Global estimates of volunteer work.

Understanding of the global scale, nature and impact of volunteer work remains limited. Key questions remain, such as how many people volunteer and in what ways. Answering these questions requires robust, comparable and timely data. This is more than an academic exercise – it is a strategic necessity. The COVID-19 pandemic starkly demonstrated that communities rely on informal volunteer networks for survival and support when formal systems are strained or absent. 75 The link to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is more critical than ever. Volunteerism is recognized as a powerful and cross-cutting means of implementing the entire Agenda. New estimates provide a muchneeded baseline to advocate for the greater inclusion of volunteerism in national development strategies and Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs). Its contributions have often been under-reported and undervalued. This chapter builds on previous initiatives to provide new estimates of volunteer engagement at both global and regional levels. Although progress has been made in measuring volunteer work at the national level, estimating the total number of volunteers around the world within a given period remains a complex undertaking. As discussed in different chapters of this Report, volunteer work is diverse, encompassing a wide range of activities and modalities, from structured engagements to spontaneous acts of solidarity. Its form varies significantly depending on local contexts, cultural traditions, governance structures and resource availability. Consequently, there is no universal agreement on what constitutes volunteer work and definitions often differ from one country to another (see chapter 2). Such challenges can affect the accuracy of national accounts and labour statistics in representing the extent of volunteering. 

As indicated in chapter 1, the 2026 SWVR takes a broad approach, following the United Nations General Assembly, which defined it in 2001 as “a wide range of activities, including traditional forms of mutual aid and self-help, formal service delivery and other forms of civic participation, undertaken of free will, for the general public good and where monetary reward is not the principal motivating factor.”  This definition serves as the general framework for this Report (see chapter 1) and the guiding principle for the GIVE (see chapter 7). It encompasses a wider range of activities for the public good to better capture civic engagement and mutual aid, while also recognizing the importance of contextual variations in how volunteering is understood. For the purposes of the global estimates, this chapter considers the statistical definition of volunteer work from the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS), which is narrower than the United Nations General Assembly definition (see Box 3.1 for further details on the definition of volunteer work). Under the ICLS definition, “people in volunteer