Blind spots in plain sight: the unsung heroes of online volunteering
In 2022, a French woman living in Kenya and equipped only with a laptop mapped urban shelters for civilians looking for safety in Ukraine. That was my blind spot.
Next year, a group of Chinese, Iranians and Filipinos¡ªwho had never met each other before¡ªused machine learning to label solar installations to help boost renewable energy in Africa. That was also my blind spot.
And as I write this opinion, a Brazilian is helping with remote assessment of the number of women needing urgent reproductive health assistance in catastrophic Gaza. Another blind spot.
Have you figured out your blind spots too?
The common thread in these stories is that each of the protagonists was an Online Volunteer. Through their laptops, their smartphones, their tablets, Online Volunteers¡ªas expert and dedicated as any other professionals in their field are¡ªclicked away their share of assistance to humanitarian and development. We can¡¯t see them¡ªthey¡¯re conveniently behind a screen somewhere around the world. But we can see their work¡ªit¡¯s in plain sight all around us.
Our first protagonist, the French volunteer, had signed up with the SDG Lab, where volunteers from 45 countries worked remotely to assess the everyday social services and to digitalize them in conflict areas. The volunteer, working from afar, mapped different types of urban shelters and reconstruction sites where people could take refuge. She also developed .
In one of the most ambitious energy access programmes Africa Mini-Grids, our second group of protagonists teamed up remotely to use open-source machine learning software. First, they and then developed the algorithm to support mini-grid installations in sub-Saharan Africa¡ªwhere some 570 million people still don¡¯t have access to electricity.
And most recently for Gaza, Online Volunteers are working round the clock collecting crucial evidence from the warfront and analyzing the needs for the hundreds of thousands on the ground who gravely need help in the face of famine, disease and destroyed infrastructure. From their homes in Brazil, Italy, Jordan, and many other countries, Online Volunteers map, translate, analyze and advocate so the world hears the voices of Gazans.
are becoming a digital powerhouse of the 51³Ô¹Ï. They are not bots, but real people¡ªwith massive collective brain and a huge heart¡ªreadily available, skilled and able to hit the virtual ground running in just more than a blink. They work from afar but are at the core of peace, humanitarian and development efforts. They bring data science into action and walk the talk on volunteering.
This digital powerhouse can¡ªand, I dare say, will¡ªgrow in leaps and bounds.
: It takes just a couple of days to recruit a volunteer for an online assignment from of about 350,000 candidates. Once the volunteer is onboard, the assignment can start immediately¡ªfrom anywhere in the world to where that help is needed. Just this year alone UN agencies posted almost 18,000 requests for volunteers for digital tasks. The number is up from 9,200 in 2023.
And yet, the demand for online volunteers far underwhelms the supply. Even from last year to now, demand has increased but not at par with what it can and should be. But for that, we need to remove our blind spot: the unseen and under-appreciated kindness of humanity¡ªand the global scale of solidarity and devotion to do good in the digital and still the very human era.
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Online Volunteers are becoming a digital powerhouse of the 51³Ô¹Ï. They work from afar but are at the core of peace, humanitarian and development efforts. They bring data science into action and walk the talk on volunteering.
