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Partnering with UNV

What is UNV?

The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme is the United Nations organization that promotes volunteerism to support peace and development worldwide, encouraging partners to integrate volunteerism into development programming and mobilizing volunteers. UNV embraces volunteerism as universal and inclusive, and recognizes the values that sustain it: free will, commitment, engagement and solidarity.

Volunteerism is a powerful means of engaging people in tackling development challenges. It can transform the pace and nature of development and it benefits both society at large and the individual volunteer by strengthening trust, solidarity and reciprocity among citizens and creating opportunities for participation.

UNV’s vision is a world where volunteerism is recognized, within societies, as a way for all people to contribute to and enhance sustainable development, peace and poverty eradication.

In its Strategic Framework 2014-2017, UNV aims to further engage stakeholders, including UN Member States, the UN system and volunteer-involving organizations, and to partner with them in contributing to achieving globally agreed development goals related to peace and development.

Why partner with UNV?

Partnerships between UNV and other organizations or entities are characterized by:

• an expectation and dialogue of mutual benefits;
• a commitment to shared outcomes which have been jointly defined;
• a clear definition of the partners’ roles and contributions;
• the existence of a framework to discuss and review progress towards shared outcomes.

UNV’s comparative advantage is the ability and knowledge to leverage the transformative potential of volunteerism, community voluntary action and civic engagement through active partnerships with civil society, volunteer involving organizations, United Nations’ agencies and governments around the world.

With 6500 UN Volunteers in the field in 2013, over 25,000 vetted, well-qualified potential volunteers, more than 300,000 potential online Volunteers and a growing number of UN Youth Volunteers, UNV provides a much-needed resource for UN entities, civil society and governments.

United Nations Volunteers

• are willing and able to work in diverse development and peace situations, including some of the most difficult contexts and remote locations;
• have the ability to work with people and organizations in local communities to leverage synergies between local knowledge and expert solutions;
• constitute a flexible, cost-effective resource in ensuring scale, impact and sustainability in peace and development interventions, including in crisis and post-crisis situations.
UNV also offers a strong knowledge base on the value of volunteerism, increased capacities to enable volunteer engagement in development processes, a focus on marginalized groups and populations and opportunities to advance South-South cooperation. Supporting UNV also enables partners to increase the visibility of their international engagement and development assistance.

There are four principal modalities for partners to support UNV with financial resources

1. Resource contributions to UNV’s Special Voluntary Fund (SVF): The SVF is a general contribution fund that is crucial in enabling UNV to initiate creative and pioneering activities that demonstrate the role that volunteerism and volunteers can play in social and economic development. Over the past years, UNV has funded key innovative activities through the SVF.

2. Resource contributions to UNDP/UNV Trust Funds (e.g. the Youth Trust Fund)

3. Full funding, i.e. the financing of individual UN Volunteer assignments. Fully funding UN Volunteers enables donors to provide opportunities for nationals of their own country to serve as UN Volunteers or to fund international UN Volunteers with other nationalities (including from the South) as well as national UN Volunteers (i.e. volunteers serving in their own country). In such cases the donor provides to UNV the full costs of the UN Volunteer assignment(s) to be funded. Fully funded UN Volunteers complete assignments in specific thematic and/or programme areas and priority countries that are within the UNV programmatic scope and of interest to the financing partner.

4. Resource contributions to cost sharing:  i.e. contributions for a project or programme. Co-financing enables governments and donors to fund specific UNV programmes, projects or events. There are three different ways to contribute specific funds. Donors can either partially co-finance projects through a Third Party cost-sharing agreement, finance an entire project through Third Party cost-sharing or contribute to a Trust Fund (donor contributions supporting broad themes and regional programmes are maintained in a Trust Fund).  UNV may also contribute funding to the programme or project.

Read the overview on partnering with UNV

For more information :


tel: +49-228-815 2000
fax: +49-228-815 2001

This page can found at: http://www.unv.org/partners.html