Voluntourism: wasting time abroad

Voluntourism, short for volunteer tourism, is when someone travels abroad and volunteers while on vacation, usually lasting a week or two. The glory days of voluntourism are slowly coming to an end. The reality that it does more harm than good in the long term is slowly dawning on people. Before we continue, let me make it clear that voluntourism is not the same as volunteering. Voluntourism is the volunteering done while on vacation and it is usually a non-recurring event in someone’s life. It is usually a one-time experience that you can use to beef up your resume or to feel better about yourself.

If you are planning to spend a week in Africa to aid poverty-stricken orphans, you should probably reevaluate what you are doing to help. In theory, giving children moral support, passing out food and teaching English sounds like the perfect way to help. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The people whose volunteer work can be classified into voluntourism are usually people lacking expertise in the skills required. They therefore spend a week learning a new skill instead of being productive. This vicious cycle keeps repeating as, by the time people pick up a skill that might be useful, they return home. Despite this fact, most volunteers leave with a completely new mindset – that they must rescue people from the suffering they have witnessed. It’s a noble thought, but this trend of voluntourism shows that people don’t really learn about the country they went to, or what causes the suffering they saw. This leads to two major issues, with one feeding into the other.

Firstly, we must tackle the mindset of the ‘benevolent West’ having to ‘rescue the poor’. This thought process leads to Western intervention in countries where volunteers may be needed. For example, pictures of starving African children are being used in campaigns to draw people in, but this only convinces people that the poverty there can’t be solved without Western intervention. The situation isn’t helped by the general lack of knowledge about these countries. This feeds the second major issue: that the root problems of suffering countries are not addressed, as most people are not even aware of what they are. Volunteers are so caught up in what they see that they don’t stop to think about what the underlying issues could be. As these volunteers only see the suffering, their misconceptions remain and nothing is done to address the fundamental issues.

This raises the question: is voluntourism doomed? No, it isn’t. I do not raise the issue of voluntourism so that people shy away from short volunteering trips, but instead to inform them on how to make their time worthwhile. This can be done by understanding that volunteering trips aren’t about helping the poor, but rather learning more about the crisis the country is in, understanding what its people are going through, building relations, and finding out more about the country’s culture. Having a better understanding between different cultures can help bridge the gaps we are faced with, as once we stop looking at these countries as charity cases we can begin to find a way to help build them up.