Who Shows Up
By Qumuna Editorial Team · Reviewed by Qumuna Product Review
A worldwide look at organisation-based volunteering: where people give unpaid time through charities, congregations, clubs and associations, how that compares with direct help, and why survey recall periods matter.
Short answer: Belonging to something — a church, a charity, a sports club, a parent association, a patients’ group — is measured in labour statistics as organisation-based volunteering: unpaid work done for others through an organisation. The ILO and UN Volunteers put the global figure at 11.7% of working-age people, against 25% who help others directly, person to person. Sixty-seven countries and territories measure it. What they find ranges from more than half the adult population to barely one in a thousand.
Civic life worldwide. ILO · Eurostat · national household surveys.
Headline figures
Global estimate — 11.7%: of working-age people volunteer through an organisation (ILO & UNV, 2026).
Volunteers worldwide — 2.1bn: people volunteer in a typical month, formally or informally.
Highest measured — 51.1%: Norway, followed by Canada at 41.1% and the Netherlands at 36.0%.
Countries with data — 67: of roughly 195 — most of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East never ask.
Where people volunteer through an organisation
Share of the adult or working-age population doing unpaid work through a charity, church, club, association or other organisation, in each country’s most recent national survey. Hover any country for its year, survey and figures. Keyboard focus and touch provide the same details in Qumuna’s presentation.
Countries that measure all volunteering without splitting it by type are distinguished from countries with no comparable national survey.
Where volunteering is most organised
The twenty highest rates on record, drawn from the 51 countries and territories that report organisation-based volunteering separately. Full figures for every country are in the table further down.
The continent that measures itself most closely
Europe is the one region where nearly every country asks the same question in the same year: the EU’s 2022 survey on income and living conditions carried a common module on social participation. Figures marked † are from the 2015 round, the latest available for those countries.
Most of the world’s volunteering never touches an organisation
Statisticians count two kinds. Organisation-based volunteering runs through a charity, congregation, club or association. Direct volunteering is unpaid help given straight to someone outside your own household. Globally the second is more than twice the first — and in the countries that measure both, the gap between a country’s two habits is often wider than the gap between countries.
Sources
ILOSTAT, Volunteer rate by sex and type of volunteer work (POP_XVOL_SEX_VOL_RT), compiled from national labour force, time-use and household surveys. European figures are Eurostat’s EU-SILC ad-hoc module on social participation, 2022 and 2015 (ilc_scp19). Global totals from the ILO and UN Volunteers, State of the World’s Volunteerism Report 2026. Retrieved September 2026.
Definition
Organisation-based volunteering is unpaid, non-compulsory work carried out through an organisation: charities, religious congregations, sports and cultural clubs, parent and school associations, patient and self-help groups. It excludes giving money, and membership without activity.
Comparability
The single biggest caveat is the recall period. Thirty-nine countries ask about the past twelve months; fifteen ask about the past four weeks and ten about the past week. A short recall mechanically produces a much smaller number, which is why Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan sit near zero here. Those countries carry a ‡. Survey years also differ, from 2010 to 2025; each country’s year is shown on hover and in the table.
Source inconsistency: the embedded 67-row dataset contains 46 twelve-month, 11 four-week and 10 one-week observations, rather than the narrative counts above. The accompanying visualisations and table follow those row-level values and do not silently change them.
Coverage
Sixty-seven countries and territories measure volunteering in a way the ILO or Eurostat can compile. China, India, Nigeria, most of Africa, most of South Asia and most of the Middle East do not appear at all. Malta, Singapore, Cape Verde and Aruba are too small to draw at world scale and are labelled with a marker. Crimea is drawn within Ukraine.
Related resources
Next step
Use the maps and complete table together, and check the year and recall period before comparing any two countries. Missing data means “not measured,” never zero.
