Don’t volunteer abroad before you learn about the project you want to be involved in. Good intention isn’t enough.

Though the title and subtitle of this article don’t sound positive, I don’t want to discourage you from volunteering. Please continue reading to learn more so that you can spread this critical awareness and avoid unknowingly supporting bad things. 

Most people feel that volunteering is good because volunteers give their time, energy, skills, and knowledge freely, usually having more or fewer expenses. Volunteers, in general, want to help or do the greater good. Their intentions might be good, and I value these people very much. Unfortunately, there is also another side of volunteering abroad that is ethically bad. In this blog post, I will write about particular examples of the negative impact of international volunteering.

Orphanage tourism - children are not tourist attractions - don’t create orphans

Honestly, this is a highly complex and challenging topic that it is impossible to cover everything in a few paragraphs. But at least I will try to give you some insights to see this issue from another perspective. 

Orphanage tourism, sometimes called child tourism, is probably the worst case of the negative impact of volunteering. This phenomenon doesn’t involve only volunteers but also other tourists who want to pay a visit, cheer up, and financially support children in orphanages. Even people who just donate some money to orphanages are often causing harm to children. 

You might have come across various offers for volunteering in orphanages in south-east Asian or African countries; in better case, an orphanage is genuine and helps vulnerable children who don’t have parents or any relatives who can take care of them. Unfortunately, the other case is that an orphanage forces children to be there even if they have one or both parents because empty promises convince them of a better future for their children if they are in the orphanage.

The reality is that businessmen run these orphanages to create a profit for themselves, and the children are commodities traded for tourists/volunteers’ fees or donors’ money. The conditions in orphanages aren’t usually good because if the orphanage is poor, it creates a sensational impression on foreigners to contribute more money. The problem is that the money doesn’t go for the orphanage development but into the owners’ pockets. 

The tourists who spend one afternoon there or even volunteers who work there for two or three weeks aren’t able to spot anything wrongs because the time is too short to notice that there weren’t any changes for making the place better. And they won’t find out the actual reasons why the children are there because the management will tell them not to talk with children about their past; otherwise, it might hurt them.

OK, let’s say you have managed to find a genuine orphanage and want to volunteer there. Is there any other problem? Well, it might be a bigger or a minor issue, but it is there. When you come there as a volunteer and spend a few weeks or months with those children, they will create an emotional attachment to you. This relationship will be broken when you leave, which negatively affects childhood development. Another issue might be becoming their role model instead of the local heroes.  

This sad reality is happening, so it is essential to tackle it. You can start with spreading awareness. As I said earlier, some genuine orphanages are doing irreplaceable service for vulnerable children, and it is good to support them. On the other hand, some are causing harm to many children. Therefore, it is always crucial to do proper research before supporting orphanages or choosing projects directly supporting family and community lives. 

If you want to learn more about this sad topic, visit thinkchildsafe.org or loveyougive.org, or just google orphanage tourism.

Taking locals’ work opportunities - negative impact on local economies 

It might be surprising that someone who works for free/volunteers on a construction site might harm locals’ economies. The volunteers feel satisfied because they help build a school, a clinic, or a library, which is undoubtedly a good thing, and don’t realize that their help was actually harmful. 

Maybe you are wondering: “Why?”

The reason is that the volunteers take locals’ jobs, which is the only source of income for those people’s families. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is often very high in developing countries, and the people who lose their jobs won’t be able to find a new one. Therefore, losing a job might be devastating not only for one person but also for his/her children and other relatives who are often dependant. 

I stated an example of a construction site which is probably most often the case, but this negative impact of volunteering also occurs in other fields like agriculture or even teaching. Of course, there are opportunities where volunteers are needed and very helpful, especially when some specific skills or expertise are required.

Again, not all projects are wrong, but the bad cases are there. Therefore, if the main reason for your volunteering is to help and support, do proper research before you get involved in international volunteering.

Unskilled volunteers - Poorly done work

This issue of volunteering goes hand in hand with the previous one. Training unskilled and inexperienced volunteers sometimes take more effort and energy for the hosting organization than doing the job alone without volunteers. Another case could be when the volunteers do poorly done work because they don’t have needed skills. You can read one concrete story regarding this issue on huffpost.com blog.

Spreading misleading information and biases

Spreading bad reviews or gossip is always easier than sharing positive experiences. Sometimes as volunteers or just regular tourists, we might encounter strange and uncomfortable situations and ways of doing things. We think that we exactly understand what has happened, and we judge the locals and see them in a bad light. The worse thing is when we spread our wrong impressions further on.

Sometimes we might be right and but most of the time, we, as tourists, even volunteer-tourists, cannot understand or see the actual reasons why something has happened. Maybe after a few months spent in the particular community, we can start understanding and seeing things from different perspectives, and our judgments won’t be negative anymore. 

Sadly, many volunteer programs last just a few weeks, which isn’t enough to understand local cultures, communities, or even particular situations or ways of doing things. That can negatively impact us, and we will share misleading information with other people. 

In this blog post, I share my own experience related to the issue of spreading misleading information about misunderstood circumstances experienced while volunteering.

Were you wronged or experienced a bad situation while volunteering or traveling? Learn and try to understand even if you are sure you are right and don’t judge.

There are more negative impacts of volunteer tourism which I list here, but I won’t elaborate on them in this post because it is already quite long:

• Supporting dependency of local communities on support from developed countries
• Enforcing needs and interests other than from the local community
• Cultural and religious differences - tensions between volunteers and hosting community
• Commoditization and commercialization of volunteerism, volunteers, poverty, culture, and children
• The harmful impact on the environment

Things aren’t black and white, which also applies to volunteer tourism. As I have said and the beginning of this post, I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing good and volunteering abroad. This post is just meant to spread awareness about some issues that can sometimes be hidden and one doesn’t realize. 

Though there are several issues with international volunteering, as stated above, fortunately, they can be minimized or avoided altogether through careful preparation, planning, and good project management. So when you are planning to volunteer, keep in mind a “win-win-win” situation.