Voluntourism and Volunteerism – only looking nice on the CV?

During recent years voluntourism have become more and more popular. Briefly explained it is a way of spending “globally conscious” holidays. You can have a calm conscience on your long holidays when you do a little bit charity work at the same time. In practice it means that you work for example in a school or an orphanage a couple of weeks and afterwards, or in the weekends, you do some kind of travelling.

The growing demand for such holidays have resulted in voluntourism becoming a big business. Tourists/volunteers, whatever you like to call them, pay huge amounts for organisations to participate in some social projects where the aim should be to help people. Unfortunately in some cases the business aspect has gone to far and the main aim, helping people in need, has vanished. Still the voluntourists are given the wrong impression of doing something good for the people, when they are in fact only worsening it for the most part. For example fake orphanages are popular voluntourist attractions. Poor local children, hired from their parents for nice prices, are placed in these orphanages to give the voluntourists a clean conscience about their holidays. In some projects the voluntourists help building for example a new school or some other public building in villages where these aren't actually even needed. It is just to make them feel good, to make the voluntourists live in their illusion of helping and doing something meaningful.

These are only some examples of common cases, there is a lot more to it. The main problem is that the focus is on the wrong thing here. As voluntourism has become such a good business it is more the demands of the tourists than the actual needs of the locals that directs the projects. It should be the other way round. The current need should determine the placements of the volunteers. In many volunteer organisations you can chose between a wide variety of different projects. You can chose which ever fits your personal aims or your CV the best. Already the word orphanage is enough to awaken compassion in people. As so many people are interested in the same things the organisations are busy creating new projects for them. And so the original aim of voluntary work is lost.

There are however good and bad organisations and everything in between. Sometimes I even think that my own environmental project is one of those looking fancy on the CV, but which do not work in real life. If I would have known better, if some one would have told me that for example many tribal schools have a huge lack of teachers I would have chosen differently. I would hope organisations to change their priority from the volunteers wishes to the real need of the local people. This would be better not only for the locals, but also for us volunteers.

It might be a bit confusing when I talk about voluntourism and volunteerism at the same time. Actually the difference isn't that easy to make between these two. In a way I'm a voluntourist myself, working during the week and travelling on weekends. However, you could roughly say that real volunteers stay for a longer period of time when voluntourists are only having a shorter holiday. But this is only my own way of distinguishing the terms, others may have better explanations :)