Volunteering "Work" to Join World Economic Map
7 May 2007 at 1:29 pm
The International Labour Organization and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies in the US are set to develop an approach for putting volunteer ‘work’ on the economic map of the world for the first time. Their efforts will be helped by a start-up grant from the United Nations Volunteers group.
Lester Salamon, the director of the Center for Civil Society Studies within the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies says volunteerism is one of the great renewable resources for social problem-solving around the world, yet its scale and impact have never been fully measured.
He says the work of volunteers is one aspect of labour that has not been covered adequately in statistical systems up to now.
The new partnership between ILO and the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies aims to overcome this problem by developing a recommended procedure for measuring volunteer work through official labour force surveys in countries throughout the world.
This procedure will be presented to the International Conference of Labour Statisticians in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 2008.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies operates to improve understanding and the effective functioning of Not for Profit, philanthropic, or “civil society” organisations internationally.
