Given that various “damning reports” had been published about the negative impact of volunteer tourism since 2010, is volunteer tourism doing more harm than good to the world’s poorest people?
By: Ringo Bones
Ever since those various damning reports on the negative
impact of negative tourism had been published since 2010 about upper middle
class tourists from relatively well-off countries paying travel agencies to
help orphans in various poorest regions of the world has been compared to
Friedrich Nietzsche’s proverbial “Road to Hell” – i.e. such schemes are actually
doing more harm than good. In a nutshell, well-intentioned westerners do little
to alleviate the lot of poverty-stricken children in developing countries. This
issue got the spotlight of the world’s biggest news providers because volunteer
tourism is the fastest growing sector of the global tourism industry since the
beginning of the 21st Century.
Even though various medical volunteering schemes have been
deemed the ones that do the most good in providing basic healthcare to
poverty-stricken children in developing countries whose public health systems
can barely cope to provide basic services to their own needy citizens, well-off
upper middle class tourists paying a volunteer tourism company in order to work
as an entry level carpenter or building painter in constructing new school
buildings of the developing countries remote hinterlands are actually depriving
local carpenters, painters and other local artisans of much needed jobs. Worse
still, it also perpetuates the “White Anglo Saxon Jesus Syndrome” especially in
developing countries that are used to be colonies of formerly “staunchly
Christian” world powers like Spain, England or Portugal during the last couple
of centuries.
Is volunteer tourism really comparable to Friedrich
Nietzsche’s proverbial “Road to Hell”? Well, various studies done on the
subject of philanthropy still shows that that various philanthropic
organizations that hire professionals that are specially trained to provide
help to needy kids and the poorest citizens of developing nations are the ones
that can actually do the most good. Just remember that whenever you feel that
do good to feel good aspect of altruism, you and the world’s needy are better
off for you just donating money to mainstream charitable institutions like
Oxfam.