Putting myself in the shoes of a budding voluntourist, I searched for a programme on one of the most popular voluntourism platforms, volunteerabroad.com, and quickly landed on the ‘Safari and Community Outreach’ trip in Tanzania. It promises a blast of hiking, safari camping and cultural day trips alongside a vague ‘community outreach placement’. Oh, and it costs £300 a week.
It’s with this price tag that the problematic side starts to arise. Payment means business model. So despite its claims, the platform can’t really have helping at its heart, because if every project brought about sustainable change there’d be no community left to help and that’s the end of your business model. In this sense volunteers are not really volunteers, they are customers. They are buying the experience of exploiting other people’s hardships to get a fun holiday. These very real, complex problems, be it anything from lack of infrastructure in Tanzania, poor female education in the Middle East or rural hunger in Asia, are a consumer seduction.
...you cannot shake off the feeling volunteers are like 'white saviours', like rich westerners who come in and solve everything
Once you know this you cannot shake off the feeling volunteers are like ‘white saviours’, like rich westerners who come in and solve everything. This has been a theme throughout colonial history, and, as we know, it’s been messy.
It’s doubtful whether these rich western volunteers are doing any saving anyway. Voluntourism can do quite a lot of damage, for example by volunteers undertaking jobs that could be done by local workers, in turn damaging the economy. And in most cases the ‘help’ provided is only a performative sticking plastic that looks impressive on a CV and on Instagram but does not tackle the root cause of the issue. A singular well in a village does not solve a systemic water infrastructure problem.
This trivialisation of a complex problem is insulting – how dare you assume that your ten-person volunteer group can do something a whole government can’t? Voluntourism perpetuates the dangerous impression that poorer countries are helpless without foreigners’ help.
In fact, the presence of volunteer groups absolves the government of the responsibility of a problem. When the smiling Safari and Community Outreach volunteers fill the potholes in a road in Tanzania, the Tanzanian government sees they don’t need to provide road maintenance services, because the rich foreigners will do it for them. The problem is complex and multi-faceted, so the solution must be too.
It may be more popular than ever, even a right of passage for many twenty-something travellers, but voluntourism is viciously ugly. You’re better off stomping drunkenly and trashing the place on your city break.