By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 19 2001 (IPS)

The United Nations says it is being overwhelmed by volunteers offering their services and expertise to work on UN projects worldwide.

“We have no supply problem,” exults Sharon Capeling-Alakija of Canada, Executive Coordinator of United Nations Volunteers (UNV), a Bonn-based UN body which celebrates its 30th anniversary Thursday.

“We have about 3,000 ready to be deployed at any given time, and we get about 30,000 applications every year,” she told reporters Monday.

Although voluntarism was one of the best-kept secrets of the United Nations, she noted, the number of UN volunteers in active service has climbed from about 41 in 1971, when the programme began, to 2,700 in 1991 and more than 5,000 today. In all, some 30,000 volunteers from 157 countries have served.

The UN’s regular staff numbers about 32,800, of which 14,300 are based in New York and about 18,500 are in field operations overseas.

Capeling-Alakija said one of UNV’s more successful projects is the volunteer programme to fight HIV/AIDS.

Since 1990, more than 150 UN volunteers have served 36 anti-AIDS projects at community, national and regional levels. Currently, 68 volunteers, mostly HIV-positive, are working directly with HIV/AIDS programmes. “These are people-to-people projects, getting communities involved in coping with the disease,” she said.

In Botswana, a country devastated by HIV/AIDS, 20 national UNV specialists train local people, manage district AIDS projects and distribute AIDS literature throughout the southern African country under a project funded by the government and the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

“We have given a human face and voice to the epidemic through the recruitment and placement of people living with HIV/AIDS as national UN volunteers,” she added.

Perhaps one of the longest-standing programmes in the field of human rights was in Guatemala, where UNV had as many as 300 volunteers working in support of human rights verification and education.

UNV’s largest single operation in its 30-year history is under way in East Timor, where volunteers are helping to establish a new nation state.

As of last week, 820 UN volunteers had offered their services to set up registration centres, the main pre-requisite for East Timor’s first national assembly elections, scheduled to take place August 30.

The entire election process in East Timor will be largely organised and conducted by volunteers in collaboration with the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations.

Volunteers in East Timor were also working on issues ranging from forestry and fisheries to border control, district finances, gender affairs, human rights, forensics, civil engineering, water and sanitation, judicial affairs, disaster preparedness, political affairs, research and census, health, trade, public information and taxation.

The average UN volunteer is about 35 to 40 years old with five to 10 years of professional experience, a master’s degree, and fluency in two or three languages. About 38 percent of the volunteers are female.

Capeling-Alakija said she was trying to increase that figure to over 40 percent, but in operations like strife-torn Sierra Leone, most of the volunteers were involved in male-dominated areas of expertise such as logistics, civil aviation and radio operations in support of UN peacekeeping operations.

The largest numbers of UN volunteers have been in East Timor (820), Yugoslavia (763), Guatemala (244), Mozambique (139), Bosnia- Herzegovina (137), Tanzania (125), Sierra Leone (107), Cambodia (104) and Laos (100).

UNV has also begun recruiting volunteers online, Capeling-Alakija said. Since the service was launched in February 2000, more than 5,800 people have signed up to offer their services through the Internet, at www.netaid.org.

Although volunteers are not paid salaries, they are entitled to a monthly living allowance and are also covered by health and medical insurance. Every volunteer is permitted to bring up to three dependents during his or her assignment. All travel arrangements are handled by UNV.

Several industrial nations, including Italy, Spain and Belgium, cover the full costs of volunteers from their own countries.

UNV projects have a total programme value of about 100 million dollars. The annual administrative costs, estimated at 14 million dollars, are provided by UNDP.

In his Millennium Report last September, Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked UNV to take the lead in bringing together a coalition of partners to launch the proposed UN Information Technoloy Service.

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