When Americans Volunteer Abroad, Who Really Benefits?

For many young Americans, traveling to the developing world to do volunteer work seems like a perfect vacation, blending adventure with service and making the serious hit your credit card just took for the plane ticket feel somehow justified.

Enter the so-called “voluntourism” industry, a collection of for- and non-profit companies that organize group trips abroad to do volunteer work—a week tutoring street children in Hanoi, Vietnam, for instance, or a month doing conservation work in the Caribbean Sea. Just fork over the required fees, which can range from $900 for two weeks teaching English in Uganda to $5,000 for two months with the sea turtles in Mexico, and the organization does the rest, setting up room, board, and sometimes even tours or language classes.

But these programs are not without their skeptics, and their short-term approach to service has posed an important question: Who most benefits from voluntourism—the communities being served, or the volunteers themselves?

That’s a complicated question of course, but in at least one instance, University of London geographer Amy Norman says she has an answer. When it comes to young orphans in sub-Saharan Africa—a group commonly targeted by voluntourism organizations—the children would be better off if the volunteers stayed home. In September, Norman and her colleague Linda Richter published a study arguing that the cycle of short-term attachment and abandonment that children in orphanages—many of whom already watched their parents die of AIDS—undergo each time a new crew of well-intentioned volunteers arrives can be emotionally devastating.

“Young children are programmed to build attachments at this age, and to do so with tourists, who end up going back home, leaves children feeling abandoned and insecure,” Norman says. “We think this is irresponsible, and damaging to children’s long-term development.”

Voluntourism of this kind can also have another unintended consequence, one that promotes a dangerously stereotypical view of the developing world. Africa, in particular, can be seen as a place of universal poverty and social instability. For instance, in South Africa, where Norman did her research, she says many Americans arrive equipped with the knowledge that the country has 2 million AIDS orphans but are unaware that the vast majority of those children have been absorbed into their extended families rather than sent to orphanages. And for those who are in institutions, making their care the object of a foreigner’s vacation, no matter how well intentioned, can feel downright offensive.

“In the West, the idea of allowing foreign tourists to come visit institutions where vulnerable children live, and to combine this with a trip to say, the Grand Canyon, well this would seem outrageous,” Norman says. “But for some reason this seems perfectly normal … in Africa.”

But organizations that set up volunteer trips abroad say they’re just trying to foster bonds across international borders and bring a valuable service to both communities and service workers. Sarah Ehlers, founder of A Broader View, a non-profit group that organizes more than 180 service programs abroad, says that while her volunteers don’t generally make long term connections with the organizations they serve, her company does. They come back to the same countries and the same organizations every year and become long-term supporters of their work. And volunteering abroad, she says, helps her clients connect with the places they want to help.

“Sending a donation to a charity [in the developing world] is always a good thing, but one is never sure if the money will be used to help the needy directly or to pay some warlord a bribe,” she says. “In reality, a physical presence, in a desolate village or understaffed orphanage, is worth much more to these unfortunate communities than a single monetary donation could ever be.”

Ryan Brown is a staff writer with Campus Progress. You can e-mail her at ryan.brown@duke.edu.

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