Volunteer Travel - Sustainability

Sustainability

Much of the conflict regarding volunteer tourism is that these trips are not sustainable. There will always be groups who want to partner with international organizations and individuals who desire to spend their free time helping others, but the trips and projects these people choose should focus on development that both involves the locals directly and caters to their most important needs. Volunteer trips that benefit communities through the construction of new facilities and community spaces may or may not involve the help of locals. Those that do not prevent local workers from getting much-needed jobs and those that bring their own resources fail to support the local businesses and economy. Sustainability is especially important in cases where projects are initiated by volunteers and left in the hands of locals to finish. Volunteer groups should be certain before beginning a project that there is enough funding and support for the project to be completed once they leave, in order to avoid letting their hard work waste away as a pile of rubble or their supplies sit in storage unused.

For example, voluntourism blogger Alexia Nestora found a village in Kenya that had been significantly impacted by voluntourism. This village had approximately 500 residents and as a community had built a school and furnished it with the necessities, such as individual classrooms and blackboards. The village was using this schoolhouse when a well-funded NGO came in and decided to build the community a larger school, complete with a very expensive commercial kitchen. Volunteers flew in and the NGO purchased expensive building materials and built the second school right next to the first. The community then decided to use the second schoolhouse as their school, and now they use their original schoolhouse for storage. A second group then came in to build a third school and they began construction right next to the second school. However, they ran out of funding before it was even time to build walls and have not been back to complete their work. Talking to the locals in the village revealed that they never wanted a second, much less a third, school and had no need or desire for an expensive commercial kitchen. However, they could have benefited from new teachers or an additional source of funding in order to pay teachers already on staff. Many other villages in Kenya lack adequate structures for schooling and would have welcomed the help of these NGO and volunteer groups had they offered to build a school for them. In many projects like this one, NGO and volunteer organizations often overlook one of the most important steps – talking to the locals and asking what they need.