Volunteer Tourism: What's Wrong With It and How It Can Be Changed
Volunteer Tourism: What's Wrong With It and How It Can Be Changed
Volunteer Tourism: What's Wrong With It and How It Can Be Changed
Diversité et inclusion
Annexe 2
The trend of voluntourism has come about partly through initiatives by large-scale,
well established organisations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, CARE
International and World Vision. They raise money for programmes they have
developed for orphans and vulnerable children.
Voluntourism with children also perpetuates the notion of a desperate Africa needing
the benevolence of the West. Volunteers are led to imagine that their engagement
directly addresses suffering. Many believe the children they work with don’t have any
other social systems to support them materially or socially.
This is evident from the images and anecdotes they circulate of a suffering, sick
Africa. The images they portray is that Africa is incapable of escaping poverty and
violence without Western intervention.
Students need to learn about the political, social, economic and cultural histories of
the places they visit. They should be given the opportunity to explore systems of
poverty and inequality in greater depth. Most importantly, students need to think
about these experiences as cultural exchanges meant to generate knowledge and
respect about other ways of being and not as trips that “help” the poor.
If volunteers can understand the people they work with as citizens with rights rather
than objects of charity, they can begin to think about long-term partnership, justice
and structural change.