Does voluntourism do more harm than good?
In recent years, more and more people participated in voluntourism to do volunteer work during travel. According to Kahn (2014), the total expense of volunteer tourists each year is $2 billion (as cited in Anderson, Kim, and Larios, 2017, p.1). As this trend grows, the controversy on voluntourism is ongoing. At first glance, voluntourism is popular and may seem meaningful for many people because volunteering is often regarded as a contribution.
Additionally, volunteer tourists can experience different cultures at the same time as making contributions. However, various evidence indicates that the negative effects of voluntourism are even worse than its positive aspects. Therefore, even though voluntourism is regarded as noble work by many people. It results in more serious problems and produces more harm because many volunteer tourists are unprofessional and their work sometimes hurts the local economy.
Some people may argue that volunteer tourists are knowledgeable so that they can effectively contribute to the recipient community.
A large proportion of the volunteer tourists are well-educated college students who may provide some help to the local community development using their knowledge. Thus, some people believe these knowledgeable young people can make a change in the local community. However, many of them are actually unprofessional and unskilled in volunteering work and they don’t know what the recipient community actually needs. According to the Voluntourist (2015), many volunteer tourists are not professionals in teaching.
Thus, they cannot effectively help kids to learn English in the classroom though some of them are native English speakers.
Additionally, they can only stay for several weeks, so other volunteers sometimes do repetitive teaching. This non-professional teaching will result in the inefficiency of students’ learning. Budd (2019, para. 4) also pointed out that these volunteers do not have valuable and relevant skills in necessary fields such as medicine and masonry. Some of their works are unqualified and contribute nothing to the development of the local business. It is also not realistic that foreign volunteers with few local experiences can help local people to resolve economic and political issues within just several weeks. Therefore, their help in the recipient community is very limited even though many volunteers are knowledgeable.
In addition to unprofessional volunteering, volunteer tourists can hurt the local economy due to their well-intentioned volunteer work. Volunteers’ generosity sometimes turned out to have unanticipated negative impacts on the local economy. Donating gifts is a common behavior that disturbs the local market. According to Budd (2019, para. 5), some volunteers previously gave bikes away to the local people, which led to the destruction of the local business.
Though these volunteers did it with good intentions, the distributed bikes made local bike sellers harder to do their business because it messed up the local bike market.
Their behaviors originated from kindness but resulted in unexpected negative consequences. Additionally, not only do the distributed gifts hurt the local economy, but the volunteers themselves also take away job opportunities that are supposed to belong to local people.
Specifically, many volunteer organizations prefer to use even less skilled volunteers instead of hiring local people because volunteers can help them raise money while local people require salaries. It turns out that more and more local people lose their job opportunities in the local business. In a word, the generosity and job competition from volunteers further do harm to the local economy.
Though voluntourism has some positive impacts that benefit the local people, it also leads to more severe problems in the local community due to unprofessional work and harm to the local economy. We notice the negative impact of voluntourism is worse than the positive aspect. Therefore, to make local people better off, a higher requirement should be set for volunteers. Volunteers themselves also need to pay more attention to their behaviors.
Does voluntourism do more harm than good? by Jingde Wan
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References
Anderson, S. E., Kim, R., & Larios, K. (2017). Voluntourism: The economic benefit and societal costs of short-term mission trips. International Journal of Health & Economic Development, 3(2), 28–37.
Budd, K. (2018, November 9). 5 Myths About Voluntourism. National Geographic https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/unpacking-voluntourism-five-myths
Budd, K. (2019). Why it matters: Giving back. National Geographic Traveler, 36(1), 36–37.The Voluntourist [username]. (2015, September 10). Documentary ‘The Voluntourist’: Is voluntourism doing more harm than good? . YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E16iOaAP4SQ
