The text of this post is drawn from a report authored by the United Nations Volunteers, which is available for download here. Center Director Lester Salamon, spoke at this event.
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The presenters at the UNV side event to the 46th Session of the UN Statistical Commission. L-R: Rafael Diez de Medina (ILO), Lester Salamon (JHU), Mae Chao (UNV), and Muna K.C. (Restless Development Nepal), Jacqueline Butcher (CIESC), and Milorad Kovacevic (HDRO).
One of the outcomes of the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in 2013 was a resolution on the Statistics of Work, Employment, and Labour Underutilization. The resolution was approved by ILO in March 2014. This resolution provides the first internationally agreed on basis for a framework for measurement of volunteer work.
This resolution has important implications for international recognition of volunteer work for several reasons. The resolution has introduced a comprehensive framework for measurement of all work, paid and unpaid. Critically, it recognizes volunteer work as one specific form of work. For the first time the labour statistics community has recognized the importance of volunteer work and thus for the first time this will be statistically visible globally.
The new framework goes beyond the prior standards and recognizes services provided by household members and by volunteers as work. It marks a shift in understanding of the importance of all kinds of work not just for macroeconomic development but also for social cohesion and social development at the household, community, and national levels. This indicates that the shift in our understanding that development requires a focus on both its economic and social dimensions has percolated into labour statistics.
By virtue of this Resolution we now have in the body of an international standard an agreed concept and definition of volunteer work as well as some guidelines for their regular measurement. It also means that countries have recognized the importance of measuring volunteer work to inform policies.
The concept and definition of volunteer work in the new standards is closely aligned with and builds on the ILO Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work (2011). The Resolution counts as volunteer work, any unpaid work that benefits any person other than members of the immediate family regardless of whether such family members live in one or multiple households. The Resolution thus excludes work done for family even if members of the family are not living in the same household. Recognizing the fact that what counts as family is influenced by culture and convention, the definition of family for these purposes is left to the individual countries.
The ILO envisions undertaking further methodological work on measurement of volunteer work in the coming years. These include distinguishing unpaid trainee work (eg. Internship) from volunteer work in the implementation of surveys, distinguishing support provided to volunteers to facilitate their work from payment, and promoting compilation of statistics on volunteers through organizations.
Greater push and funding for measurement of volunteer work is contingent on effective advocacy by the volunteer community, academia, governments, and UN institutions such as UNV about its value. One part of this will involve escalated advocacy on the value of volunteer work for human development in general and specifically for achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The second part of it will be presenting the statistics in a way that generates interest, debate, and research.
Given that volunteer work is now statistically situated within ILO’s framework for the statistics of work, employment, and labour underutilization, discussions on work – particularly on decent work – can serve as entry points for discussions on the value of volunteering. The forthcoming 2015 Human Development Report titled “Rethinking Work for Human Development” presents one such opportunity for creating the momentum for countries to measure volunteer work.
It is not enough to measure volunteer work. How statistics on volunteer work are presented can influence its uptake in discussions on development and public debate. Statistics on volunteer work can be presented as a dashboard of measures or a single composite index. Each one comes with its pros and cons.
Volunteer work is varied and spans many different sectors and activities. The diversity of volunteer work, together with the fact that the entirety of its value is extremely difficult to quantify, makes it difficult to combine various measures into a single index. Creating a single composite index will require imposing restrictive assumptions and limiting the scope of coverage.
For the purposes of analysis and research, the dashboard approach may offer the best way to present the data. However, a dashboard of measures may not be the most convenient for advocacy purposes.
A composite measure like a single index is easy to understand and compare across countries. This makes composite indices very useful as advocacy tools. A case in point is the Human Development Index which has had enormous success in drawing attention to issues of social policy and expansion of human choices despite its limited and restrictive form. These are tradeoffs that the volunteerism community will have to consider.
The most fundamental and crucial element in the measurement of volunteer work is the volunteer. In the context of the SDGs, volunteers will play a key role not just in assisting governments with delivery of development initiatives but more critically in monitoring and reporting on these initiatives. There are some key synergies in the advocacy work for measurement of volunteering, the advocacy needed for recognizing volunteers who often work outside the limelight, and making the case for greater participation and inclusion in the SDG discussions. These three agenda items are related and will need to place the volunteer at the centre as a participant, not merely as a subject.