Are you thinking of volunteering in Nepal? You might want to think twice about helping out in schools, building orphanages or working on farms.
Nepal is a very popular country for gap year volunteers – often 18-year-olds who just finished high-school and want to take a break to travel the world and gather some new experiences. Voluntourism – the tourism industry built around volunteering, is not as harmless and do-goody as it might seem, especially not in countries such as Nepal.
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Voluntourism is a form of tourism where the tourists participate in voluntary work, often (but not always) for a charity. Voluntourists often work in orphanages with children, do construction work, work in schools or even farms.
Sadly, the voluntourism industry thrives on the idea that global poverty can be solved by sending some well-meaning voluntourists to the four corners of the world to help out in local communities. In recent years, voluntourism has even been hailed as a great way to travel cheaply for backpackers and gap-year students. Skills and experience do not seem to be important – which has a massive impact on the actual outcome of the placement. This sadly means that more often than not, the local people end up serving as a means to meet the needs of the voluntourist.
Voluntourism may be fuelled by noble feelings, the economics and business behind the industry are sadly almost always perverse.
There are many companies and charities offering voluntourism opportunities in Nepal. Not all of them are above board and if you still want to go through and become a voluntourist in Nepal after reading this article, I would recommend doing a lot of research into the charities you are working with.
Is voluntourism ethical?
One of the biggest problems with voluntourism is that voluntourism in itself might seem highly ethical while it often actually isn’t.
Let me explain.
When 18-year-olds sign up with a voluntourism company, they are often told that they are making a big difference and that they will be helping the local community while the opposite is often true. Voluntourists are often doing jobs a local could be paid for such as farming or building orphanages or schools.
What is more, voluntourist is a perfect example of neo-colonialism and skewed viewpoints of the lives and people in developing countries. Not only is there a lot of room for exploitation of local communities and children (more about this later), locals are often left with the product of pointless and questionable work (see voluntourism in the construction sector), with voluntourists taking away jobs from the community and creating a crippling dependency on foreign help in the area. In fact, Irmgard Bauer explains in her 2017 paper that voluntourism often paralyses the local community, ensuring that locals remain firmly at an assured level of helplessness to secure even more voluntourism placements. In other words: voluntourism is more often than not a vicious circle where the local community misses out at every turn.
The Ethics of for-profit and non-profit organisations
What about the companies and organisations that send voluntourists to developing countries to ‘help out’? How ethical are these sending organisations?
Well, it turns out that they are often not that ethical at all. Every single NGO works on the basis of their own respective political or ideological objective. These objectives might not be in line with the wishes, culture or even needs of the local community. Take mission sending organisations for instance. These sending organisations often have a quintessentially Christian outlook on both culture and ideology. Although mission voluntourists will obviously be going with the objective to help the local community, this help often comes with a side dish of bible reading and talking about Christianity.
Another ethical problem that comes with non-profit organisations is that these organisations cannot exist without poverty and strife. One NGO in Guatemala was paying Western Doctors $500 per surgery. As outlined in ‘Did we do good? NGOs, conflicts of interest and the evaluation of short-term medical missions in Sololá. Guatemala’, this project was so popular that the NGO had to scour the country to meet the demand of Western doctors heading to Guatemala performing surgeries. This is ethically incredibly questionable as the local community is used to meet the needs of the voluntourists, rather than the other way around.
For-profit organisations on the other hand are businesses – no matter how many smiling white teenagers and dirty smiling local children they put on their website. The main goal of these for-profit organisations is to make money. They aim to attract as many voluntourists as possible. They have put a lot of money and effort in cultivating relationships with the host villages and the host organisations, and thus will want to keep sending voluntourists to the same villages, schools, and organisations as long as possible. This sadly means that they need to show the would-be voluntourist a poor, sad village in constant need of outside help. Therefore, schools, healthcare, orphanages etc cannot be improved to the point where voluntourists are not needed. This would lose them money! They instead create a vicious circle where the local community is kept dependent on Western voluntourists, ultimately contradicting their purpose of eliminating poverty or sickness, and helping the local community.
Voluntourism as a tourism industry
Voluntourism is a multibillion dollar industry – a 3 Billion dollar industry, to be precise. Most voluntourists head to Thailand, Cambodia and Peru, but with more and more airlines now flying to Nepal, it is becoming one of the most popular voluntourism destinations in the region.
The Voluntourism industry is a problematic one. It puts vulnerable children in danger, it emphasises a white saviour complex and it can even create attachment disorders.
As voluntourists pay between $149 and $1000 for the duration of their stay (and they often still bring in money raised at home or online via go-fund-me pages), a single voluntourist is big business in poor countries such as Nepal. The welfare of children and the community as a whole sadly often comes second to the experiences offered to the voluntourism.
But Voluntourists are helping, right?
It is true that voluntourists might be able to help a community up to a certain point. The sad truth, however, is that many voluntourism projects – not only in Nepal, but all over the world, do not reach the people that actually might need the help.
In Nepal for instance, most voluntourism projects – whether it is teaching, construction or healthcare, are sending voluntourists to project in the Kathmandu Valley, Pokhara, or the Terrae.
The sending companies want to send their voluntourists to tourism hot spots instead of villages and communities that might actually be able to benefit from the project. The site selection of placements is often incredibly paternalistic where the choice of a deserving community relies on personal or patronage relationships.
In addition, they want to provide the voluntourist with an amazing experience (the sending company wants good reviews, wants the voluntourist to come back, wants them to make amazing Instagram pictures and spread the word about their organisation to friends) which means the voluntourist is often stationed in places where help might not be needed. The host organisation will then start up a superfluous project where the voluntourist can ‘help’ even though the project might not be of interest or help to the local or wider community.
Voluntourism and the White Saviour Complex
When talking about voluntourism, it is impossible not to talk about voluntourism as a form of white saviourism.
Many voluntourists head to the global south with a goal of helping the local communities and bettering the lives of the sick, the poor and the young. However, there might also be a secondary reason why so many teenagers and young twentysomethings head to countries such as Nepal: white saviour complex.
Academics studying voluntourism often notice that volunteer tourists, who are mostly white, implicitly portray themselves as the developed saviours of the radicalized non-white people that supposedly need the help of the white volunteers to develop.
And you might say ‘’Hey! That is not me! I would never ever think like that!’’ but then why would you, as someone who has no experience in teaching or childcare, medicine or even construction, go and work on those projects in Nepal. What can you as a in-experienced, untrained 18-year old bring to a Nepali classroom that a trained Nepali teacher can’t?
Another problem with voluntourism that stools on the White Saviour Complex is that many projects present locals as ‘’needy’’ and portray them as people who have no agency of their own. It is the task of the white, rich, Western voluntourist to come and save the local people rendering the locals passive.
The White Saviour Complex was also seen in European Colonialism as colonialism was partly justified by claiming that the educated Europeans had to go and help the underdeveloped non-Europeans. Sadly this theme can be found as a red thread throughout the voluntourism industry, making voluntourism one of the most important examples of neo-colonialism.
The problem with volunteering in orphanages in Nepal
In poor countries such as Nepal, Voluntourism is big business. It brings in a lot of money for the host families and owners of the voluntourism programs. In the past 10 years many 18- to 25-year-olds were shipped out to orphanages and schools inside Kathmandu Valley or near Pokhara where they were told they would be taking care of orphans.
However, the kids in the orphanages often were in fact sold by poor family members, ‘’rented’’ from nearby villages, or even trafficked from poor mountain villages. Back in the orphanage the owner would then spin a tearjerking story about the kid’s background so the volunteer would loosen their own purse strings, and in many cases, even set up go-fund-me campaigns to raise thousands of dollars for the owner – I mean orphanage.
90% of orphanages in Nepal are located in the tourist hubs of Kathmandu Valley and Pokhara. Many orphanages keep kids in terrible conditions – even though many voluntourists pay handsomely to either help in the orphanage or to stay at their allocated host family. In addition, they will often have raised money at home to hand over to the orphanage the moment the orphanage staff puts a garland of marigolds around their neck. The money sadly does not go to the orphanage but disappears into the pockets of the owner of the orphanage.
But at least you are kind of helping the kids, right? Well, many of the kids were ripped away from their parents at a very young age. In fact – kids that were trafficked to Kathmandu Valley or Pokhara might not even remember their parents, family members, or even the village they come from. Therefore, it is very hard for them to get back to their family or village, once they get turned out onto the street by the orphanage.
In fact, in 2017, a shocking 2 out of 3 kids in orphanages in Nepal are not orphans. They are just kids used as bait to trap well-meaning voluntourists and their money. With voluntourism becoming more and more popular this number is probably even higher – especially since many orphanages are illegal and not registered.
One of the reasons why you often won’t see kids older than 14 in orphanages is because teenagers are harder to handle (we all went through puberty!) and do not garner as much sympathy from voluntourists as toddlers or primary school kids do.
As these kids grew up in an orphanage where un-qualified volunteers would come and go every 3-weeks (sometimes even every week!), there is very little consistency in what and how they learn. Even when the orphanage keeps on kids past 14, many of the kids also do not get a chance to sit the national exams in Nepal (SEE) which will make it hard for them to find a (good) job or access any form of higher eduction.
As they were trafficked from their family and villages at a very young age, many might not even remember their family or village – making it almost impossible to access the support network they would have had in their rural village. It is not uncommon for male teenagers coming from orphanages to fall into the traps of addiction and homelessness in Kathmandu. For female teenagers kicked out of orphanages, the future is sadly even bleaker.
Charities such as Next Generation Nepal save kids from illegal orphanages and tries to find the parents and family members of these kids.
You can donate to Next Generation Nepal here or read their amazing blog about the impact of volunteering.
Some of the problems NGN raises in their 2017 fact sheet:
- Kids claiming to be orphans are often forced to lie about their parentage
- Kids are often denied access to their parents even when the parents live close by
- Items donated by Voluntourists often disappear as they are sold off for profit.
- Kids are kept in unhealthy and squalid conditions to increase their value as a poverty commodity
- Kids are often starved or beaten and even denied access to healthcare.
- Outsiders and voluntourists are permitted to take kids away from the orphanage without supervision (see below).
If you still decide to volunteer in an orphanage, please look out for these signs. If you notice something is off, try to gather as much evidence as you can and contact NGN via their website which is linked above. They will provide you with contact details for an agent at the Central Child Welfare Board of Nepal who will investigate the case.
Sexual abuse and volunteering in schools and orphanages in Nepal
Another problem with volunteering in orphanages and schools in Nepal is the fact that voluntourists hardly ever get vetted.
In most countries, anyone working with children will need a special paper from the authorities or police, stating that they do not have a criminal record. In the United Kingdom for instance, this is called a DBS check (Disclosure and Barring Service). There are three kinds of DBS checks: Basic, Standard and Enhanced. When signing a contract for a job in education, childcare or healthcare, your employer will ask for an enhanced DBS check. The enhanced DBS check will not only tell your employer whether or not you have a criminal record, but also whether or not the current or potential employee is listed on the Children’s Barred List or Adult First list. This is standard procedure and helps to keep kids safe.
Voluntourists coming to Nepal to volunteer in schools or orphanages often do not need to provide the organisation with such checks.
Can you see where this is going?
It is sadly not uncommon for voluntourism programs and schools to attract paedophiles. As mentioned above, it is very easy for voluntourists (and even outsiders) to have access to these kids. Sexual abuse in kids is often not reported in Nepal. Although the government did enact a separate law focussing on the rights of children in 2018, there is still a lot of child sexual abuse in Nepal – especially in the travel and (volun)tourism sector.
Probably one of the most famous cases of an aid worker exploiting children is that of Peter Dalglish in 2019. This Canadian aid worker was arrested in his house in Kavre and was sentenced to 9 years in prison after being found guilty of paedophilia. Two boys aged 12 and 14 testified against him.
But it is sadly rare for sexual abuse against male children to even be reported.
In 2021, Saathi and Terre des Hommes posted a study on Child Sexual Abuse in Nepal with a focus on the Travel and Tourism sector. The study was based on 7 years of Saathi case studies and it was one of the most eye-opening, gut-wrenching studies I have ever read. You can find the PDF version of the report here.
Sexual exploitation of boys remains a largely hidden phenomenon in Nepal. This sadly means that the numbers of actual child sexual abuse are probably a lot higher. Very little information is available on male child victimization. Many Nepalese are even unaware that male child sexual abuse is a thing!
In 2019, Shily Manandhar wrote an exposé on how children’s homes and schools (often those preying on voluntourists) continually put children at risk in Nepal. Not only do many voluntourists work in Nepal illegally – they are often able to take kids with them on weekend breaks or even to their private rooms or hotels. If you would like to read the complete article, you can do so here.
Other ways Orphanage Volunteering can be harmful
We have talked about many kids in orphanages being trafficked away from their parents, about how sexual predators have easy access to these children and how the owners of these orphanages often sell donated goods for a profit, keep the donations for themselves, and keep kids hungry and in squalid conditions to increase their poverty commodity and loosen the purse strings of voluntourists.
Another negative side-effect of voluntourism is described in the Orphanage Voluntourism in Nepal Q&A you can find here.
With voluntourists often coming and going every week to 3 months, it is incredibly hard for kids to build relationships. By the time the relationship is established, the voluntourist is already on their way to Thribuvan International Airport to resume their cushy life in their home country while the so-called orphan is forced to yet again build new relationships with the new unqualified voluntourists coming through the revolving voluntourism door. This contributes to a repeated sense of abandonment in children who are already incredibly vulnerable.
And yes! Unqualified! Many of the voluntourists are not qualified to teach or work with children. What value is there in kids having a teacher for one week or one month. A teacher who is not qualified to teach. Kids will not get the appropriate skills and training leaving them off worse than if they were thought by a trained Nepali teacher.
More about this later.
The future of Orphanage Volunteering in Nepal
Luckily orphanage volunteering is dying out in Nepal. The Nepali government has been taking a lot of action against illegal orphanages and brought in a rule where all volunteers need to obtain a work visa – even if they are not getting paid themselves.
This, however, does not mean that there aren’t any abusive and illegal orphanages out there. Many orphanages keep a low profile and survive on mouth to mouth advertising in the backpacker and voluntourist communities.
Where voluntourists and kids previously could reside in the same building, the Nepali government has now said that voluntourists need to stay in a different location. This decree, and the new rule that voluntourists need to have a work visa are obviously very welcome. However, illegal orphanages often slip through the net and keep putting children at risks for only a couple of greenbacks.
Volunteering as a teacher in Nepal
Now orphanages are on the out, a new kind of voluntourism is rearing its head in Nepal: teaching. Droves of gap-year students are flown into Nepal and brought to schools in Kathmandu or Bhaktapur where they are matched with a local school.
How good is education in Nepal?
Before we answer the question whether or not Nepal actually needs voluntourist teachers to come and teach Nepali kids, we need to have a look at the state of education in Nepal and most importantly in and around the Kathmandu valley.
Overall, the level of education in Nepal is pretty poor. Many teachers are not necessarily qualified (especially in rural and remote areas), the Nepali education system is sadly based on rope learning (learning things by heart instead of learning new skills), and the textbooks for government schools are not always up-to-date or even up-to-standard.
But in the Kathmandu Valley, where most of the volunteering goes on, schools are doing a lot better with many academies and Nepali private schools popping up for kids in middle school or secondary school. Although the teaching in these schools can also be identified as rope learning, the quality of teaching, textbooks and teachers is overall a lot higher.
At the end of secondary school, Nepali students sit a series of standardised tests called SEE. The results of the SEE will determine whether or not students can go to university be it in Nepal or abroad.
So yes – there are problems when it comes to the quality of education offered in Nepal – especially when looking at rural areas in the mountains and in the terrae.
That being said, the biggest struggle in Nepal when it comes to education is keeping kids in school. 770.000 kids aged 5 to 12 years old are not going to school and only half of the students in grades 3, 5 and 8 are achieving the criteria for Nepali and Mathematics. Looking at the divide between rich and poor, we see that 65% of rich kids is on track when it comes to literacy while only 12% of poor kids are. Many poorer kids are taken out of school the moment they can read and write – especially in remote areas and communities. You can read more about this on the Unicef website.
So what is the problem with teaching in Nepal?
Now we have established that education in Nepal – especially outside of the Kathmandu valley, is not necessarily great, why would teaching as a volunteer in Nepal be a problem?
In her study about teaching and voluntourism (The impact of international volunteers on education quality in developing countries ‒ An assessment of organisations’ volunteer recruitment and management practices), Estefanie Hechenberger looked into the impact of voluntourism teachers.
First of all, she ascertained that many for-profit organisations do not require the voluntourist to have a degree. To be clear: I am not talking about a teaching degree. Anyone who paid the fee was able to join as a volunteer teacher. They did not need any experience, any knowledge… anything. Just the money to pay for the project-fees, the plane ticket, and the visa.
Although it is obviously hard to ascertain the actual impact of these kinds of unqualified teachers on the wider community, it is believed that the direct impact on the students is quite low. Especially since many of these teachers only stay for a few weeks to a couple of months. Just like with volunteering at orphanages, it means that kids will need to constantly rebuild bonds of trust with the teacher which can have an impact on their mental health. In addition, the fact that kids will get a new teacher every couple of weeks or months means that there is hardly any continuation in teaching methods, class- and educational expectations and in some cases even subject knowledge.
In practice this means that kids are not only taught by unqualified teachers who do not have a grasp on current teaching practices, kids will also often be left confused (expectations when it comes to behaviour and learning are constantly changing) and with gaps in their knowledge as teachers teach the same things twice or are unable to adequately teach courses and subjects.
Hechenberger also mentioned the fact that there are more and more gap-year providers also means that more and more unqualified, inexperienced teenagers are sent to developing countries to take up volunteering positions as front line teachers. She explained that this can be incredibly dangerous as governments often see these teachers as a kind of band-aid solution for their poor educational system. It stops the government investing in local and better-trained teachers.
Add to this that the quality of teaching done by these unqualified teenagers, the cultural differences, and the fact that that these programs are often poorly managed and measured (from an educational perspective) and you have a perfect storm for education that is actually WORSE for the students than better.
Teaching SEN kids in Nepal
During my research into teaching opportunities for volunteers in Nepal I have seen many websites and companies advertising the chance to work with kids that have Special Educational Needs.
I was shocked!
These companies like Projects Abroad are letting inexperienced kids ‘’from 16 year old’’ work with incredibly vulnerable kids in Nepal. How is this even legal? Especially when keeping in mind that these teachers did not have to show a police or DBS check!
These kids – often kids with down syndrome or severe forms of autism, need structure, they need routine. They do not need an untrained, inexperienced 16-year old be their friend and teacher for 2 weeks. While the teacher can fly back to Europe or the States with 100 pics for the gram and a sob story to write about on their college application, these SEN kids are worse off than before.
Voluntourism teaching as a neo-colonial concept
Another problem with voluntourism and becoming a volunteer teacher in Nepal is the presumption that the voluntourist, as an untrained volunteer, coming from a wealthy nation, does a better job that a local teacher.
This colonial mentality actually leads to the host schools and communities to think that they will never be as good as the Western volunteer and that the volunteer will always be better and higher. (David & Okazaki 2006 and Loiseau et al. 2016).
So voluntourism – especially when it comes to teaching, really does instil that colonial mindset – both in the voluntourist and in the community, that the white teacher is better than them!
Add to this the fact that the voluntourist is happy to come to Nepal and teach even though they would NEVER EVER be allowed to teach in their home country (because they are inexperienced and do not have teaching qualifications!), just because they are in a different, less developed country where different rules seem to apply. This comes pretty close to expat exceptionalism if you ask me.
What about teaching in Nepal as a qualified teacher?
If you are a qualified teacher (i.e. you have QTS and you are legally able to teach in primary schools or secondary schools in your home-country) and you would like to come to Nepal as a voluntourist, you can have a bigger impact as a teacher-trainer. There are numerous programs that will allow you to train Nepali teachers over a period of time in new teaching practices and classroom management.
I hope that, as a teacher, you can see why this might have a far greater impact on the wider community. Instead of teaching 20 kids in a classroom for 2 weeks you are teaching new skills to Nepali teachers who might teach between 30 and 300 kids a year! For the rest of their career!
Medical volunteering in Nepal
In recent years, health volunteering has become more and more popular in Nepal. It is true that Nepal’s health care system is somewhat strained and that donations and fundraising drives in Western Countries have really helped to increase the quality of life for many Nepalis. One of the most famous examples of how fundraising drives for the health sector can have a positive impact is the Lions Club Eye Hospital in New Baneshwor. Here, trained doctors and nurses provide Nepalis with both minor and major eye procedures such as SICS and Phaco at low rates. They also organise surgical eye camps all over Nepal where people who need cataract surgery can get the procedure done for free.
However, heading to Nepal to become a volunteer in the health sector might not be the best idea.
Problems with voluntourism in the health sector
When looking at programs offered in Nepal for voluntourists in the health sector, we often see that they would prefer you to have experience in the health sector. The word prefer in this sentence is incredibly important because it means that you will be able to become a healthcare voluntourist in Nepal with little to no experience. One of the programs asks you to be ‘at least interested in healthcare’.
Would you let someone with no experience take care of your sick family members? Just because they are white?
Also keep in mind that, although there is a shortage in health workers in Nepal (but what country doesn’t have a shortage!), the quality of care offered by Nepali doctors and nurses is of a high standard. As someone who has lived in Nepal for two years now (and another 2 years to come), as someone who is planning on giving birth in Nepal, I know that whatever happens to me I am in good hands.
In addition, there are also ethical issues when it comes to voluntourism in the medical sector. As Irmgard Bauer opens with in her 2017 paper ‘’More harm than good? The questionable ethics of medical volunteering and international student placements’’, it almost seems as if the local people serve as a means to meet the voluntourist’s needs. Even though voluntourists head out to countries like Nepal for all the right reasons, language barriers, lack of experience and even ill-preparedness can cause more harm than good.
In his 2011 article, Disaster relief in post-earthquake Haiti: unintended consequences of humanitarian volunteerism, Jobe highlights several problems with untrained voluntourists – even when it comes to crisis management and disaster relief. He explains that the use of untrained voluntourists in fact increases the number of medical errors. He also explains that even with trained voluntourists, follow-ups of cases are hard to manage as voluntourists will only stay for a few weeks or one month while the healing process will take longer, triggering much-needed and ever-important follow-ups. These follow-ups are then handled by new voluntourists or local staff – both whom often did not treat the patient in the first place, resulting in medical mistakes or a longer healing process.
There are also ethical issues with voluntourism in the health sector. In the 2006 article Duffle Bag Medicine by Maya Roberts, explains that many of these health voluntourists are fearlessly confident – even when they are still students. In their enthusiasm they can often be culturally insensitive. They also tend to waste much-needed resources in their over-confidence, and apply learned procedures inappropriately. These students – who would often not be able to work unsupervised in a hospital, are almost set loose as it were, on sick and poor people in hospitals in developing countries.
Schools and even universities often market medical voluntourism for both non-healthcare and healthcare students as a great way to boost one’s CV. It allows gap year students to get some experience in a hospital, ultimately making them a more attractive candidate for medical schools and other healthcare courses.
Ethical problems with medical voluntourism
Apart from the ‘’no experience needed’’ mentality some sending companies seem to have, and the fact that even medically trained voluntourists can do more harm than good during their placement, there are also quite a few ethical problems with medical voluntourism.
The first ethical problem I would want to shine a light on is the fact that medical voluntourism is often just a quick-fix or a band-aid. The voluntourist, especially those with short-term placements, is not solving any of the structural problems in the wider community. They are in fact supporting and perpetuating the factors that lead to illness and bad health as they are not looking at solving the root causes of health care problems such as poverty, overstretched health care and infrastructure. The fact that an army of free medical voluntourists is offering free help might also mean that there is no incentive for the government to invest in health care or health care professionals.
Another ethical problem with it comes to medical voluntourism is that it often erodes local health services. People who are able to pay for health services will wait longer to be seen by a voluntourist for free ultimately impacting the local economy and often leaving local healthcare workers without a job or money. When the voluntourist or organisation leaves, they leave a large gaping hole in the community that now has no healthcare professionals, no modern treatments and no drugs, often forcing people to head to nearby villages and towns.
It is also incredibly arrogant to assume that the medical conditions and problems of people in Nepal are similar or the same as those seen in people in the West. Many voluntourists with medical training are trained in curing diseases often found in the west. Diseases are often also in a much more advanced state than they are in the West which makes it harder to assess these health problems. In rural areas there might also be an increased risk when using anaesthetics. People can be malnurtured or in poor health which makes using anaesthetics incredibly dangerous. Anji Wall wrote an amazing paper on this in 2011. Medical voluntourists are also often incredibly inexperienced when it comes to working without diagnostic tools.
Add to this the fact that treatments in developing countries might require a completely different approach. In Guatemala for instance, voluntourists handed insecticide-laced shampoo to the locals after lice were declared as a health priority. As shampoo is a luxury for many and luxuries are to be shared, the distribution of the shampoo had hardly any effect. Other examples are of providing invasive hip protheses procedures to people who are used to squatting or distributing medication with labels in a language people do not understand. Especially in cultures where sharing is engrained this can have far-reaching consequences.
Sadly there are also ethical double standards as there is a widespread view that any care given is better than nothing. This means that people will often be given useless medication by voluntourists even though the medication will not work – just because the organisation wants to give the voluntourist a chance to look benevolent. Medical voluntourists obviously accept that they will be working in a hospital or facility with underprivileged setting. In his paper about NGO’s in Guatemala, Berry talks about the fact that the medical voluntourist will often accept lower standards of work because they are working in a developing country. In addition, the voluntourist does not take any responsibility for the delivered care which can have devastating consequences. In fact, because medical voluntourists often only stay for a few weeks (and can legally not stay longer than 3 months in Nepal), they often have no idea whether or not the procedure was a success. They try to see as many patients as possible in the time-frame, and unless a condition can be fully treated in one session, the voluntourists are unable to provide continued care. Cleft lip or cleft palate surgeries for instance, have often lead to deaths as underlying illnesses would develop and follow-up care was not available. When we take an even closer look at the example of cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries we also see that although the cleft lip or palate has been mended, the much needed speech therapy is non-existent.
Add to this the fact that the relationship between voluntourist and local personal is not always a great one. When the voluntourist leaves, patients are often dumped onto local personal without handover or additional information. Local staff will in other words, need to mop up after the voluntourist. Local staff also often perceive the voluntourists as arrogant, disrespectful and undervaluing local knowledge. They also do not seem to understand that disposable materials are precious commodities and use these materials liberally.
But doesn’t the money paid for the placement help the local hospital or centre?
Now we have established that medical voluntourism can in fact be detrimental to the local hospital, patients, and healthcare staff, the question rises whether or not the money paid for the placement benefits the local hospital or centre.
The answer to that questions lies somewhere in between yes and no. Yes, the local hospital might get some of the money – but most of it gets distributed between the sending company and the host organisation. The hospital or local centre would have been better off if the fees were just donated.
Take for instance the group of 10 medical volunteers mentioned in Brain gains: a literature review of medical missions to low and middle-income countries. 10 Volunteers paid over $30.000 in fees for their voluntourism trip while the much needed new hospital wing would have cost $60.000. Another paper quotes the cost of the T-shirts for a medical voluntourism team being able to fund the first aid station at the centre for one year.
In ‘Don’t make my people beggars’: a developing world house of cards.’, Loiseau and Sibbald talk about host- and sending organisations spending money towards building new volunteer accommodation or marketing to procure an ever increasing stream of fee-paying voluntourists instead of helping the local hospital build a much-needed wing or helping them invest in diagnostic tools.
Volunteering in construction
Lastly I want to talk about voluntourism in construction. Because what is better than building wells and houses and schools for people and communities? You single-handedly gave the school clean water or made sure the local kids have nice classrooms?
In a country like Nepal, local people desperately need jobs – especially for those working in unskilled labour such as construction. Locals fly out in droves to countries such as the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait to work in construction by temperatures often exceeding 40 degrees Celsius. These people are often sending back hundreds of dollars in remittance a month to their family and village in Nepal to keep their family afloat. They live in cramped labour camps where they have to share a room with 30 other men. They often sleep in shifts (3 men per 1 bed, 8 hours per person) and the food they receive in the labour camps is often subpar. In 2021 more than 1200 Nepalis died while working abroad but this number is probably a lot higher.
Sadly, ill-informed teenagers and well-meaning twenty somethings still travel to Nepal to build wells, schools, and houses. They ultimately end up doing the job of a local for free – a local who would have been able to support his family with the money earned from the construction project. The last thing villages in Nepal need is imported unskilled labour. Nepalis need in these villages are desperate for jobs!
There is also something to be said about the fact that public works will serve the community better when locals are involved. 20 British girls trying to build one well by a school in the terrae will have less of an impact on the local community as when the local community is taught how to build wells themselves. People need to be shown how to solve problems, how to do things, how to build certain things. They do not need to have things done for them by inexperienced voluntourists. But yet again – this would not serve the voluntourism industry as self-sufficient local communities do not need voluntourists.
In fact, I loved reading Pippa Biddle’s article in Huffpost and how she spent a week building an orphanage in Tanzania. Being boarding school girls, they obviously had no experience in building a library which meant a local builder had to take down and rebuild everything during the night so the girls could continue building the library. She says ‘’ It would have been more cost effective, stimulative of the local economy, and efficient for the orphanage to take our money and hire locals to do the work, but there we were trying to build straight walls without a level.’’
Conclusion
In her article, Pippa Biddle laments the fact that the projects she worked on were not bad but that her being there was. And that is the overall gist of what is wrong with voluntourism. Some of these project might have a positive impact on some of the people it is serving. But the impact of donating the fees you paid to become a voluntourists would have been 10 times greater and better for the local community as it would not only have provided locals with a job, but also with pride in their work and important knowledge that would steer them towards self-sufficiency.
The voluntourism industry wants to create dependency. A self-sufficient community or helping solve the root causes of bad health services or education would cut off their seemingly endless supply of voluntourists. A healthy community needs no help, they need no voluntourists. In other words: it is in the best interest of the voluntourism companies to keep the quality of help and service provided to the community low to create a bigger demand for voluntourists.
The sad fact is that by being a voluntourist in countries such as Nepal, you are not solving any problems or addressing any poverty. In fact: you are partaking in a large-scale, world-wide industry that sees poverty and suffering as a commodity. In other words: you are adding to the poverty and suffering of these people in the long run.