Every year, hundreds of British students head to the developing world to take part in a variety of activities popularly termed as ‘volunteer work’.
Oxford University alone has TravelAid, Oxford Development Abroad (ODA) and a branch of Student Partnerships Worldwide (SPW) organising such projects across Asia, Africa and Latin America, with the two main activities usually being teaching or building.
Yet how useful actually are such projects? Are those who volunteer making a valuable contribution to underprivileged societies, or are they simply taking an opportunity to feel good about themselves whilst travelling?
I must admit that I have my own bias when it comes to this issue. Last summer I spent a month in Niger teaching English as part of a TravelAid project, and this July I’ll be heading to Bethlehem with the organisation Unipal to teach in a Palestinian refugee camp.
Prior to visiting Niger, I firmly believed that the project would be making a valuable contribution to the lives of school children in a desperately poor country with a literacy rate of just 19.9% amongst adults.
Yet while there, I found this conviction continually called into question. We were there for a month: how much difference could we realistically make?
None of us was a qualified teacher and we’d had very little training prior to the trip. Faced with the dire reality of the shortcomings of the Nigerien education system, my previous belief that we were making a difference seemed laughable.
We’d raised £2000 for the schools where we were teaching, and maybe we should just leave our contribution at that.
Yet by the end of the trip my original conviction that we were contributing something valuable was making something of a comeback.
In the long-term, of course, we weren’t making any real difference, except perhaps in terms of what the money we’d raised could provide for the schools.
But while we were there, we gave teachers and students who’d been learning English for years their first opportunity to practise it on native-speakers, and, perhaps much more importantly, our presence reassured them that the whole world had not forgotten their plight (Niger was ranked last in the UN Human Development Index of 2006).
Since returning, several of our team have organised independent fundraising projects for Niger. Sure, we can’t make a major difference, but surely we’re doing something good?
As for it just being an excuse for a nice holiday – life in Niger involved some seriously dodgy bathrooms, dodging our way through faeces on the way to school in the morning, and trying to avoid malarial mosquitos. Hardly my idea of a relaxing sojourn.
If I merely wanted to travel, I wouldn’t have opted to stay in the same place teaching for 4 weeks – an argument which I’ve heard many others volunteers make as well.
There are some who claim that such summer volunteer projects are not just futile, but actually harmful. In working as teachers or on building projects, volunteers are taking jobs away from local people, therefore damaging the economy and individual lives.
Surely we in the West should be encouraging the development of suffering economies, not fuelling their decline?
In fact, the situation is often not as simple as this. In the case of volunteers who teach, students who visit developing countries in the summer are generally working outside of the academic year and running free ‘summer schools’.
Without them, these would not exist; the students are not replacing teachers, but rather supplementing their work by offering the children the opportunity for consolidating their learning without having to pay.
In Niger, this seemed to be important to many of the students, whose education during the academic year had often been interrupted by frequent teacher strikes (one boy told us he had theoretically been learning English for seven years, but had had about the same number of hours’ tuition).
Volunteers on building projects generally suffer from such criticism even more, as they are perceived to be doing an unskilled job that any local could be doing instead.
This is undoubtedly a concern, and one that should not be forgotten when such projects are being established and planned. However, an important point to remember is the very fact that volunteers are just that – volunteers.
They are providing a service without being a drain on the limited resources of, say, a remote community in rural Morocco who want to build a village school.
In its building projects, ODA employs local engineers to provide the expertise and sources local materials to use, thus contributing to the economy.
Volunteers have argued that they are simply proving the labour for the menial tasks (such as brick making) which would otherwise take the locals away from their farming or even schooling in the case of young people.
Teresa King, a second year geographer who will be visiting Uganda with ODA this summer, makes an additional more subtle defence of the projects, arguing that, “in being humble and serving people in this way you allow for a positive cultural exchange, showing that Westerners are not just faceless capitalists who turn their back on the developing world, but who actually care about their plight, and are willing to help.”
Student volunteer projects are not going to save the world or end global poverty. But their material contributions can make a genuine difference to the everyday lives of local people, and on a socio-cultural level they can create new friendships and greater understanding.
Students who choose to take part are opting for several weeks or even months in some pretty tough and sometimes outright unpleasant conditions, with the chance for traveling around only coming after the project has been completed.
They may want to feel good about themselves, but in most cases they also genuinely want to help. Surely there is value in that?
