Raquel Kasham Daniel Is Building a New Digital Home for Volunteering in Nigeria

For Raquel Kasham Daniel, volunteering has never been just about giving time.

It has been part of how she became who she is.

Long before Voluserve, before the idea of building a technology platform, before the conversations about service, skills and talent development, there was Raquel the volunteer.

She volunteered. She led volunteers. She built programmes that depended on volunteers. And, perhaps most importantly, she experienced what volunteering can do for a person who is still trying to find their place.

At a time when she was looking for work and kept running into the familiar problem of needing experience before anyone would give her a job, volunteering became one of the places where she could actually gain that experience.

She learnt by doing.

She met people. Took responsibility. Built skills. Made mistakes. Tried again.

And she began to see volunteering differently.

It wasn’t simply something you did because you wanted to help.

It could change you.

Years later, that understanding would come back to her in another form.

Raquel had already tried to solve part of the volunteering problem once.

In 2021, she launched Nzuriaiki, an online platform created to showcase volunteer opportunities and connect organisations with people who wanted to serve. At the time, the idea was simple: there were people willing to volunteer and organisations that needed volunteers, but finding each other was often harder than it should be.

The idea didn’t disappear.

It evolved.

Today, it has become Voluserve.

And this time, Raquel is building it as a technology platform with a much bigger question behind it:

What if volunteering could become a pathway for people to serve, learn, gain experience and grow?

That question is at the heart of Voluserve.

The platform helps people discover volunteer opportunities while giving organisations a place to find people who want to contribute. But Raquel doesn’t want Voluserve to stop at the point where someone finds an opportunity.

She is interested in what happens next.

What does the volunteer learn?

What skills do they develop?

What strengths do they discover?

What happens when someone who has been told they need experience before they can get an opportunity finally gets somewhere to practise?

And what happens when organisations begin to see volunteers not simply as extra hands, but as people who also need structure, learning, support and room to grow?

For Raquel, these aren’t abstract questions.

They come from years of working close to real people and real communities.

For more than a decade, her work has been deeply rooted in development. Through Beyond the Classroom Foundation, she has worked extensively with children and adolescent girls, particularly those living in underserved and vulnerable communities. Her work has focused on education, protection, menstrual health, safety, confidence and creating better opportunities for girls to thrive.

Through Bambini Africa, she has also published books, games and created learning experiences for children.

Her work has always been about people.

That is why Voluserve is not a departure from the development space.

It is another way of working within it.

Raquel isn’t leaving community development to become a technology founder.

She is taking a problem she has lived with for years and asking what technology can do about it.

And perhaps that is what makes this chapter particularly interesting.

She isn’t building technology because technology is the next shiny thing.

She is building because she has spent enough time close to the problem to know that some things can be done differently.

Volunteering is one of them.

For years, volunteering has largely been treated as something people do on the side. Something generous people do with their spare time. Something organisations use when they need extra hands.

Raquel sees something much bigger.

She sees a place where someone can discover a skill they didn’t know they had.

A place where a young person can gain experience before their first job.

A place where someone can build confidence.

A place where people can meet others outside their usual circles.

A place where organisations can build stronger teams.

A place where service can become part of how people learn and grow.

And this thinking is beginning to extend beyond Voluserve itself.

Raquel is developing a broader body of work around service, including 4Hs of Service™, which explores different dimensions of how we serve.

It points to something bigger than a volunteer platform.

It points to a growing interest in service itself.

What makes people serve?

Why do people contribute differently?

How do we help people discover where they fit?

How do we make service more intentional?

And how do we create systems that help people grow while they serve?

For someone who has spent years physically working with communities, this may seem like a very different kind of work.

But in many ways, it is the same work.

The setting is changing.

The tools are changing.

The scale can change.

The heart remains the same.

Raquel is still asking the question she has asked throughout her career:

How do we create better systems for people to thrive?

Only now, she is building one of those systems with technology.

Voluserve is still growing. There is still a lot to figure out. There are things being tested, changed, rebuilt and tested again.

But perhaps that is the point.

Raquel isn’t presenting herself as someone who has figured out the future of volunteering.

She is building it.

And she is doing so from a rather unusual position: she has been the volunteer, the programme leader, the community worker, the person looking for volunteers and now, the person building the technology that connects them.

That gives her a view of the problem from almost every side.

And it makes Voluserve more than a platform for finding volunteer opportunities.

It is an attempt to rethink what happens when people who want to serve are given better systems through which to do it.

For Raquel Kasham Daniel, this may look like a new chapter.

But it is not a new story.

She has been building around people, service and community for years.

Voluserve is simply what happens when that work meets technology.