Volunteering in Emergencies: Protect. Promote. Recognize.

To design and support policies that promote volunteering, governments need to measure and disseminate the economic value they bring to communities. Tools now exist to calculate this information. In March 2011, the International Labour Organization (ILO) issued the Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work. When the IFRC used the ILO’s methodology, it found that active volunteers for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement contributed close to 6 billion US dollars worth of services worldwide in 2009 – or close to 90 US cents for every person on earth. The manual’s researchers estimate the total economic value of the world’s volunteer workforce at nearly 1.4 trillion US dollars, or more than 2 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP). It is more difficult to measure the social value of volunteers, but governments should be aware that people working side by side and delivering services to the vulnerable create a sense of community empowerment and solidarity that money cannot buy.

IFRC, 2011

Are you sure you want to delete this "resource"?
This item will be deleted immediately. You cannot undo this action.
File Name File Size Download
protect_promote_recognize.pdf 2 MB

Related Resources

Guidance material
02 Feb 2016
Disasters and Alerts 
Tags: Guidance material
Guidance material
28 Apr 2015
Building on the broad range of cash experiences within the Movement and in the humanitarian sector, these guidelines provide practical, step-by-step support to the design and implementation of cash programmes. The objective of the guidelines is twofo...
Tags: Guidance material
Guidance material
27 Jul 2017
Ce guide fournit des informations qui permettront de mieux connaître et comprendre le Mouvement, afin de renforcer encore les relations solides et précieuses qui existent déjà entre les parlementaires et la Société nationale de chaque pays. Les...
Tags: Guidance material, Disaster Law
Scroll to Top