Volunteerism helps people gain knowledge, apply their skills and extend and strengthen people-people and people-state relationships. Volunteers support state authorities to address pressing and emergent development challenges. Volunteering has many benefits including new or better employment opportunities and personal development. Additionally, volunteer work activities enhance social solidarity, social capital and the quality of life in society. (International Labour Organisation, 2021; United Nations Volunteers, 2021). However, there is a scarcity of data and statistics to empirically document the contributions of volunteers to the development and well-being of individuals and communities. Thus, the development potential of volunteer work has largely remained indiscernible. 

United Nations Volunteers (UNV) has been exploring the possibility of developing a global volunteer index to generate and validate evidence and data on the magnitude of volunteer contributions to development. In its Strategic Framework (2022-25), UNV intentionally directed efforts to strengthen evidence-based knowledge on the measurement of the contribution and impact of volunteering to global poverty eradication and development efforts (United Nations Volunteers, 2021). This was in response to the increasing interest and demand for the integration of volunteerism into national development and implementation frameworks. Timely and reliable volunteer work data and statistics are significant in measuring people's voluntary contribution to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The derived evidence on the contribution and impact of volunteer work could support policy-makers better at devising inclusive and effective policies targeting marginalised and disadvantaged population groups (International Labour Organization, 2021)

The Global Volunteer Index will be designed to measure interconnected dimensions of volunteerism and will be constructed based on a comprehensive set of indicators covering the critical aspects of volunteerism. The Index will contribute data and evidence to the discourse of measurement of volunteer contributions, encourage commitment by countries to invest in the collection and production of volunteer work statistics and indicators; and provide the means to estimate the overall impacts of volunteer work on individuals, communities and the economy. The Global Volunteer Index will be a key international resource that measures volunteer work across UN member states and territories. There are several volunteer indices in use today. However, there is a lack of a universal framework for measuring volunteerism that policymakers can follow to produce timely, reliable and harmonised data on volunteerism.  Such a framework would need to provide guidelines and principles for policymakers and researchers to determine the state of volunteerism at national levels.