Like superplussed said, not a great article, but one that raises valid points. Having grown up in the expat community of sub-Saharan Africa and later spent a year working there, I've had my own experiences with these voluntourists and heard plenty of stories from old-timers in the field. Just two of these here:
Every few months, colleagues of ours would get a "team" from abroad, sent to them courtesy of their organization. That meant: a dozen young, inexperienced western adults descending on them for two or three weeks to "help out". The first 1 1/2 weeks would be spent doing odd jobs at the orphanage, perhaps putting up a new toilet block or something like that. The next week would be spent on holiday - visiting one of our big national tourist sites. On the face of it, yes, the team did do something useful. But what were the hidden costs? Most importantly, time. The long-term couple that was usually in charge of the orphanage had to devote big chunks of their time per team for planning: planning how to transport the team around, planning how to accommodate the team, planning what to do with the team, etc. Then of course the team needed constant attention and supervision, not to mention accompanying on their tourist trip. All amounting to several weeks of time that could have been spent a lot more profitably. Also, consider the money aspect: each team member probably paid around $2000 - $5000 for the whole trip. What if that money had gone directly to the project? They could have done a lot more than just putting up a new toilet block (which, by the way, could have been done a lot cheaper by local workers, thus also helping the local economy).
Apart from this indirect harm caused by voluntourists, there can be direct harm as well. The project I was involved in once had a pretty major staff crisis following some indecent behaviour of a short-term visitor towards a local girl. Said visitor had just come for two weeks to have a look around and help out a little, so we hadn't given him any cultural training (which was an organizational failure, in retrospect). He didn't realize that his behaviour towards the girl, which would have been fine in Europe, was deemed very inappropriate in the local cultural context. The result was, however, that the girl's grandmother, a vital member of our team, felt publicly shamed by her granddaughter's behaviour. (Public shaming is one of the worst things that can happen to an African.) Almost before we realized what was going on, she had sent in her letter of resignation and was packing her bags to leave for her home town. It took a week's patient negotiation by other local staff to get her to stay.
So yes, voluntourists can cause a lot of problems, even when their intentions and motivations are impeccable. There is a place for volunteers to serve abroad, but it needs to be done in close communication with the people on the ground who know what is really needed. Plus, if you're thinking in a time span of weeks, that is almost definitely too short a time to do anything meaningful. If you really want to help, come for six months or a year, then we'll talk again.
> Also, consider the money aspect: each team member probably paid around $2000 - $5000 for the whole trip. What if that money had gone directly to the project?
I think that's really the main point here.
For example I'm familiar with Morocco, a country with significant unemployment issues even for those who are well educated. You can hire a worker there for $10 to do manual labor for an entire day of 10 hours of work (pretty insane). So this notion that $3000 goes towards 6 days of work for 5 hours of work each day, just makes no financial sense. Instead of paying $30 for 30 hours of labor from someone who has experience in e.g. construction, we're seeing two orders of magnitude, $3000, spent on an equivalent amount of hours to a person without experience in construction.
You might as well take 1% of your budget, pay a local worker and just go on a holiday and you'd not only contribute as many hours, but those hours are more effective, you're also creating a local job, local income and tax revenues. (well the latter might be a bit optimistic seeing as taxation either isn't enforced, or voided for low-income groups, but you get the point). Or hell, take 5% of the budget.
I tried to persuade my girlfriend when she left for India on a similar project last summer to do something else. At least that was a 3 month project and she did quite a bit of teaching and was able to do a bit of knowledge transfer.
I think that makes the most sense though, knowledge transfer, i.e. an engineer or a doctor who teaches engineering or health practices in places where there's knowledge deficiencies. There's quite a bit of that going on, it's also far from without flaws but it feels much more structural. Engineers without borders has been pretty transparent about their failures in the past while not giving up. Almost anything else and you're really just overpaying rich people.
Every few months, colleagues of ours would get a "team" from abroad, sent to them courtesy of their organization. That meant: a dozen young, inexperienced western adults descending on them for two or three weeks to "help out". The first 1 1/2 weeks would be spent doing odd jobs at the orphanage, perhaps putting up a new toilet block or something like that. The next week would be spent on holiday - visiting one of our big national tourist sites. On the face of it, yes, the team did do something useful. But what were the hidden costs? Most importantly, time. The long-term couple that was usually in charge of the orphanage had to devote big chunks of their time per team for planning: planning how to transport the team around, planning how to accommodate the team, planning what to do with the team, etc. Then of course the team needed constant attention and supervision, not to mention accompanying on their tourist trip. All amounting to several weeks of time that could have been spent a lot more profitably. Also, consider the money aspect: each team member probably paid around $2000 - $5000 for the whole trip. What if that money had gone directly to the project? They could have done a lot more than just putting up a new toilet block (which, by the way, could have been done a lot cheaper by local workers, thus also helping the local economy).
Apart from this indirect harm caused by voluntourists, there can be direct harm as well. The project I was involved in once had a pretty major staff crisis following some indecent behaviour of a short-term visitor towards a local girl. Said visitor had just come for two weeks to have a look around and help out a little, so we hadn't given him any cultural training (which was an organizational failure, in retrospect). He didn't realize that his behaviour towards the girl, which would have been fine in Europe, was deemed very inappropriate in the local cultural context. The result was, however, that the girl's grandmother, a vital member of our team, felt publicly shamed by her granddaughter's behaviour. (Public shaming is one of the worst things that can happen to an African.) Almost before we realized what was going on, she had sent in her letter of resignation and was packing her bags to leave for her home town. It took a week's patient negotiation by other local staff to get her to stay.
So yes, voluntourists can cause a lot of problems, even when their intentions and motivations are impeccable. There is a place for volunteers to serve abroad, but it needs to be done in close communication with the people on the ground who know what is really needed. Plus, if you're thinking in a time span of weeks, that is almost definitely too short a time to do anything meaningful. If you really want to help, come for six months or a year, then we'll talk again.