Volunteers: The Invisible Infrastructure | Habiburrahman Abed | TEDxShar e Naw

Quick Overview

Habiburrahman Abed argues that volunteers and local community engagement form the true, invisible infrastructure for resilience in crisis contexts like Afghanistan, emphasizing that formal systems are too slow and must recognize volunteers as strategic partners rather than just temporary helpers.

Key Points: Knowledge, capability, and experience are valuable only when they serve others, contrasting with keeping them hidden. The speaker, Habiburrahman Abed, grew up in a crisis context, fleeing his home at age seven due to conflict. His first volunteering role was teaching children deprived of formal schooling, which helped him transition to the humanitarian sector and join the United Nations. Globally, 2.1 billion people volunteer monthly, but in Afghanistan, there is no formal scale to measure this contribution, which is primarily informal. Local communities and volunteers are the backbone of community resilience and crisis response, often providing essential services like food, shelter, and transport when formal aid fails. The speaker calls for concrete actions at individual, community, and policy levels to invest in social infrastructure (like community capacity and volunteerism) rather than just physical infrastructure.

Context: Habiburrahman Abed delivers a TEDx talk at TEDxSharaeNaw, focusing on the critical, yet often invisible, role of volunteers and local communities in building resilience, especially in environments frequently affected by conflict and natural disasters like Afghanistan. He draws from his personal experience as a refugee who turned to volunteering to help others.

Detailed Analysis

Habiburrahman Abed begins by stating that knowledge and capabilities are only valuable when applied to serve others, contrasting this with keeping them hidden. He shares his personal background, having been forced to flee his home in Afghanistan at age seven due to conflict. His early experience volunteering to teach children who lacked formal schooling led him into the humanitarian sector and eventually to work with the United Nations in Afghanistan. Abed highlights that while global volunteerism is massive (2.1 billion people monthly), formal measurement systems often ignore this contribution in Afghanistan. He contrasts the slow response of formal systems with the immediate, life-saving actions of local volunteers and communities who provide food, shelter, and transport in crises like earthquakes. He uses the recent Eastern Afghanistan earthquake as an example where the initial response was insufficient, and the lack of basic infrastructure and services was apparent. Abed stresses that the real backbone of crisis response is not just external aid, but the local volunteers and communities themselves. He concludes by advocating for a shift in focus: instead of investing heavily only in physical infrastructure (buildings, vehicles), governments and organizations must invest in social infrastructure—building community capacity, valuing volunteer engagement as strategic partnership rather than temporary help, and ensuring volunteers are central to community solutions.