Why volunteering in developing countries isn’t actually helpful

Volunteer tourism, or ‘voluntourism’, is the increasingly popular trend of travelling to a certain country and doing some form of volunteering. However, while this practice may make the volunteers feel good about themselves, this ‘voluntourism’ may do more harm than good for the host country.

It has come under criticism in recent years, and there are a number of issues with it, and it can actually keep a developing country in a cycle of poverty. For example, in many countries there are opportunities for young volunteers to build houses in a village; however these volunteers are putting local labourers and builders out of work and are not experienced or qualified. Therefore, they are disrupting the economy and building inadequate housing. In fact, sociology and anthropology Professor Judith Lasker has discovered that most voluntourism benefits the volunteers and the organisations sending them there more than the host communities themselves.

A country that has long been a host of volunteer tourism is Cambodia. Despite its economic boom during the early 2000s, today still more than 400,000 Cambodians toil away in factories for as little as $2 a day, producing clothes for Western markets. Conditions are often so bad that workers often faint from exhaustion or overheating. Wages for Cambodian garment workers are said to be the second-lowest in the world, after Bangladesh. An assessment report on Cambodia found that between 2004 and 2011 poverty rates more than halved, from 53% to 20.5%. This was big news for the government, a validation that their economic policies were in fact working and money was trickling down from the wealthy to the poor. However, less discussed were the same report’s findings that such statistics give an inaccurate picture of poverty levels. The number of people who live in ‘vulnerable poverty’ (less than $2.60 a day) increased significantly during this period.

Due to the huge economic inequality throughout the country, it’s a perfect target for volunteer organisations to come and “do good”. Claire Bennett, co-author of the book Learning Service: the Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad, believes there’s an abundance of reasons why volunteer tourism isn’t of any benefit to countries like Cambodia.

“Many of them stem from the fact that volunteer travel sits on the intersection of two very different fields – international development and tourism,” Bennett said. “Tourism is all about giving the traveller what they want – the client is the tourist not the local community.”

“So many issues stem from this fundamental problem,” she continued. “Volunteers can misdirect funds into “band aid solutions” that they can be a part of, rather than looking at long term change. Or they can be a burden on an organisation, or take local jobs. Volunteers can also reinforce a colonial mentality – the idea that what is needed is foreigners to come in and sort things out.”

Bennett also believes that while creating a dependency on foreign aid isn’t usually the biggest problem with ‘voluntourism’, it can create issues. “I have seen some examples of dependency and that is to do with the way that some experiences are set up – like schools that don’t employ English teachers but rely on a stream of short-term foreign volunteers instead. This can really short-change students who at the very least deserve to have a stable qualified teacher.”

However, in Cambodia teaching English isn’t the main attraction for volunteers. The country has been known to exploit children and their families in the name of ‘orphanage tourism’ - in which volunteers come to visit and donate to orphanages. However, due to the popularity of such orphanages, many were set up as businesses in order to profit from these visits and began “renting” or even buying children from families.

Professor Lasker admits she doesn’t enjoy talking about orphanage tourism. “My research focused on health-related volunteering, so I was glad to avoid studying the orphanage tourism as made me so uncomfortable,” she said. “But as time went on and as I started speaking frequently about effective and ethical global volunteering practices, I could not get away from it and knew I had to do some research for myself.”

Through reading up about these orphanages, Lasker was able to see the huge problems that came with these institutions. “There is no screening of volunteers, and some of them turn out to be paedophiles,” she said. “As well as this, the potential for finding better ways to take care of vulnerable children is reduced when there is an operating orphanage available.”

Bennett believes orphanage tourism is a very complicated issue and it will be a long time before it’s completely stopped. “We are yet to see a large dent on the industry. There are a lot of entrenched interests that extend beyond just volunteering – for example, there are church groups with long term partnerships sending funding to orphanages.”

“So orphanage tourism is still ongoing, and tackling it is going to take a multi-partner effort. The Cambodian government had orphanage care as a last resort for a child in its policy, and is cracking down and closing orphanages because of how they have mushroomed in recent years. And the international campaign to try to tackle the problem has diversified. But there is still a long way to go before this is over.”