place that’s there when the latest social media trendy platform fades. When I join an organization, it’s so easy to become well-versed in what that organization does if they have a web site: I not only read that, I go back on archive.org and read past versions of their web sites. I find out if the ReStore is traditionally closed on a particular holiday. I find photos from past events featuring a former board member who I have learned has died and I need to create a tribute. I double -heck the dates of an event I will attend. A web site is also for your employees and volunteers, not just potential new supporters.
I have an entire section on my web site about nonprofit web sites: what should be on a nonprofit’s web site and how that web site should be designed and managed. I started it back in the 1990s and have updated it regularly. There was a time in the early part of this century when I thought maybe it was time to take the section down, that web sites weren’t needed anymore. I’m so glad I didn’t – the material is needed as much now as it has ever been.
If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Since the early 1990s, I have been researching and discussing how information communications technologies (ICTs) help nonprofits and cause-based initiatives do their work. I was intensely involved the early days of the USENET group soc.org.nonprofit and I had one of the first web sites focused on the subject (and my web site still has a section focused on this topic).
Online communities that have focused on this and related subject have come and gone over the years, and one that I’ve used for years has recently started to sunset. As that last online community winds down, I no longer have an outlet for my “ICT for good” discussions.
So I decided to start a group on Reddit (such groups are called subreddits) called Tech4Causes so that others interested in this subject can participate. I debated a lot about the name, and decided that one would be best (and also because Tech4Good was already taken as a subreddit, and focused on something else).
The Tech4Causes subreddit is a place to discuss examples resources and ideas for applying apps and online tools to activities supporting causes that help humans and the environment. It’s a place to discuss hackathons / hacks4good, apps4good, community tech centers, ICT4D, ethics regarding such, etc. It’s a place to discuss how a nonprofit, NGO or community program YOU work or volunteer with leveraging ICT to do its work.
Tech4Causes is to discuss specific scenarios, like how Information ICTs can help and have helped prevent or mitigate problems arising from disasters – fire, earthquake, floods, storms or other severe weather, catastrophic power or structural failures, or violent conflict. Or how can or has ICT improved food stability in a community, or helped domestic violence victims, or facilitated pet adoptions and reduced shelter populations, or helped seniors be more mentally active, or helped young people participate in community arts projects?
It’s also to discuss how ICTs have helped support and engage volunteers supporting a cause and what policies a nonprofit, NGO or government community project needs to leverage ICTs as a part of its program or administration. I’d like for people to also talk about what ethical issues might need to be addressed in using tech for good. Examples of artificial intelligence being a force for good and a negative influence on the work of nonprofits, NGOs, community projects and community, arts, environmental or other causes are welcomed.
I’m the founder of the group and, right now, the sole moderator, but I’d like to have a lot more moderators as the months past. I have no desire to make this all mine; I would like to have shared ownership of the group with others. I’ll be identifying new moderators based on who consistently posts quality content.
The most in-depth exploration I’ve ever done regarding “Tech4Good” is The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, which I co-wrote with Susan Ellis. It has the most comprehensive and detailed guidance regarding using the Internet to engage and support volunteers (and some sci fi references, per the authors both being geek girls). It’s for organizations that want to get started with virtual volunteering or to expand a program they already have, as well as those researching virtual volunteering. The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is based on many years of experience, from a variety of organizations. It’s like having me do an in-depth analysis of your program, or me helping you set up your own program, but without having to pay my hourly rate as a consultant. It’s also better than any AI. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.
Also see
Reddit4Good: subreddits focused on some aspect of volunteerism, community service or philanthropy
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
United Nations Volunteers mobilized a record-breaking number of 12,840 UN Volunteers, marking a four percent increase from 2022.
Of the total number of UN Volunteers, 11,339 or 88 per cent were from the Global South. Of these, 8,027 served as national UN Volunteers in their countries of origin, while 3,350 served as international UN Volunteers in other countries of the Global South. This demonstrated the commitment of UN partners and UNV to engaging local volunteer talent in peace and development worldwide, as well as to South-South cooperation.
In 2023, the average age of a UN Volunteer was 35, and the overall age range was from 18 to 78 years. There were 167 UN Volunteers aged 60 and above. There were 2,012 UN Youth Volunteers between 18 and 26 years of age.
The largest number of UN Volunteers served in sub-Saharan Africa (5,299). Latin America and the Caribbean had the next-largest contingent (2,762), followed by Asia and the Pacific (1,931), the Arab States region (1,649), and Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (1,224).
UNV achieved gender balance in the international professional category, while men were underrepresented in the national officer and general staff categories. Exceeding the target, 73 per cent of the UNV staff came from the Global South.
The proportion of women UN Volunteers increased to 57 per cent (2 per cent growth from 2022). Notably, in 2023, 49.8 per cent of UN Volunteers on the African continent were women, whereas this was 48 per cent in 2022.
SPOTLIGHT ON ONLINE VOLUNTEERING
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) relied on the talents of 100 Online Volunteers in Niger to run social media campaigns in French and English to raise awareness regarding the rights of refugees, most of whom are from <span>Burkina Faso, Mali and Nigeria. UNFPA marshalled 586 Online Volunteers to highlight women’s reproductive rights in Guinea and Niger and another 552 in Niger to combat fake news against the backdrop of political instability. Niger was also where 125 Online Volunteers assisted WHO in raising awareness of breast cancer and 105 Online Volunteers teamed with UN Women in championing women’s rights. Responding to the floods in Libya and the earthquake in Morocco, 95 Online Volunteers designed social media posts, mapped volunteering initiatives and managed information flows. As well, 18 Online Volunteers supported all UN entities in responding to the crisis in the State of Palestine and neighbouring countries – Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. The assignments focused on media monitoring, need-based analyses, response mapping and translation.
To raise awareness about the 54 Faces of Africa Campaign and the Youth Connekt Summit in Nairobi in 2023, UNDP called upon 102 Online Volunteers. Another 77 analysed development plans and budget priorities for the UNDP Ethiopia Country Office. Online Volunteers with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) contributed to research on climate, nature and pollution, while for the Government of Zambia, they created content for the Africa Music, Art and Cultural Exhibition 2023.
The talents of 257 Online Volunteers were applied in support of UNDP’s work on youth empowerment in the Asia-Pacific region, while with UNFPA, 151 UN Volunteers supported the #EveryGirlCounts digital campaign. Additionally, 134 Online Volunteers supported Thailand’s Social Development Ministry by contributing to International Volunteer Day activities and creating social media content. As well, 56 Online Volunteers assisted the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) in an AI-generated platform on gender equality. UNV in China and UNDP launched #HerDigitalFuture with the support of 185 Online Volunteers to highlight opportunities and potential educational pathways in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) for teenage girls.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, 647 Online Volunteers served with the World Food Programme (WFP) in Peru to provide information to refugees and migrants, with a primary focus on those from Venezuela. In Bolivia, another 72 served in Online Volunteering assignments that helped inform people about accessing public information.
Emergency response in Ukraine was supported by 392 Online Volunteers who mapped, translated and provided important research to UN entities. Another 30 supported the UNDP Accelerator Lab initiative creating chatbots for public information. The Gender Equality and Women Empowerment programme was assisted by 60 Online Volunteers with UN Women in Kazakhstan, Moldova, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, with assignments ranging from research to data management, women entrepreneurship, peace and security. A vital role was played by 17 Online Volunteers, who contributed to the Türkiye earthquake response through psychosocial support, translation and social media content.
