Project: ILO PROJECT TO MEASURE VOLUNTEER WORK

Sponsor: United Nations Volunteers
Status: In process
IPS Staff: L ester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Helen Stone Tice, and Megan Haddock

Purpose and Approach

The International Labour Organization (ILO), based in Geneva, and the IPS Center for Civil Society Studies (CCSS) have agreed to develop an approach for putting volunteer work on the economic map of the world for the first time. Though the work of volunteers has been growing in importance in both developed and developing countries, its statistical measurement has been overlooked. The new partnership between the ILO and CCSS promises to overcome this problem by developing a recommended procedure for measuring volunteer work through official labor force surveys in countries throughout the world, thus fulfilling a mandate established in a 2003 UN Statistics Division Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions in the System of National Accounts. This procedure will be presented to the Inernational Conference of Labour Statisticians scheduled to convene in Geneva in December 2008.

Results

The International Labour Organization and Center for Civil Society Studies signed a collaboration agreement outlining their respective roles and responsibilities in April 2007. A technical experts committee has been formed and the first committee meeting planned for the summer of 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland.