<p>Read this article: [Gap</a> year students accused of being charity tourists who do little good - Telegraph](<a href=“http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1526430/Gap-year-students-accused-of-being-charity-tourists-who-do-little-good.html]Gap”>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1526430/Gap-year-students-accused-of-being-charity-tourists-who-do-little-good.html)</p>
<p>Unskilled volunteers often cost organisations more than they benefit them. Volunteers must be supervised, trained, and younger ones especially require a high level of care and guidance. Paying a fee to cover the cost of hosting a volunteer for a short period makes sense, and is ethical; shelling out the equivalent of a local worker’s yearly salary for a two month stint to boost your cv is not. The truth is that a donation of money or goods will most likely have a greater effect than the labours of an American, British, or Australian teenager.</p>
<p>Aside from these organisations’ abhorrent waste of resources and financial exploitation of communities in need, what I find most disturbing about the voluntourism trend is that it reinforces (or creates) a perception that foreigners from rich countries are more valuable than local people, or that communities in developing countries do not need or deserve the same standards of work and education. As a VSO spokesperson said in the article linked above:</p>
<pre><code>“We would not expect young untrained people to come here and teach our children. So why do we send untrained people to other countries to teach English? Volunteers need to question whether what they are doing is of any use to the country they are travelling to.”
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<p>I don’t mean to come down hard on people who take part in these programs. As someone who’s worked, volunteered, studied and lived on five continents and in three developing countries I am a great proponent of the benefits of travel, and I believe that exploring other countries and cultures can give young people excellent opportunities to learn and develop cross-cultural undertanding. But these programs? Not the best way to help developing countries. When people ask me about short term, unskilled volunteer placements, I tell them to enjoy a holiday or study abroad for a semester in a developing country, get to tknow the language, people, customs and culture, and seek out local organisations that could use a donation.</p>