UN Sustainable Development Goals

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend. As ever, he did what I expected him to do and covered the breadth of this subject with intensity but also personal knowledge and understanding that I have a lot of respect and time for, and he knows that.

Since so many other noble Lords have talked about the more general issues, I want to speak about a particular issue. Some noble Lords may say, “She’s at it again”. I want to speak about what the SDGs say about the role of volunteering in delivering outcomes. We rarely talk about it. We have incredibly good experience of and knowledge about it, but we have sort of abandoned it, and we need to get back to it.

Noble Lords have heard this from me before if they have been in debates such as this one, but I value enormously the role that Voluntary Service Overseas has played in my life and recognise that it has had the same effect on many other people’s lives. I went to Kenya to teach from 1967 to 1969. That was a long time ago, but it changed my life. Since I came back, I have never let go of keeping in touch with VSO, pursuing its objectives and understanding the changes in how volunteering now works. I was involved in its governance for over 10 years and have seen that volunteering is very different from when I did it all those years ago. It is now seen and recognised across the world as a very important means of developing objectives in international development.

I am sure noble Lords know that there is now a global volunteering standard. More than 60 organisations around the world have signed up to it, including the African Union. I went to Ethiopia after the signing of the SDGs and met the AU. We signed a memorandum of understanding between VSO and the African Union to develop national volunteering around Africa. VSO now works through joining together international volunteers, who usually come from here, with national volunteers who are volunteering in their own country. Frequently, they will be moved to another part of that country so that they learn a bit more about their country, in Kenya often working with a different tribe in the locality and so on. This means that high numbers of young people in and around Africa, as well as in Asian countries, have developed skills in leadership, working together and going across borders of traditional ways of doing things and have been able to participate with international volunteers, particularly young people, in tackling climate change and in peace and reconciliation at a very local level. They live in the local community and work with the local people and build their resilience and knowledge and understanding of how to tackle these issues.

I therefore agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Lane- Fox, that we see the inspirational and challenging things that are happening that local people are pursuing and that we are letting go. We gave up the youth volunteering programme during Covid, and I understand why, but we lost a raft of people who knew what to do and how to do it. I know that there are now thoughts in the FCDO about how we return to that, and I urge the Government to get on top of that and look at it much more carefully.

VSO is doing some incredible work on the border of Sudan and Ethiopia and in the Philippines on peace and reconciliation and on how local people can think about the things that will keep their community going, whatever is happening, and how they do that. Some of the work is remarkable and, as I say, inspiring. It is also working on issues around women and girls, particularly what is happening to them in conflict, and on climate change. On climate change, a lot of that is about how you develop resilience at a local level to make sure that a flood can be handled in a different way and the way that other climate change effects can be dealt with in the local community. This is what international development is all about, and it is also the way that many young people in this country have learned about the rest of the world and about how they can work in the rest of the world and get an enormous amount out of it themselves in terms of learning, skills and future opportunities.

There is someone here who did a short programme with the International Citizen Service. She came back and said, “I’ve totally changed my life aspirations and what I was going to do”; she is now working here in the CPA. We can change people’s views of what is going on in the developing world and the global South, if we get more involved and enable more young people, in particular, to get involved in volunteering.

I urge the Government on this. I know how tricky it is, but I have ideas for them which would mean that the new youth volunteering programme would cost a lot less than what the previous Government were working on when they left office. It can be done and I am sure that, even in times of difficulties, we can do it. I hope that the Government will take the opportunity to do that as quickly as possible.