It is unlikely that there are UN days that simply pass unnoticed, except with regard to nationwide public activities, as that is reserved for some of them. Falling on a weekend, chances are that these three events may attract restricted professional groupings for reflection.
One of them, the International Day of Banks is being marked on Saturday December 4, dating only from late 2019 when the UN General Assembly decided to celebrate banks every December 4 to highlight their contribution to achieving sustainable development goals. This reasoning makes the commemoration quite close to the one the following day, titled the International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development, on Sunday December 5. It however has a longer observance history, dating back to 1985. Chroniclers say it offers an opportunity for kindred organizations and individual volunteers to promote the spirit of volunteering, encourage governments to support volunteer efforts and recognize volunteer contributions to realizing the UN Sustainable Development Goals set for 2030. Not by budgeting alone!
The volunteering spirit is championed by the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme, which one can say was modeled around the United States Peace Corps initiative. At 60 years of independence we ought to salute the spirit of the young men and women who helped founder president Mwalimu Nyerere in efforts to spread schooling at all levels, especially adult education and community (fork development) schools. In all these stages and including original spreading of secondary schools, volunteers did plenty of work and those of us who schooled at that period remember our Peace Corps teachers. They taught sports, and many of the country’s youth learned basketball during that period, and even a little bit of rugby!
By contrast, the World Soil Day also marked on December 5 started in 2015 as an International Year of Soils, as an aspect of worldwide struggle for food security, propagation of improved or green farming methods to protect soils, instead of feeding them with chemical nutrition which many environmentalists question. Some of this educative work is being done by extension officers and financial sector advisers when credit is needed for farming projects, etc. Volunteers first raised activist alarm on declining soils.
One such whistleblower was the late Professor Rene Dumont whose classic work, False Start in Africa has remained the basic text on environmental destruction and poverty after independence. We admittedly didn’t do enough to stem the process, with the villagisation initiative depleting trees as well as technology failure to exploit coal for domestic cooking after modification. Had we had more volunteer organisations at that time we could possibly have done better, both with soils and environment, so it is a continuing agenda for volunteers, activists, even bankers.
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