Follow the money. The ethics of the economics

Also worth considering are the economic consequences of your volunteering. At the most basic level, interrogate the operator about how much of the cash you might be paying to volunteer is actually going to the community. You might be impressed or disgusted with the answer. If they can’t tell you, then they are either hiding something or they don’t know. Either way, it makes them a poor choice of local partner.

Beyond questions of how much money though, are questions of where the money is being spent. If you are working on a building project, how much of the materials were bought from local businesses? Development starts with supporting what services and materials the community can provide already, not destroying local initiative by bringing in tools, materials and skills from outside that are currently available in the local economy.

Odds are good, for example, that basic building supplies exist for sale in the area, and that there are people already skilled in masonry and other artisinal practices nearby. Where situations like this exist, your participation as a (probably) unskilled participant might be best directed at doing work that will allow local community members to practice their professions in a paid capacity onsite. Such approaches promote employment, get things built faster, and support the local economy.

Unfortunately, such projects typically mean that you will find yourself a manual labourer working under a local foreman. Which might not be what you bargained for. As Alexia Nestoria, a voluntourism industry consultant and the voice behind the Voluntourism Gal blog points out, an overwhelming proportion of volunteer projects don’t actually need volunteers to do the work that they are volunteering to do. Not only are there often local people willing and able to undertake the projects, but the time required to actually train and monitor unskilled well-wishers often detracts from effort that communities could otherwise put into just getting on with implementing projects themselves.

The reason for taking volunteers on despite their relative inefficiency is generally because those volunteers are funding the projects. Volunteers are seldom willing to send their cash, but stay at home themselves. Even when it would be a more rational and efficient approach.

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So the question that you need to then ask yourself is:

Why am I doing this?

If you are purely interested in doing good, to the exclusion of all other aims, then simply donating your volunteering money to a decent and efficient local organisation may well achieve those aims best.

But simply wanting to do good in the abstract is seldom the motivation for those who travel to volunteer. Many would-be voluntourists have a desire to be a physical part of the project and to have a hand in making the world – quite literally – a better place. Here, a voluntourist needs to make some practical decisions about where their assistance will be most helpful (or minimally troublesome) for a community.

If you have particular specialist skills that are not easily available locally, then consider partnering with organisations that can use those skills. Sure, making a website for a local NGO may not be as sexy as getting your hands dirty building a school, but other people may be able to build walls. Not everyone can set up a decent website, and that makes your contribution necessary and valuable in a way that your grunt labour isn’t.

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…and who am I doing this for?

No good volunteerism project works by making heroes out of foreigners in the local community – it’s about working with local groups to achieve development aims as directly and usefully as possible. If that means that you aren’t the top dog on the building site, and the local guy who actually knows how mortar and bricks go together is, then so be it.

That said, there is a school of thought that says that voluntourism should be approached from the point of view of the customer. That people want to feel good about themselves, and that should be catered to as much as possible because the free market will work to weed out the poor projects from the good (watch the first few minutes of this conference, for example) and a growth in good volunteer-centered projects will ensue.

The danger here however, is that the kind of voluntourism project that appeals to a naive traveler’s ego is precisely the project that is unlikely to be developmentally helpful to communities. Projects that are primarily about you as the participant tend to be short lived, low-effort and frequently without a long term goal – since the ‘goal’ is not developmental at all. It’s about making you feel good. Putting the power of the free market to efficiently satisfy demands together with narcissistic fantasies of helping the impoverished is a recipe for disaster.

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Oh god. Can I do no right?!

You can. And there are many reasons that you should. But it’s important to pay attention to the fine detail. Questions about where the money goes and the intricacies of your relationship to the community you serve are absolutely fundamental to directing your energies wisely. If you are taking the trouble to go out of your comfort zone to make life better for others, the least you can do is your homework, and to be aware of the complexity of the questions you need to ask.

Voluntourism wouldn’t exist as an industry if travelers were happy to efficiently donate money for local organisations to do the work themselves. For better or worse, many folk want to have a hand in the process of helping communities. That desire can be a useful (or at least benign) learning experience, or it can be wholly unhelpful. To what degree your next journey to volunteer abroad will be one or the other depends a great deal on how you are able to honestly confront some difficult questions about why you are going, who you are going for, and whether you are participating in a project that – in the fine detail – is going to be a force for good.

You may find yourself surprised at how quickly the most straightforward school-building project can become an exercise in self-analysis. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also absolutely necessary.

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This post originally appeared at Matador Network.

—Photo ma_emerson82/Flickr

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