Voluntourism: good-will holidays blamed for boosting poverty

The emerging industry known as “voluntourism” may be exploiting well-meaning Western tourists while fostering poverty and reducing economic growth in developing countries. 

 By  ALEXIS BEAUMONT

With its popularity booming across South-East Asia and Africa, concerns are being raised about the net benefits of the practice known as “voluntourism”.

Voluntourism organisers charge fees to arrange volunteer work for wealthy tourists in developing countries in conjunction with an overseas holiday, but not everyone is sold on the altruistic basis of the concept, popular with gap-year students.

Scotch Toko is head of youth programs at Oasis Community Engagement Foundation – an organisation that works with young people in underprivileged communities across Africa – and he believes voluntourism fosters a culture of dependence.

“Voluntourism takes people’s empowerment away. It gets people in to do the work, and if people are constantly doing things for you, your skills are not being developed to look after yourself,” he says.

Mr Toko believes the industry is keeping people poor, dealing with short-term issues while ultimately slowing down the long-term development of economies.

“There are hints of neo-colonialism in it, ultimately facilitating poverty through a continuous dependence on Western culture and not necessarily liberating people to deal with their issues,” he says.

“Giving people food today is not really making a difference because that person will be back tomorrow. It teaches them that begging works. You’re promoting poverty.”

In August last year, university student Emily Koop, 22, took part in a package tour of Africa, which included a week spent working as a volunteer at the Chakuwama orphanage in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Booked through international volunteering/travel company Projects Abroad, Ms Koop was told that the majority of the $3100 tour fee would be directed toward the orphanage.

Despite these assurances, when she arrived at the complex, Ms Koop discovered a derelict children’s home devoid of any schoolbooks, furniture or toys.

“The children all sat on concrete floors without tables, chairs, pens or books. They had no toys and wore ragged clothes, and the facilities available were less than basic. There were several other volunteers around and so I started wondering where our money had gone,” she says.

“I rushed out and bought the resources needed. The things were used for one, two days and then everything went missing.”

Uncovering cupboards packed with the supplies she had purchased, Ms Koop soon concluded that the poverty-stricken orphanage was merely a facade.

“The orphanage aimed to look worse off than it actually was, in order to gain more funding and resources,” she says.

For Mr Toko, this scenario is all too familiar, and predicated on the belief that “looking poorer means more resources”.

“Orphanages engage in behaviour like this because the industry ultimately teaches them that the poorer you look, the more you get given,” he says.

Blogger and founder of youth leadership and education organisation, Promoting Education emPoweing Youth, Daniela Papi, says voluntourists who give away necessities like shoes or water filters not only contribut to the poverty cycle, but often also destroy local markets.

She says voluntourists must be careful not to disturb the natural flow of an economy by taking local jobs and meeting needs in the marketplace before small businesses can.

On her blog, Ms Papi stresses the concept of the “ivory tower”, a which likens voluntourism to the colonial notion that Western intervention is the saviour of the developing world.

“We can’t keep acting like superheroes. The story of the Western volunteer swooping in and saving the African children is growing old. It might make for a great photo on Twitter but in reality, it’s ineffective and superficial,” she writes.

Ms Koop saw it first hand when she and the other volunteers visited the Mwananyamala public hospital in Dar es Salaam.

“A lot of the patients asked for volunteer doctors simply because they were white. The patients assumed that they’d have better training purely because they were Westerners. That’s the reality of the voluntourism industry. That’s the kind of perception and dependence it is creating on Western culture,” she says.

The volunteers in Ms Koop’s group were made up of mostly university students, including 20-year-olds in their first year of medicine.

“The local doctors asked the medical volunteers first-off to start stitching up patients … these were kids who had never been trained on anything like that before. Once they complained they had had no training, the doctors started teaching them how to stitch an eyebrow using a sponge and after that they were considered ‘trained’,” she says.

“They weren’t exactly helping the doctors out, they were more just doing the little jobs for them while the Tanzanian doctors had a cigarette. There was zero regulation on what they were required to do. It was terrible.”

One strategy that seeks to mitigate the effects of job loss and dependence on voluntourists, is a team-based approach.

In 2012, Cornell University in New York designed an eco-friendly, sustainable crèche in Cosmo City, Johannesburg, purposefully hiring local builders and contractors to construct the facility.

This approach is supported by Monash University’s Community Engagement Co-ordinator, Bronwyn du Rand, who also believes that fostering poverty is a significant effect of voluntourism, potentially leading to serious issues for developing economies in the future.

“On a large scale, there is a definite potential for voluntourists to take jobs away from local workers because the industry is not allowing for those small businesses to develop. They are meeting a need in the community before businesses can accommodate,” she said.

“Organisations must allow community members to take the lead while voluntourists work alongside them. It should be a team effort.”

Ms du Rand’s colleague, head of community engagement Craig Rowe, agrees, calling the Cornell project a “dream model scenario”.

“Money alone never solved any societal problems, ever. Voluntary work should be about building a relationship first with the people of that community,” he said.

But despite being effective in some cases, United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) charity donor educator and voluntourism blogger Saundra Schimmelpfennig warns that there are certain areas, such as orphanages, where his strategy can have harmful effects on children.

Ms Schimmelpfennig says voluntourists working in orphanages can create substantial emotional damage for a child, with the short-term visits resulting in long-term abandonment issues.

“While at the orphanage, most volunteers seek to build emotional bonds with the children so they can feel they made a difference. Though well intended, this leads to a never-ending round of abandonment,” she wrote on her blog.

This point is reiterated by Mr Toko, who says voluntourism takes advantage of a vulnerable child who needs continuous love.

“Children form a distorted picture of what love is. They see love as something that only comes in short bursts and then leaves again,” he said.

“Besides, who wants to have a friend for a month?”

At the Chakuwama orphanage, Ms Koop spent a substantial amount of time with the children, often taking them to doctor’s appointments and on excursions.

“When I revisited the orphanage after I left Tanzania, the ‘mumma’ of the complex told me that the one-year-old girl had been saying my name in her sleep,” she said.

“It made me really upset.”

Child protection has also been raised as an immediate concern surrounding voluntourism, following the imprisonment of Nicholas Griffin in 2011.

The 53-year-old Briton founded the Cambodian Orphan Fund in 2007 and was later found guilty of sexually abusing children in his care.

Since his arrest, the concern for stricter security checks on volunteers has grown with fewer foundations maintaining an open-door policy.

Mr Toko says Oasis conducts substantial testing and screening sessions for all people wanting to volunteer with the company in order to mitigate the potential danger.

“Voluntourists can do a lot of damage, so we are happy to reject people if we feel necessary,” he said.

Michelle Fok, the director of Monash University Saturday School – a program that facilitates tutoring between Monash students and local primary school children in South Africa –  says even well-intended voluntourists can be a problem within the industry.

Since she began working with Community Engagement last year, Ms Fok has dealt with ineffective volunteers who are untrained, demotivated or working for the “wrong reasons”.

Although not her biggest concern, Ms Fok believes it is something that the industry constantly struggles with.

“There’s often a lack of commitment, wrong motives, or sometimes they just sit in the back row and don’t do anything,” she says.

Saturday School project assistant Thembile Ndlovu says the best way to overcome an unproductive volunteer is to retrain them and help them remember why they are getting involved.

“The idea of volunteering is laudable. The desire to go and share your resources with someone else is awesome but often this is forgotten amongst the people we recruit. Sometimes when we take on new people, it feels like we take five steps forward, only to take 10 steps back because the people aren’t committed,” he said.

“What makes a good volunteer is selflessness. So sometimes we have to remind people that they’re there to learn and to help others learn also, otherwise it’s pointless.”

For her part, Ms Koop believes the voluntourism industry is dangerously unmonitored. She says her experience has taught her that it’s something that needs to be talked about more.

“The treatment of the children was scarily wrong, and what made it worse was it goes completely under the radar. There were kids not being treated for illnesses or contagious rashes that spread all over the orphanage. It could all have been preventable but the owners just didn’t care,” she says.

Although Ms Koop acknowledges the positives of voluntary work – which can help stimulate an economy through job opportunities and injected capital, raise awareness of vulnerable regions across the world, and increase the number of donations and aid sent to a country – she says her experience has permanently changed her view of the industry.

“There was such a manipulation of funds, a black hole for money to disappear to. I could’ve used that money to support myself while actually doing proper volunteering,” she said.

“I had very little impact. The whole point of volunteering is to make someone’s life easier, to fill a gap that’s not being filled. I didn’t do any of that at Chukuwama.”