By Mary Peng
“You can change the lives of these orphans in three weeks! Make a difference, NOW!”
Upon reading these catchy slogans flashily printed below photos of emaciated African or Asian children, we may feel as much empowered as we are haunted by those desperate gazes. We sense not only a responsibility to act, but also firm confidence that whatever we do in those three weeks — whether building a school, teaching English, or working in a clinic — will indeed kindle hope in the hapless strangers we bless and end their sufferings.
Perhaps we will inspire in the children such a strong desire to learn that they will quit lounging in the streets and instead study to change their own lives. Or maybe we would drastically ameliorate the run-down medical facilities in the local community (of course the community could not do it without you) and enable tuberculosis patients to finally receive adequate treatment.
In recent years, the media has created the illusion that smart and energetic Western youths are fully capable of “changing lives” in foreign, under-resourced communities. The result has been a new sector: “voluntourism.” Volunteers pay to travel to impoverished regions in developing countries and engage in community service during their stay. According to the association of gap-year providers in U.K., up to 200,000 British high school students embark on these self-fulfilling service trips every year through agencies that organize gap-year programs. In the ideal win-win scenario, volunteers would learn from the service experience while the local community would benefit from “expertise from the West.”
In reality, however, the volunteers and the firms providing these services often benefit more from voluntourism than the communities that they were supposed to serve. At the 2012 Unite for Sight Conference, Michael Fairbanks, co-founder of the SEVEN Fund (a philanthropic foundation devoted to finding entrepreneurial solutions to global poverty) and long-time senior economic advisor to Rwandan President Paul Kagame, presented a marvelous critique of the burgeoning “voluntourism” industry: “Do we allow high school students to teach in American elementary schools and work in orphanages? No! So why should they be allowed to think that they can go to Kenya or Cambodia and do a better job of teaching or working in orphanages than certified professionals without receiving any or little training?”
Although voluntourism allows youths to become cognizant of the poverty rampant in many parts of the world, it also runs the risk of dumbing down the difficulty of development work and perpetuating the belief in Western superiority. We often associate poverty with poor governance and backwards traditions, and believe that the orderliness of our own prosperous and democratic societies somehow provides us with sufficient credentials and skills to excel at development work with little to no training.
Encouraging youths to travel to poor parts of the world is critical to facilitating cultural understanding and increasing awareness of the poverty that beleaguers more than half of the world’s population. However, volunteers must not be brainwashed into believing that they can affect change in a matter of weeks or even a few months. Rather, successful poverty development anywhere relies on long-term dedication, planning, and method evaluation. As Mr. Fairbanks mentions in his talk, voluntourism can only be most beneficial if volunteers begin their travels with genuine humility and curiosity toward the culture and people they will encounter. Voluntourists can only try to maximize their learning about the foreign space and perhaps return one day, after being fully trained, to undertake the difficult task of development.
mmmm point almost well made. However you appear to be under the misapprehension that all volunteer travellers are young and unskilled. 70% of our volunteers are over 40 – all are skilled – our core value is skills transfer. The few under 25 we place also have skills and the ability to transfer them – IT and speech and drama for example.We have also placed young students of education with qualified education volunteers to work with local teachers – works brilliantly – all our skills share is on the job – pretty tough when class sizes are over 50 – made all the more effective when a young volunteer works under the supervision of local and volunteer teachers as a classroom assistant. It takes some planning and consultation but it does work…..slowly sure….but returning volunteers are witness to real change.That saidI agree completely that volunteer programmes that are not targeted to sustainable outcomes for local communities – outcomes that local communities want – will fail and are more likely to do harm than good – indeed at people and places we are insistant – volunteers will work local people not instead of them. I also agree that volunteers must be well prepared