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Although it is ultimately the volunteer who decides with which organisation they want to volunteer with and who will receive their hard earned money, it is vital that organisations provide responsible and ethical programmes. It is disturbing to see more and more articles on-line in which volunteers are over-promised and under-delivered. Is it just a matter of time before South Africa features as one of these “irresponsible” volunteer destinations?

See for yourself on:

The Telegraph

Admittedly there is a growing awareness from consumers that they should do their homework properly. But even then many websites look “responsible and ethical” - they use all the right terminology, are picked out by search engines looking for these key words or phrases. “Green washing” is difficult to see through and many website promote themselves as ethical and responsible volunteer / voluntour organisations.

Voluntourism in South Africa is booming! Every day we come across another operator starting up. Some plagerising material from our own website without even attempting to change the wording. On face-value these websites looks good and say all the right things. But look a bit deeper and the cracks start to emerge. Some of them are not registered companies, some do not list their company registration number, some operate without a physical address, some only have a mobile number to contact them on …. and the list goes on.

The global trend of large wholesale tour operators offering voluntourism products has come to South Africa. A potential shortcoming in a lot of voluntourism models is that they operate their programmes like a normal retail travel booking – your community placement or should I rather say “booking” is automatically guaranteed and your money is taken. Importantly no screening or matching of skill takes place. What this means in practice is that the receiving community – in some cases vulnerable communities, with little rights and influence, often with OVC (Orphans and/or Vulnerable Children) in their midst - has no say on who comes into their community or what they will be doing. This “push” approach to volunteering does not always take into account the needs of the community and brings its own set of risks. In a worse-case scenario these operators could be sending paedophiles to work with children.

Voluntourism has many risks that communities themselves may not be aware of. Despite these risks, they often “buy-in” to voluntourism because of the promise of a monetary donation. One of the risks being that dependency is created and/or increased. And in some cases, the community often does not have the capacity to effectively utilize the large number of volunteers sent to them. If voluntourism is to make a sustainable contribution to communities then it is important that they do not replace local labour but work with local labour. Much of the “work” that volunteers are asked to do can and should be done by employing local labour. Should volunteer programmes be geared more at passing on higher-order skills than doing basic maintenance and repair work?