Mr. Toily Kurbanov, the Deputy Executive Coordinator of the United Nations Volunteers Programme (UNV), has held a top-10 spot on the UN Social 500 leaderboard for the past year. I asked Mr. Kurbanov to share his unique perspective from his work with UNV and inquire about the secret behind his social media success. Here is a transcript of the telephone conversation edited lightly for brevity and flow.
Simone Dominique: If you can, tell me a little about your background.
Toily Kurbanov: Well, I have been working at the UNV for the last 1 year. I am an economist by training and also a specialist in public administration. Equally important, if not more important, I’m a husband, and a father, and a son, and a brother, and a friend. I’m a Russian, and I’m also a Turkmen. So these are different roles I have—the identities I carry.
Dominique: Can you tell me something memorable about your story?
Kurbanov: I don’t know if there’s anything particularly unique about me. I think I belonged to my generation in my part of the world. I found myself crossing borders, though: I was born in one country, raised in another, and worked in a third country—all because we were going through the transformation from the former Soviet Union.
I moved from one airport to another, you know, from one side of the Iron Curtain to the other. That’s not really a unique experience, but it sheds light on my background and describes my path.
Dominique: How did you end up at the UN?
Kurbanov: I applied for a job at the UN while doing my second degree at Harvard Kennedy School, and at one of the job fairs, I met future colleagues from the UN who were headhunting for staff. UNDP is the organization I originally joined and still remain with. They used to have what was known as the Leadership Development Program, where they recruited up to one dozen individuals annually to train and fast-track within UNDP.
Dominique: Tell me a little bit about what your job entails and what a typical day looks like.
Kurbanov: I have 2 typical days because I work at the headquarters and in the field. The UN volunteers are an important part of the UN system. On any given day, we have about 6000 volunteers serving across the entire spectrum of UN operations. They volunteer in peace, security, and development with organizations such as UNDP and UNICEF. They also volunteer in humanitarian action through UNHCR, WFP, OCHA, UNICEF, and other parts of the UN system that are at the front lines of meeting the needs of the most vulnerable people, especially in situations of protracted crisis.
And who do you see when you go to the frontlines of peace, development, and humanitarian work? You see United Nations volunteers.
So that’s what my [typical] day looks like. I am out in the field, meeting with the UN volunteers, learning more about their assignments and how we can be most useful to them, meeting with the UN colleagues, and trying to create an enabling environment for volunteer opportunities within the UN system. I am increasing the volunteer opportunities and meeting with the government counterparts as well as with donors because none of these things that we do can be done in isolation. They require multi-stakeholder coalitions.
Then my [second typical] day is when I am at the headquarters. I help to run the organizational machinery supporting the volunteers: I meet with colleagues from across the UN system, I meet our own team, and I try to make sure, together with the rest of our management team, that the UNV is responsive, agile, effective, efficient, and a great place to work.
Dominique: What are you passionate about? I get a sense of it through your Twitter account. Please tell me in your own words.
Kurbanov: My family is the first thing that comes to my mind. I am passionate about the world that we will hand over to the next generation and my children. I am concerned that the world we leave behind is not going to be a better world than the one we inherited from our parents. I can’t say definitely the outcome, but I want to make sure it’s a world where we have fewer inequalities, where human rights are upheld, [that it’s a] world that is less susceptible to climate disasters, and a world where children have opportunities to grow and contribute to their communities.
Dominique: Do you see progress with what you’re doing?
Kurbanov: I think we’re getting somewhere. We will know only with the benefit of hindsight, but we are not shying away from the real issues, which is an important requirement in making a difference. You’re not just making some cosmetic change or superficially addressing the development and humanitarian concerns, like dealing with symptoms, but you are also dealing with the root causes.
One of the real issues that we’re not shying away from in the UN system is the transition from humanitarian action to development assistance. When there is a crisis, the initial response is about immediate relief and needs to lead to longer-term recovery. One needs to exercise a duty of care through humanitarian action, helping vulnerable communities while not creating a dependency on external assistance. So our job is to help the communities build back better, develop their internal capacity and resilience, and put them on a sustainable path for development.
So, there is a delicate link between humanitarian and development work. We know it will not be easy to transfer from a humanitarian phase to development, especially in protracted crises. We grew up at a time when crises were time-bound: there was a disaster, and then there was an end to the disaster, and there was a recovery stage. Or there would have been an awful incident where, whether it was conflict or civil unrest, entire communities got displaced, but eventually, things would return to normal mode. But nowadays, we see so many protracted crises where we don’t see the end of the misery, and there aren’t many solutions for them.
Dominique: Does it take a toll on you when you see that day in and day out, where a crisis continues on and on, and the volunteers are working so hard but there may not be a solution a year out? How does that affect you emotionally?
Kurbanov: It’s very, very emotionally taxing, to say the least.
We also need to be humble. The United Nations Volunteers are only one part of the United Nations system, and often, even when the entire spectrum of the UN’s assets and operations are involved, solutions are still not easy to come by. So much remains beyond the control of the United Nations system. We know that solutions that need to be found will be sustainable only when they address not just the symptoms of a crisis but also the root causes of the crisis.
But we need to keep hope and realize that there aren’t straightforward solutions. Often, this is not a linear process. There are a lot of trials and errors, maybe even going in circles for a time. But we need to engage the affected population, and we need to assure them that the international community is with them.
Dominique: So this next question, I’m asking this question hoping that there’s something that can help other people from the UN or anybody else who reads this outside of the UN system: Has there been an obstacle that you faced, and can you share a way that you overcame it?
Kurbanov: What we’re trying to do is apolitical. It’s directed towards the communities and towards building national capacity. But, of course, everything is taking place in a political context. So it is important for us as United Nations staff and volunteers not to be ignorant of the political context but also to be aware and sensitive. I think our overarching principle, whether it concerns our day-to-day job or social media presence, should be to do no harm and recognize there is so much at stake. Every word we say and the message we send may have profound implications, especially in today’s interconnected world.
Dominique: Is there a specific obstacle you can say, something you tackled that could help?
Kurbanov: At the risk of sounding vague, who was that—I think Keynes—who has said that I prefer to be vaguely right than precisely wrong. In the United Nations system and in the international development and humanitarian community in general, we have many passionate people, very competent people, and a lot of strong-willed people. Operating in challenging circumstances requires a certain commitment to try to make a difference. We have many visionaries with many ideas about how to solve a particular problem. What I have learned over the years is that it doesn’t matter how clear or inspiring your vision is. What matters more is how successful you will be in offering that vision to others, adjusting it, co-opting their views, and making it a common vision.
A concrete example of this would be what happens daily in any country where we have multiple UN agencies trying to address different development or humanitarian constraints together with their national counterparts. It is much more important that we transform that vision into a shared UN vision, something that brings to bear the entire wealth of expertise of the United Nations system, which is therefore even more helpful to the countries and the communities that we serve because that would be then the vision, or a project, or a platform, or a coalition, or an initiative that reflects comparative advantages of different UN Agencies such as UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA, etcetera. And that’s a daily obstacle. It cannot be simply singularly resolved with a single measure. It’s a careful balancing act, especially when working in the field.
To summarize, the two principles would be to do no harm and to try to coalesce the rest around the vision. This vision may not then have your own copyright, but it will be a shared vision and much more impactful.
Dominique: Thank you. Okay, let’s talk social media. Do you remember the first time you tweeted? How long ago was that?
Kurbanov: It would have been about six years ago, when I was working in the Pacific Island countries, in Fiji.
Dominique: How did that feel tweeting out to the world?
Kurbanov: Awkward. I wasn’t tweeting to the world. I was tweeting to the one follower I had at that time, my former boss. A social media presence is an interesting way of self imposing discipline. A social media presence only matters if it’s consistent. You don’t have to have a quota on how many tweets you have daily, but you have to be consistent. When you Tweet regularly and internalize that practice, it becomes a useful tool in terms of distilling the message and staying to the point. That could be applied to daily interactions, whether in speech or talking to volunteers.
Dominique: How much time do you spend on social media every week?
Kurbanov: I never counted how much time I spent. When I was in Myanmar, I knew how much time I spent because that was the time I was standing in traffic. One hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. Now it’s different. I’m traveling a lot, not standing in traffic but on the road, or on a plane. Maybe one or two hours a day. It’s not just about putting something out but also reading up on what others have to say on Twitter and Linkedin. It is a much more efficient way of learning from others and broadcasting your news in terms of the time spent or the resources spent than the alternatives we have in the digital world or print world.
Dominique: I must find out why you rank so high on the UN Social 500. What are you doing? Why is your social media Klout score so high?
Kurbanov: Honestly, they have this algorithm error somewhere. Every time I see my ranking on the UN Social 500, I’m amused.
Dominique: [laughter] Let’s drill down. Your Klout score has risen in the past year. What have you been doing differently on social media?
Kurbanov: I joined UNV one year ago. The ultimate purpose of my social media presence is to give justice to the great work that UN volunteers are doing out there in the field. I’m in a position where I can broadcast my views and get those heard by others. Not every one of the 6,000 volunteers has that position, so it is my responsibility to the entire United Nations volunteer community and to our colleagues in UNHCR, UNDP, and other field offices working with United Nations volunteers.
I think that the UN Volunteers mandate is a beautiful mandate, and it’s a very important mandate in our troubled world that we have people who are willing to go out there to serve the communities in foreign countries or even sometimes in their own country. So, if I have any standing on the social media boards, it’s because of the mandate that I try to represent and to give justice.
I try to communicate in a way that is not fluffy and not jargon-ridden. It’s not all about general concerns and aspirations; it speaks to realities as much as openness backed up by evidence. I’m a bit of a history nerd and a data nerd, so I will tweet and retweet interesting historical facts and data visualisations.
Dominique: Has the UN Social 500 helped you in any way?
Kurbanov: The first time I saw the UN Social 500, I immediately followed the top 30 [Players], which is already an important tool for me. I’ve learned so much by following those UN colleagues, and I still follow them.
Dominique: How can a person become a UN Volunteer?
Kurbanov: We have 2 ways of volunteering within the UN system. You can volunteer as a person working in the field or online, working on location-neutral tasks. [To learn more about volunteering at the United Nations, please visit https://www.unv.org/]
Dominique: That’s great. In closing, is there a question that I didn’t ask that I should be asking you?
Kurbanov: No, but I enjoyed having this conversation.
Dominique: I did, too. Thank you for sharing and for the work you do.
