Volunteering abroad seems to have become a staple in the “moral development” of the young and wealthy. Many go every year, with high-minded ideals of helping those less fortunate, but also armed with the knowledge that this will occupy a glowing spot on their CV or social media pages. However, recent criticism of this culture has questioned whether it ultimately is a self-serving adventure and one that should be situated within a colonial legacy. Should volunteering in the Global South be critiqued as exploitative? Can NGOs “decolonize”? And how can students partake in it in a genuinely ethical way?
Instagram is filled with university students who have posted pictures of themselves helping young children in the Global South on volunteering trips undertaken on gap years or holidays. Many of these happen within the context of an organization that quite literally sells the idea of moral development by “helping” vulnerable communities alongside fun holiday activities. For example, Raleigh International, a gap year program, advertise themselves as transforming young people’s lives through international volunteering. I spoke to a student at the University of Edinburgh who described her experience there as one she undertook mainly to have “an adventure”. They take you on more leisurely activities, such as a trek through the jungle alongside two “moral” activities, either based around ecological development, helping build classrooms, or teaching. The student I spoke to described how these latter activities felt meaningless – these wealthy Westerners were not needed there. Costa Rica was not the undeveloped country she had thought it was. Far more of the focus was on teaching the volunteers how to help rather than the ultimate material impact.
“Voluntourism” is a term only coined in recent years. It arose from critical analysis of certain forms of volunteering abroad that perpetuate unequal dynamics between the West, as the civilized actor, helping a “savage” Third World, in a way that ultimately benefits the wealthy Western actor far more, in a fundamentally exploitative tradition. A lot of these critiques hinge upon volunteering from selfish motivations, as fulfilling white saviour complexes, or hoping to extend social capital, rather than a genuine desire to help. Organizations such as Raleigh, which are so common on gap years and amongst the wealthy Edinburgh student cohort seem emblematic of this. They represent a fundamentally shallow view of developing countries as a place in which Westerners can fulfil their dreams of adventure whilst also essentially receiving a badge that says they did a good thing because they paid to help underprivileged people. This is the most cynical perspective one can adopt – volunteering in this way is extremely common and can often come from a genuine desire to help. But what recent critical analysis of voluntourism has shown is that it has the potential to irrevocably damage the communities whom volunteers claim to be helping. It can harm children’s psyche, as they form emotional attachments to volunteers who then leave. It can even deprive local communities of jobs, as certain tasks are given to volunteers from the Global North who do need to be paid, which ultimately leads to continued reliance onto foreigners. Even the most well-intentioned volunteering abroad can have damning repercussions, let alone that done with more selfish motives.
How can we as students then go forward? NGOs are evidently vital, and often structurally interwoven into crisis situations. For example, governments outsource social responsibility onto them, such as in food provisions in certain refugee camps, relying on these exact same short-term volunteers to keep operations that provide essential aid going. I spoke to PhD student Brenda Young on how she thought the best way to conduct ethical NGO work abroad would be. She acknowledges the problematic legacy of colonialism that haunts many NGOs but ultimately strongly felt that “voluntourism” was not intrinsic to all forms of volunteering abroad in any way. She also did not view intentionality as central to the issue; it is ultimately impossible to know, and there may be no such thing as a selfless action, which does not make the consequences meaningless. Young viewed the cultural exchange that enriches both the volunteer and the communities as a very positive effect of this work. For her, what was central was that volunteers are used in situations where they are actually useful, and for volunteers to not use a tokenizing rhetoric when it comes to the work they have completed; to not “other” communities, by fitting them into the box of marginalized.
We must acknowledge the exploitative way in which NGO work abroad as university students can function. The halo of moral legitimacy given to NGOs and their workers is ultimately a damaging and blinding screen to the potential harm that can be done. It is our prerogative therefore to think twice before signing up to a volunteering programme about who would benefit more from our work – the community we volunteer in, or our CV?
Photo by Lisa van Vliet on Unsplash