Achieving the global goals: why volunteers are important



In the last 15 years, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have framed global development efforts. Volunteer action for development has contributed to the MDGs in a wide variety of ways 

The new agenda for sustainable development will frame global peace and development efforts in 2016-2030 in all countries, regardless of their development level. It has a wider scope and aims at tackling both vertical and cross-cutting issues. It also explicitly recognizes volunteer groups as stakeholders to achieve the new set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as global goals.

Lessons learnt from the MDGs

MDGs implementation showed that sustainable development requires approaches that complement technical, financial and institutional measures. To achieve the SDGs, people’s engagement in planning, implementation and monitoring needs to be facilitated and new partnerships forged. Volunteers will be instrumental in this process.

This has strongly emerged from an extensive consultation process led by the United Nations (UN), which has involved over 8 million people, and was summarized as follows by the UN Secretary-General in his Synthesis Report on the post-2015 sustainable development agenda:“As we seek to build capacities and to help the new agenda to take root, 

volunteerism can be another powerful and cross-cutting means of implementation. 

Volunteerism can help to expand and mobilize constituencies, and to engage people in national planning and implementation for the Sustainable Development Goals. And volunteer groups can help to localize the new agenda by providing new spaces of interaction between governments and people for concrete and scalable actions.”

Volunteering can contribute to achieving the SDGs in many ways
  • Volunteers can provide technical support and enhance capacity in all thematic goal areas. They deliver basic services, help transfer skills and foster exchanges of good practices, and add valuable international and local expertise through domestic, South-South, South-North and North-South exchanges. Corporate volunteers can play a particular role in this regard, by making their expertise available to public institutions as well as to fragile communities.
  • Volunteers help leave no one behind by reaching out to people, including those marginalized or difficult to reach, to bring people’s voices and knowledge into collective actions. This is crucial to build ownership and localize the SDGs. Volunteer organizations can serve as brokers of engagement, connecting governmental strategies and initiatives with complementary, yet essential, community voluntary action.
  • Many of the SDGs call for long-term attitude and behavior changes - for example, in the way we live together or in the way we consume. Volunteers facilitate changes in mindsets by raising awareness or championing those changes and inspiring others.
  • The SDGs require a 'data revolution' to collect and analyze disaggregated data to monitor progress. Volunteers can help measure progress on SDG implementation by collecting data, providing expertise and supporting participatory forms of planning and monitoring. Volunteerism, as a form of civic engagement, is a way to strengthen state-citizen accountability mechanisms for the coming decades.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Come Join Us To Achieve SDGs   
                                                 Contact us at : communications@heeals.org 


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