Voluntourism: What could go wrong when trying to do right?
Posted on February 25, 2010 at 6:03 am
This is a guest post from Daniela Papi. Daniela is the founder of PEPY, a hybrid organization based in Siem Reap, Cambodia. You can read more about the lessons Daniela and her team are learning by following her blog: Lessons I Learned
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During the past eight years, as I have joined and then lead volunteer programs in Asia, I have seen many of the same mistakes repeated when it comes to international “voluntourism”, I have made many of these mistakes myself. I know how easy it is to offer a trip that is easy to sell, fits in with travelers’ demands, appears to have a plan for a positive impact, but in the end ends up being either a waste of time for the local community partners or, in the worst cases, causes more harm than good. Here are some of the common problems I have seen in the voluntourism market and some tips for travelers on how to choose the right program.
Creating one-off projects which have little long-term impact
Often times the real needs of a project are not things that volunteers can easily support. Language barriers, lack of local knowledge, and lack of skills prevent volunteers from being a good fit for most development project needs, so instead tour companies often create projects for the volunteer.
These projects typically involve little investment of energy and ideas in people. The core needs of the partner might have been teacher training for their school, soil enhancement techniques to improve farming, etc. Because volunteers can’t help with those things, a project is instead created to fill the desire of the traveler to “feel helpful”, and the core needs are overlooked for those where it was simpler to insert unskilled volunteers. These projects might be building a fence or painting a school, and it is likely that the tour company will do little to monitor the project other than stopping by twice a year with their tourists to take a picture of “the school they are helping.”
Real life example: I really did travel with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly, I must say, as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). We probably spent $200 on paint (25% of which we dropped on the floor). The project was in rural Thailand, and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational resources, hired a few teachers for a month, or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job. If they insisted on painting, if they had instead funded $3000 towards a locally identified educational need (for example, a weekly life-skills training course), plus bought $200 worth of paint, at least then our combined efforts would have been more than just the blue paint on the floor.
How to choose: Ask the tour operator about their relationship with the NGO partner. Have they worked together long? If the answer is yes, that’s a good thing. How do they choose what projects the travelers will engage in? If the local communities or NGO partners are making the decisions and have veto power over ideas they don’t like, that is better than ideas coming from the tour company based on unfounded assumptions of needs. For all of these answers, getting in touch with both someone who had gone on the trip before and someone working in the country where you are visiting to get their perspective on the company and NGO partner will shine a more realistic light on the situation.
Forgetting that volunteers are NOT free
A lot of tour operators will bring their clients to a project and expect an NGO or community program to entertain their guests by speaking to them about their work or organizing a small volunteer project. They put the NGOs or orphanages on their site, sell them to clients as part of a tour, yet keep all of the tour profits themselves. Sometimes the tour company says, “We leave it up to the tourists to see if they want to donate!”, but it should not be the tourists’ responsibility to ensure that the development partner gets value out of the trip in exchange for their time.
Real life example: As an NGO, at PEPY we sometimes get requests from tour companies to come see our projects. They want to include a visit to our programs as a part of their tour, which they will market to their clients. To entertain a group for a few hours and explain our projects would take time away from management staff.
How to choose: If you know that your skills are not precisely matched with the needs of a project, or if the interactions you are having with partner NGOs are taking their time away from their core mission, ask and find out if the tour company is compensating the person or group presenting to or facilitating your community interaction. If they are not, yet the tour company is marking this part of the experience as a selling point of the tour, then they are probably putting the desire for their own profits over a the need to provide real support for these groups.
Giving things away
As Saundra has told us over and over again and as I have learned through seeing the negative effects of an unbridled tourism culture of giving things away “to the poor people”, giving things to people is never going to solve their problems. Instead, it can destroy local markets, create community jealousies, and create a culture of dependency.
Real life example: I wish this WASN’T real… but sadly, this is what a lot of “responsible” tourism has come to. There are tour operators in Cambodia where you can pay $45 for the day to be driven out to a “poor village where you can hand out food or school supplies to the poor family of your choice”. Oh yes, people pay for this. It’s like buying food pellets at the zoo to feed the goats. Except these are people. Not goats.
How to choose: Question any organization that allows you and your tour group to go anywhere to “hand out school supplies” or “deliver a book to a child”. If those items are needed, they should be distributed through local power structures, in ways where those with the highest needs are prioritized, and where capacity building is tied in with the giving away of things.
Monitoring projects poorly or not at all
How can a tour company that comes through an area a few times a year know that they are “improving lives through our wells”? Do they go back and test them? Fix them? Get feedback? Sometimes we think we are helping people, but it is not until we try it and fail that we realize our plan was flawed. What is worse is if we continue to repeat our failures, either from lack of willingness to admit them, or lack of effort to research our impacts.
Real life example: A tour company in India allowed tourists to hand out goats to families on their tours. In the middle of the tour, a person from a nearby village came and told the director that the man who had been put in charge of choosing which poor families should get the goats had been charging the families for the goats for years. The tour company had been making their English speaking tour guide rich, were not helping “the poorest of the poor” that they claimed to be, and had furthered corruption and mistrust in the village.
How to choose: Ask about the NGO’s monitoring plan. If you are building any structures or giving away any technology, find out how those things are being put to use and who will monitor the needs in case of damage or additional ideas for improvements. Is there a responsible NGO partner involved in these projects full-time who can make the changes needed to ensure the program’s success? If you feel that the tour company’s projects are one-off initiatives with little relationship building on their part with the community, find a new operator.
Giving unskilled volunteers jobs that require skills
Even painting requires some skills, and clearly our group in Thailand didn’t have them. Teaching English should not be left to 19 year old gap years, especially in countries where there are plenty of unemployed local English speakers. If we don’t know how to do what we are supposed to be doing as volunteers, we might cause more harm than good, and at minimum, we will waste a lot of people’s time.
Real life example: There are many orphanages in Cambodia which take volunteers to teach English. Some come for a few weeks, others for a few days. When they leave, the classes have no teacher, there is no curriculum to ensure that the students aren’t learning “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” every day, and the school is not better able to solve its own problems in the future because of the volunteer’s visit. If skilled teachers had spent time teaching English teachers English, they would have improved the system at least slightly, but sadly, everyone just wants to pet the cute kids.
How to choose: If you are looking for a long term placement, make sure to pick an operator that does very thorough matching of skills and needs. For short term placements, choose groups focused on educating you as a traveler, and giving you the skills and tools to improve the world when you go home. We have to learn before we can help. Choosing a trip focused on your education, which doesn’t assume that every wealthy traveler has construction skills, will empower you to be better equipped to support responsible initiatives in the future.
Forgetting to make the rest of the time on their trip “responsible”
There is a lot of discussion about the “volunteer time”, but what about the rest of the trip? Where are you being put up? What restaurants are you eating at? Those things matter just as much as the volunteer time, and just like carbon offsetting, if you are trying to do good by giving money to development projects, yet causing harm in all of your day-to-day activities, the two do not balance out.
Real life example: A responsible tourism organization based abroad was planning their trip to Cambodia and had contacted us to learn more about our work. When I met with the trip coordinator at their hotel, I realized that they had chosen to stay at a hotel owned in part by a very well known corrupt politician. Had they spent the time to ask anyone working in responsible travel in Cambodia about their hotel and restaurant choices, they would have found much more well-respected places in which to spend their money.
How to choose: Ask your voluntourism partner about the rest of the trip and how they make their choices. If they outsource their entire trip to a partner or if they are selling trips in tens of countries around the world, they likely do not know the people and places they are visiting well, and are less likely to be offering you a chance to have a positive impact with your tourism dollars.
Fostering moral imperialism
This one is the biggest problem I think, but the least talked about. We assume, because we come from wealthier places with better education systems, that we can come into any new place without knowing much about the culture or the people, and we can fix things. We can’t! THEY, the people who live there and know the place well, can. Our job in the development world can and should be to support them in doing so. So, we can’t assume we can come do it for them and “save the babies” by visiting an orphanage for a few hours on our trip to India. And we sure shouldn’t think that our time is oh so valuable that we should fundraise money to pay for OUR flights to go paint a school poorly. My job, in running a tour operation, is to educate travelers on at least these two points: improvements take time, and the people we are visiting have just as much—if not more—to teach us as we have to teach them.
Real life example: Just search for voluntourism on the web. “Come to XXXXX, Africa and save the world,” followed by instructions on how to fundraise tax free dollars, which include the price of your travel abroad.
How to choose: If we are going to send our students abroad without charging them, we should at least tell them the truth: THEY are the ones benefiting in this situation. Let’s start being realistic and not deciding to go abroad to help, but instead to learn. If you find a company that discusses the trip as “life-changing” for the communities you are visiting, scroll further until you find one that admits that the real selling point is that the experience will be life-changing for YOU. That is OK! That is why we travel, so let’s not try to hide that. If your tour company talks about all of their successes at helping people, but will not give you examples of times they have made mistakes, lessons they have learned, or things they are doing differently now compared with three years ago, don’t trust them. They clearly think that just because they are setting out to do good, that they are. Remind them that Good Intentions are NOT Enough.
It’s time to stop making the same mistakes
Now that enough of us have made these mistakes and learned from them, it is time for others to stop making the same mistakes. To make the overall impact of volunteer travel more positive will take a movement of travelers demanding responsible practices from their operators. Please add comments or tips for travelers which you think might give them additional ideas for picking the best organized voluntourism programs.
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Daniela Papi is the founder of PEPY, a hybrid organization based in Siem Reap, Cambodia. You can read more about the lessons Daniela and her team are learning by following her blog: Lessons I Learned
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Great piece. I have also been exposed to poorly thought out voluntour trips and young people that were taught they could “save” the world. As a secondary school teacher I am determined to help young people learn about good community development and global citizenship. One of the coolest things I learned along the way is that when young people have positive experiences learning about community development overseas they return to become engaged, committed members of their local community.
This is what makes the problem even worse… people who think they are overcoming the problems by promoting an idea of global citizenship – an entirely one-sided global citizenship of which only the wealthy Westerners can reap the benefits.
Thanks for the comment, Jane.
An organization that I really respect and have worked with a bit that I think does this well for the secondary school age group is Where There Be Dragons. They focus on exposing their students to educational opportunities about responsible development/tourism/self development while also making sure their travel is responsible and “low to the ground”. It seems to me that they have been very successful at trying to foster educated global citizens through their tours.
While the price of this type of organized travel can exclude some, there are a lot of lessons to learn in how they and other educational tour operators organize their trips.
If we can remind people that their whole life is their canvas with which to improve the world, not just their week-long volunteer vacations, they might start to look at their vacation time as their monitoring, learning, and “reality-check” time, and the other 51 weeks a year as their time to “save the world.”
In my job I’ve often traveled with college students who want to do “service,” and we discuss exactly these issues. Thanks for this concise and cogent synthesis of them. Your experienced perspective is appreciated.
One thing I do when I’m organizing the trip is incorporate educational visits or short-term “internships” at community organizations (preferably those run by members of said community) and pay the organization “tuition” for their time and expertise. I figure if we don’t bat an eye paying $10/person for educational museum tickets we can give $100-$300 to an NGO who’s just hosted us for the day and taught us far more. But I haven’t been in your shoes: Do you think this is a reasonable way to tour responsibly?
Also, Jane, ditto. I too find that students, on returning, see the injustices of their own community much more clearly, and make a point of discussing throughout these trips where we might find similar issues to become involved with at home. I also explicitly ask at the end of the trip for students to brainstorm a list of things they can do to repay or pay forward the debt they’ve incurred through the privilege of their “voluntourism.” To me, this is the main reason for supporting such trips.
Thank you for the comments, Rebecca. Yes, indeed, I do think making a donation to an NGO when they are investing time in your group is appropriate.
I have spoken with tour companies and volunteer tourism operators who have responded in each of these two ways when asked why they don’t give any of their fees to partner NGOs:
“We don’t want to give money to the NGOs as we don’t want to aid corruption.” – My response to that argument is, if you are not willing to put the time in to vet NGOs properly, then you shouldn’t be giving them money, but then you also shouldn’t be visiting them! Even if YOU are not giving the NGO money, the people you bring will assume you have done your due diligence and will perhaps take it upon themselves to donate to this group you have chosen as their “worthy cause.” We should be making sure that our partners are worthy of support before choosing to send groups to them, and make sure we compensate those responsible partners for their time so that they can continue to do great work. (To be honest, what I do find difficult is if travelers want to visit an NGO they have heard of and want to learn more about, one I am not a fan of, but who is willing to take our group in for the visit. I struggle as to what is right in that situation.)
Another argument I have heard from companies charging money from clients but not using any of it to give to the NGOs who are hosting their guests is “We don’t want to create any dependencies.” Well, if your clients are still giving money directly, then this excuse is not valid, and you are preventing your clients from donating but are instead giving your time and service on a regular basis, is that not another type of dependency on foreign labor? Wouldn’t it be better that that organization had funding and could hire people to do whatever tasks you were volunteering for even when you were not there? And if you were worried about them spending money in the wrong place, then are they are probably the wrong people to be working with in the first place!
I have a lot more thoughts on voluntourism dilemmas on the voluntourism section of my blog http://lessonsilearned.org/ and I know Saundra has written extensively about these issues as well. Thanks for reading, commenting, and thinking about these issues!
A year ago I was a (college-grad) tourist hoping to volunteer in a developing country, motivated by the desire to learn first-hand at least as much as to feel nice. The more I searched for and investigated the options available, the more I realised many of the points you make in this great article. But this search is HARD. And you must do it yourself – I don’t feel I could trust any travel agent to sufficiently investigate these issues.
When I heard the lesson first hand, it became clear to me. As part of a tour group in Calcutta, I visited a locally-run foundation-funded non-government school for children, and heard from one of the staff that foreign volunteers aren’t welcome to teach because they simply don’t commit for the length of time required for the children to complete the curriculum and sit final tests. We toured the school, met the children, asked questions of the staff and learned a lot. Some of us made a financial donation, and the tour company matched us. It was great to see the children’s education being top priority.
However, another example wasn’t so clear, and perhaps you can give me your perspective. I investigated online a program in Nepal that brought young foreign tourists to an orphanage to provide care and to teach English, computer-use and other topics for varying periods of up to three months. The program also arranged tour activities in the spare time. To participate meant a substantial fee had to be paid, which covered all expenses, but also funded the running of the orphanage itself. To me, this model implied the entrenchment of short-lived emotional bonds and constantly varying teaching styles, which does not ideally benefit the children. It is perhaps my lack of direct experience that has not allowed me to form a solid opinion on whether this is wrong for not aiming to train and employ long-term local teachers and carers, or whether it is right because it is better than no orphanage.
Sadly, relying on my own online search skills at the time, I could not find a suitable, affordable and sustainable short-term (up to three months) voluntourism program, and did not volunteer. Perhaps some of the links on this site will help for next time.
Thanks for your article.
As a side (and final!) note, my new goal is to volunteer long-term in development. One of the great organisations I found online last year was Pepy! (which is how I found this great blog). But it may be some time before I will have the means to do a 6-12 months unpaid internship, or the experience level required for a development-aid-funded graduate scheme.
I used to work for an NGO and I applaud what you have written here. SO much time and effort is wasted by NGOs satisfying donor’s egos for “touching the people” instead of just helping people by donating directly.
We sent truckloads of goods to impoverished areas but we were able to clear them first as goods that were unavailable in the local area or goods that were going to be used in established and maintained schools and vocational training facilities that we operated.
People give stupidly too. We were collecting clothing for one of our orphanages in Africa and got huge bags full of winter jackets!!!
Those bags ended up going to local homeless shelters in Chicago where people really needed winter jackets instead of going to a country where the annual temperatures never drop below 80 degrees.
One of our donors was so adamant that she wanted to go to our projects in Pakistan following the earthquake relief that we reluctantly agreed after she was paying all of her own way. Our local team had to assign a person to travel with her and show her around the relief zone only to watch her give a big fat donation to a completely different NGO that happened to come in just for the earthquake relief (and which disappeared afterward) rather than our own team which was in the process of building an entire community to house displaced families.
Why did she give to the other? Because they were feeding the poor people and she got to touch them instead of hanging around a boring construction site all day (where we’d hired all local labor and purchased all materials in the region).
I wish people could learn to see beyond their own egos when it comes to donation and think about long term effects.
Thank you so much for your points of illumination, God willing they will grow brighter and light the way for others.
Cracked!
But seriously i’m glad that someone has taken the time to illustrate how volunteerism can be bad or worse, and how to go about it correctly in order to ensure that your time has been applyed correctly. I’m actually more interested now if doing something like this to teach other teachers proper methods of teaching English, as opposed to teaching the kids for a week or so.
Haha, that’s the short answer of how I ended up here too
I heard of other people doing volunteering abroad, and my first question (I never actually asked) was “Wouldn’t it be more effective to simply donate the money you would have spent on airfare?” My second (that I also never asked) was “Wouldn’t that put the locals out of business?”
Thank you for this article/ blog post. I’m a 19-year-old gap year. I was ready to enlist in the Navy, who was interested in what they determined to be my aptitude for language acquisition. When that didn’t work out at the last minute, I decided to voulunteer. Simple things, really- like playing guitar for the old folks’ home. My parents were convinced that I should join a voulunteer program where I could teach English overseas. Of course, I felt extraordinarily uncomfortable about the idea. What my parents failed to realize was that I’m not a savant; I got top grades in Spanish because I studied like Hell and watched telenovelas during my downtime. I skipped a year of French because I studied like Hell and… well, I didn’t practice aural skills. And all that time in highschool spent studying language taught me that language is very hard to learn (unless you’re 3-12 or an actual savant) and that I was completely unqualified to teach it. I know parts of speech like the back of my hand, I understand the uses of different verb tenses, and I have mnemonics and learning tricks up the wazoo for Spanish, less so with French. But not English. I don’t know how to learn English. I don’t know how to teach English. And I realized that 2 weeks of learning a few handy phrases in English wouldn’t be the same as providing an educational foundation in English. And even so. Teaching the kids English would be catching each of them a fish. Having a linguistic specialist help devise a curriculum for the local teachers to implement would be providing the local population with the right tools to hopefully never need voulunteers again. Thank you. It is such much of a relief to know that I wasn’t just being unjustifiably suspicious.
Thanks, Saundra, for pointing out that this post is getting more hits again (via this “Cracked” piece on socially conscious actions which look like they help more than they really do: http://www.cracked.com/article_19123_6-socially-conscious-actions-that-only-look-like-they-help.html )
I also wrote a piece about how we changed PEPY Tours, I company designed to raise funds and support for Cambodian education programs. The tour company used to offer “voluntourism” trips, and now we offer “edu-tourism” or “learning-service” trips – where we aim to not only fund the educational NGO’s programs but to help travelers learn about development issues, get interested, get angry, and THEN take action… not just on their “vacations”, but in their every day lives. One piece is here: http://lessonsilearned.org/2010/02/traveling-responsibly-%E2%80%93-learning-trips-over-giving-trips/ There are more post there and here on Saundra’s blog about voluntourism as well as the dangerous of “orphanage tourism” (which relates to Michael’s comment above). Thanks for reading!
This probably isn’t the best post I could have chosen to voice this, but I just wanted to say that I love your blog and think you are doing wonderful and very important work. Like most young middle-class Brit-brats, I went travelling in my late teens. Did I volunteer? No! I visited Tokyo for a week, chilled out in Oregon for a fortnight and then spent 3 months in Hawai’i working on a friend’s farm for a small wage with food and board thrown in. Various other people have looked down their noses at me when I tell them what I did on my gap summer. How dare I go abroad to the USA of all places and not to Kenya to build a school or the slums of Brazil to play with children with down syndrome for a week!
Your blog has reminded me that I made the right decision. Unlike most of my acquaintances, I try to live the rest of my life ethically at home- I buy from small businesses, walk or take public transport, etc. But I suppose that doesn’t score you as many points as a photo of you posing with a smiling shoeless child, does it?
I was wondering how you feel about the Peace Corps. I am currently in the beginning stages of signing up. I understand that they have a wide breadth of types of projects, but overall do you think that they fall under the category of ‘voluntourism’?
Lydia,
I’ll be submitting a rather long post on my thoughts on Peace Corps later this month. But in short, they have three goals which are essentially: Help Americans learn about the rest of the world, help the rest of the world learn about Americans, get something done if possible. And that’s really their priorities. They’re training in development practices is really not that great and volunteers are often placed for political purposes rather than the community really wanting the help of a volunteer. So yes, I think it can often be an extended form of voluntourism. Some people can really help out, but many projects fail as well. Americans do come back with a better sense of the world, but is our enlightenment worth the effort the community has to go through to host a volunteer. I’m really torn. I think there are other ways we should be exploring like study abroad or language immersion opportunities.
While it is vital to research and “voluntour” purposefully and thoughtfully, it is also important not to diminish the desire for change within young people today. We should encourage their desire to travel and enrich themselves, which will help give them perspective and awareness, a quality that fosters productive volunteering. By making them aware of the pitfalls of many trips conducted by tour companies, but being careful not to persecute their personal motivations, the outcomes of such trips will more likely have a positive impact on the areas they seek to change.
I dunno… A lot of these trips can cost several thousand US dollars; odds are good that the eager young voluntourist won’t be providing a thousand dollar’s worth of utility unless that person already speaks the language or has training in the area of interest. I personally side with the students who’ve previously posted in the comments. If you don’t have specific skills to use or if you don’t plan to return/donate from home, then your money is going to benefit your ego a lot more than it will benefit the people you’ll be visiting.
Nice guest post by Daniela
Some sad and striking stuff there. I can’t believe people pay $45 to go feed a poor family. People will try to make a dollar off anything…
Thanks for this clear reminder of why volunteering abroad should focus on skilled personnel who work to build the capacity of organisations and communities and hopefully make themselves redundant!