Why “voluntourism” is harmful

“Voluntourism” is relatively new in the world of travel. A marriage of volunteering and tourism, it is aimed largely at young people looking for a school break alternative to sightseeing, or a gap year experience. As a former director of a US Peace Corps volunteer programme, I find the claims of those who defend voluntourism highly questionable and believe its consequences are harmful.

I recently consulted a consolidating website that helps people choose a voluntourist programme. One is first invited to “pick a country,” then to “pick a cause,” and then to pick a duration (from “alternative spring break,” one-two weeks,  two-four weeks and so on). I clicked on Peru, Agriculture, and a two to four week duration. Twenty-seven opportunities came up, the first of which began: “Volunteer abroad and make a real difference, from US $175!”

I then looked at an offer to work in rain forest conservation in the Amazon for two weeks (£1595.00 excluding airfare). A few lines down: “No qualifications needed, just lots of enthusiasm for nature.” And then under the heading “What you’ll gain from this experience” was the promise of “the enormous satisfaction of knowing that you're contributing to a worthwhile and necessary conservation project aimed at protecting and preserving our world for future generations.”

A British non-profit that offers a menu of short-term projects around the world states that its main goal is to make “changes in all the communities we work in. We… are proud to say that the impact of our work is life-changing, for both the local people and our volunteers." Another claimed that participants would "contribute to international understanding and peace.” In the websites of some two dozen voluntourist organisations, three of which I also contacted by telephone, I noted similar claims—“life changing impact"... “contribute to key global issues”… “change your perspective, change the world”… “changing the world is not a spectator sport—you need to get your hands dirty” etc. I read about a young American named Jason Churchman who became a “CNN Hero” by “changing the world, one house at a time." He had built 18 houses for poor Mexicans under the auspices of a US volunteer-sending organisation that covered the cost of materials.

There are now at least fifty private voluntourist agencies in Europe and North America, and scores of NGOs in developing countries that actively seek voluntourists. Hundreds of thousands of young people from the west have been involved in these opportunities over the last decade or so.

How can one object to someone helping to install windows in a school building in Honduras, helping out in an orphanage, or showing kids how to use the internet in Zambia? The smiling photos posted on the voluntourism websites suggest that these are uplifting experiences. So where is the harm?

First, any lasting impact on the lives of the people the voluntourists hope to help is unlikely, even if they stay for six or eight months. Unlike long-term volunteer programs like Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas or the American Peace Corps, voluntourists come with no training and no specific skills. Much of what they do in a short-term visit is a form of make-work. A 2011 UN Report questions the impact of  “student 'gap year' volunteerism, often undertaken for short periods.” An observer from Cambodia put it more bluntly: “one does not need to be an expert to know that some whitey paying USD 1,000 to paint a wall is a complete waste of time.” And a "voluntourist" who had returned reported: “a lot of volunteer travel right now is offering really short-term solutions for complex problems. And yet we’re really disappointed when we’re not getting long-term development results."

Second, such visits can create the illusion that the voluntourist has “understood” the lives of others, when, necessarily, he or she can only have skimmed the surface. Because these experiences are so focused on a “you and me” snapshot of another world, they miss what cannot be put in a photo album: the complex interplay of culture, social structure, and political economy that starts to explain poverty in developing countries.

Third, while the rhetoric is about helping others, the real beneficiary is the voluntourist themselves (the adventure, the note of altruism added to one’s university application). This skirts the edge of patronisation, using the less well-off to validate the visitor’s experience, as a New York Times article recognises: “The problem with voluntourism is that it treats receiving communities as passive objects of the visiting westerner’s quest for saviordom. Even more vile is its reliance on poverty as a visible spectacle….The willing (and paying) and often unskilled are led to believe that hapless villages can be transformed by schools built on a two-week trip and diseases eradicated by the digging of wells during spring breaks. The photo ops, the hugs with the kids and the meals with the natives are part of this package.”

An article in the Daily Telegraph notes that “Gap year volunteers risk undermining local workers and hindering long-term development in impoverished countries” and goes on to cite a Human Sciences Research Council report which noted the harm caused in cases where “Children... form a bond with a volunteer, who then moves on after a few weeks.”

Fourth, there is evidence that some voluntourism organisations are short-changing both their clients and the poor who are usually paid to house and feed the visitor. The voluntourist’s fee covers the profit of the sending organisation, which in order to maximize its profit may not make every effort to ensure a carefully planned experience. As one observer put it: “I visited a volunteer organization in the Caribbean where …untrained volunteers were placed for one week in classrooms that didn’t expect or know what to do with them, or taken to an orphanage to babysit for a few hours. They received no training beforehand, and between hidden fees, conflicting information, and general disorganization, volunteers left the project even more confused than before they signed up." And to maximize profit, it is in the sending organisation’s interest to pay a bare minimum to the host. An Australian voluntourist was “surprised to learn how little of the up to $3,000 paid by volunteers actually goes to the orphanages." When volunteering through one of the world's leading commercial volunteering companies, she says she was told by the director of the orphanage she was placed at that it only received $9 per volunteer per week.

Finally, voluntourism reinforces an “us-them” framework that locks all the parties in familiar roles—the outsider as generous helper, the native as grateful recipient. In this sense it is a thin parody of the official world of development foreign aid, which for all it has accomplished has also created a deep well of dependency that today delays a needed return to local self-confidence. One doesn’t conquer dependency by reinforcing expectations of outside help among local poor people who have long become used to it (in Haiti, Honduras, Kenya, to name just a few of the many countries where dependency has set in, and to which many voluntourists go).

To the extent voluntourism produces a thin veneer of cross-cultural understanding, to the extent it obscures the complexity of poverty and development, to the extent it reinforces old stances, these experiences work against real change. The promises about impact, contributions to international peace and understanding, are not just hype, they are essentially false. What would contribute more valuably to a better world, to more and deeper understanding, are programmes that create space for humility, that foster a facing-up to the limit of outsider help and the contradictions embedded in it.