The term “voluntourism” is a mixture of volunteering and tourism and can be defined as bite-sized acts of volunteering during traveling. This act serves the purpose of satisfying the desire to do something beneficial for society while also enjoying touring. While this may have started as a benign intention, it is defying the original purpose of volunteering and can bring detrimental side effects to the volunteering sites.
“I f you can speak English, have a sense of adventure, and feel the urge to experience new cultures and make a difference...” —This is a catchphrase of a popular voluntour site online. Such a phrase reflects how light the requirements are for the travelers, or so-called “voluntourists”, for them to “make a difference”.
Voluntourism is one of the world’s fastest-growing travel niches with catchy phrases such as “enjoy vacation and be a better person” luring in more victims. However, at a time when charity organizations are proliferating and the organizations are no longer mission-driven, going on a trip with unproven and probably illegal organizations is not so enticing, after all..
Nonetheless, in the case of voluntourism, such training or education is often lacking, which makes the volunteering more prone to detrimental side effects. In the case of volunteering for teaching orphans, most of the legal organizations make three months of education mandatory. In order to lessen the danger of the volunteers, to teach them about the basic customs and communication, and in order to educate the exact purpose of volunteering, such actions are meant to be done. Even with the strict education and hard rules, accidents do occur in many of the volunteering sites. With this fact in mind, without a doubt, the lack of legal boundaries and of mandatory education clearly make it harder for voluntourism to actually become effective at all.
Additionally, voluntourism is encouraging the corruption of volunteering and defies its main purpose. One of the most popular voluntour sites is Cambodian orphanages. However, in recent years, the Cambodian government found it suspicious that the number of orphans and orphanages proliferated at a dramatic rate. When the government did an inspection in 2011, it realized that only 28 percent of the 120,000 children were actual orphans and the rest were those who obtained governmentaland nongovernmental funds but had one or both parents. Considering the fact that those “fake” orphanages and orphans augmented since the popularization of voluntourism, Voluntourism is rather encouraging the exploitation of the act of volunteering itself.
Moreover, voluntourism is piling the already satiated supply of one-sided giving. Recently, researchers and development experts are claiming that the continuous giving of “help” is what abated the development of underdeveloped countries. Such help caused the countries to be overly dependent on basic supplies and aid that developed nations gave. In order for volunteering to work, it is important to slowly allow the community to independently grow.
Therefore, many legal volunteering organizations strive for long-term benefits of the community instead of providing an ephemeral help. However, in the case of voluntourism, such consideration of long-term benefit is lacking and is driven to increase the tourism profit and therefore is only creating a deleterious effect on the community.
