In 2023, La Guilde's international volunteering activity returned to the order of magnitude of 2019, the historic maximum reached on the eve of the pandemic in March 2020.
With 274 young people leaving for civic service, a new record has been broken. As for International Solidarity volunteers, 202 of them left with La Guilde in 2023, a little less than in 2019 (220 departures), but more than in 2022 (186 departures). In total, we are therefore talking about 476 volunteers who started a mission in 2023, compared to 404 the previous year, 19% growth. This once again places La Guilde at the forefront in the French landscape.
In the multiple partnerships that La Guilde establishes to achieve this objective, the majority welcome only one, two or three volunteers, alongside a few large historical partners, such as IECD or Interaide.
This dynamism is not the result of chance, but of the work of a reorganized and very mobilized volunteer team. It faces international crises and ever-increasing areas of insecurity. The red spots, exclusion zones for international volunteering, are spreading across the world map, closing the Sahel (with the exception of half of Chad and Mauritania) and recently Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, for a period that we hopefully as short as possible.
In this changing geography, we will note 10 departures for Argentina, a novelty, and 21 in Central Asia (the group of six “Stans”), twice as many as in 2022. With more sending of young people into civic service in local associations, new countries are emerging in the top 10 for departures, such as Tunisia, India and Togo, all of which rise to third place with 25 departures for each destination; follow Senegal, Peru and Colombia. In total, departures involved 75 countries, or 5 more than in 2022. Cambodia and Madagascar retain the first two places on the podium.
More generally, Asia as a whole, West Africa thanks to the coastal countries and Latin America and particularly the Andes are on the rise, the rest of Africa being stable in numbers.
[These statistics – positive – say little about the richness of the partnerships and the quality of the missions in progress. On the other hand, they demonstrate the growing opportunities that The Guild provides for the engagement of young people around the world.]
