Volunteering is good for your health and is a national economic asset
- Wits University
Doing good positively affects individual well-being and skills, strengthens community trust and cohesion.
The economic valuation of recorded volunteer hours in Africa alone is worth over US$353 million annually, a large contribution to gross domestic product (GDP). Using the replacement cost method, researchers can show how economically significant volunteerism is to the region and that it also has social value.
This includes improved health outcomes, such as community health volunteers reducing maternal mortality; educational gains, such as volunteer teachers lowering pupil-teacher ratios and improving pass rates; and stronger social cohesion, as volunteers build trust and reduce conflict in communities.
From a statistical perspective, when these outcomes are modelled, volunteer involvement often explains variation in community resilience and service delivery that government spending alone cannot account for.
These estimates come from the African Union’s State of Volunteerism in Africa Report (2025), which is one of the most comprehensive assessments of volunteerism on the continent to date.
Professor Samuel Manda, a co-Principal Investigator at the Sub-Saharan Africa Consortium for Advanced Biostatistics (SSACAB) at the Wits School of Public Health, explains that the true impact of volunteerism extends far beyond what is currently captured in official data.
“Volunteerism is woven into daily life across Africa, including neighbours caring for one another, communities organising collectively, and traditions such as Ubuntu, Harambee and Umuganda shaping how people support one another. But most of this activity happens informally and falls outside official measurement systems,” he says.
Manda says that traditional metrics focus on formal volunteering through organisations, counting hours and numbers. They miss the vast informal sector where mutual aid and community self-help are prevalent.
He is also a statistician at the University of Pretoria, and the Principal Investigator of the Global Index of Volunteer Engagement (GIVE), a United Nations Volunteers-funded project. His team at the University of Pretoria developed and validated the GIVE measurement framework, which was published as Chapter 7 of the 2026 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report, the UNV’s flagship publication.
Importantly, GIVE is a measurement framework and not yet a data source. The next phase of the project will focus on operationalising the index so that countries can begin generating robust, comparable data on volunteerism.
Efforts such as the GIVE framework aim to provide a way to generate credible, comparable evidence on how volunteerism contributes to development. Unlike traditional approaches, the framework focuses on outcomes rather than inputs.
It examines how volunteering affects individual well-being and skills, strengthens community trust and cohesion, and is shaped by policy and cultural norms. It also incorporates household survey approaches, allowing it to capture everyday acts of helping that occur outside formal organisations.
“The key point is that by focusing on the effects of volunteering rather than counting only organised activities, we reflect what communities themselves value,” Manda explains.
When countries measure volunteer engagement properly, several tangible changes follow.
Volunteer contributions can be included in national statistics and development reporting, giving them weight in budget decisions. Governments can design evidence-based policies across sectors such as health, education and youth development. Legal protections and support systems for volunteers can be introduced. And credible data can attract investment from development partners.
African governments, Manda argues, are, however, under-managing one of their most important assets.
One of the most persistent misconceptions is that volunteering is simply “free labour”.
But the data shows otherwise. “It is not about getting work for free, but about leveraging a motivated workforce that multiplies the impact of public investment,” he says.
Does volunteering actually improve health?
Much of the existing research on volunteerism and health outcomes cannot definitively answer this question. Healthier individuals may be more likely to volunteer, while those who fall ill may stop. Other factors — such as income, education or social support — may influence both volunteering and health.
To address this, Manda is co-editing a new research collection focused on more rigorous methods, including longitudinal studies, natural experiments and quasi-experimental designs.
“If we want policy to take this seriously, we need stronger evidence,” he says.
If those causal links can be established, the implications could be significant, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
“Volunteerism could be deliberately integrated into health systems, for example, through community-based programmes that improve maternal health or vaccination coverage,” says Professor Tobias Chirwa, Principal Investigator at SSACAB and Head of the Wits School of Public Health.
Governments and donors could justify investing in training, supervision and support for volunteers as a cost-effective intervention. Task-shifting could be formalised in settings with health worker shortages, and social prescribing approaches could connect people to volunteering as part of broader care.
Manda adds that this would also change how volunteers themselves are treated.
“With clear evidence of impact comes a stronger obligation to ensure their safety, training and fair support. We must shift from seeing volunteers as a stopgap to recognising them as essential contributors to health systems.”
The Sub-Saharan Africa Advanced Consortium for Biostatistics (SSACAB) aims to enhance the use of data to inform public health policy and practice across Sub-Saharan Africa. SSACAB II serves as a collaborative platform that connects African and Northern academic institutions to strengthen researchers' biostatistical skills.