Voluntary Service Overseas adopts new strategy

Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) recently unveiled a new strategy that it has adopted to represent their values and what the VSO stand for at the Paradise Suites Hotel, Kololi.

At a two-day Sensitization workshop, VSO said the launching of the new strategy, “People First” and the “Logo” came after 12 months of consultation with partners, beneficiaries, staff and volunteers.

The launching focuses on four issues: “Why is VSO Changing, the new VSO Strategy, How will we achieve our ambitions and what this means at the country office level”.

The VSO’s vision is a world without poverty and its mission is to bring people together to fight poverty. Since it believes that such poverty is unacceptable, with the new strategy (People First), they are passionate about putting the right people in the right place at the right time to bring about lasting change.

“Change is best brought about by people sharing knowledge, using knowledge in the right way to help us engage people, advocate and influence at all levels,” Haddy Lamin Njie, Country Representative of VSO said.

She stressed that working closely with developing communities helps narrow the distance between them and the donors. This is the best way to transform lives over the long term. She also said the more “we act like a global movement; the more influential we will be on the international stage and the greater our ability to eradicate poverty”. 

However, she said progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) though significant has been uneven. The global population has more than doubled during VSO’s history, from three billion in 1960 to almost seven billion in 2009.

This, she said is projected to rise to over nine billion in 30 years. “More people are living in hunger than ever before, over one billion people are classified to as hungry, the highest level since records began in 1970.

VSO, which operates in a number of countries around the world, said it changed the lives of over 20 million people in 44 countries in 2010, enabled over five million people to access better quality health services, improve the education of over million children and young people, and help improve the lives of one million disabled people and 4.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Source – The Voice Newspaper