Volunteering in the Global South – who is helping whom?

Travel to Africa, Asia or Latin America for a few weeks to several months to support voluntary projects: many young people are attracted by the numerous offerings of this so-called volunteering – and so much so that it has meanwhile become a huge business model. Yet the meaningfulness behind it is rarely questioned.
Helping people is probably the strongest thought that drives young people to go to the Global South as volunteers. At the same time, a foreign country can also be explored and it also reads well on a CV. Work with children is particularly attractive, for example in schools, kindergartens or orphanages. If one takes a look at the advertisements of the numerous providers for this type of voluntary service, things read like "With volunteer work in Africa you can escape the grey everyday life and at the same time do good." or "Make your dream of Africa a reality!". This sounds tempting and also makes it easy to forget that you usually have to pay four-figure amounts out of your own pocket for these trips. But if it's all for a good cause, where then lies the problem?
In order to answer this, it is first necessary to recognise the colonial structures behind such programmes. The reason why countries in the Global South are so much poorer and are gladly labelled as the "Third World" or "developing countries" is due to Europe's mechanisms of exploitation. In the colonial period, in which Germany also played an enormous role, white powers advanced especially into Africa and enslaved and dispossessed the population living there for centuries. These dynamics did not dissolve after the declaration of independence, but remain effective to this day. If white Europeans now view such volunteering programmes as real help, there is a certain hypocrisy in that. The question thus arises: are people really being helped through these projects? Or is possibly even more harm being done? If we look at who teaches children English or maths in these countries or looks after them in orphanages, it quickly becomes clear that most volunteers have no qualifications whatsoever for these activities. If we imagined the other way around that here in Germany an 18-year-old person suddenly taught children in schools, this image would be absurd. So why should it be acceptable in Africa, Asia or Latin America?
It is therefore essential that we shift our attention away from the intentions of the volunteers and instead ask ourselves what long-term effects it has for the people on the ground. Most volunteers stay for at most a few months, some actually only for a few weeks. For the children it has become normal to constantly see a new white face that then leaves them again after a short time. They therefore have no attachment figures and repeatedly learn that white people represent their authority figures. But we all only know the images of happy and dancing poor Black children who fall into the arms of white helpers in gratitude. It is the image of the so-called "white saviour": white people from seemingly modern, highly developed Europe go to the poor, uncultivated South to show people how to live "correctly". What is right and wrong is of course decided from a Eurocentric perspective. This staging of a white saviour is based on the racist idea that white people possessed moral and intellectual superiority and therefore had to take care of other non-white people. After their trip, the white saviours can then report how happy the children there were, even though they lived so simply. They thereby feel more grounded, now also appreciate the small things in life. They believe they have done something meaningful, given something back. Black children from impoverished circumstances are thus exploited to cleanse their own guilty conscience.
But that is not what these children are there for. And little is actually done after this short period of volunteering. The argument is often made that a little help is better than none, that without the voluntary helpers many things would not work and that they really only wanted to do good for the people. But the supposedly good intentions of the volunteer workers in no way justify the fact that in reality volunteering has become an industry that focuses only on the interests of the volunteers and completely ignores the effects on the local population. This results in strong dependency relationships of the affected countries on such projects. As a result, the work of local organisations of the local population is displaced, which actually deal with the problems in the area and accomplish valuable things. Jobs are also taken by volunteers that should actually go to the people on the ground. If the many teaching or childcare positions filled by volunteers are not taken over by locals, this means that these systems cannot develop independently. Both the children and the locals who depend on such jobs are thus extremely harmed in the long term. And on top of that, with many providers it is also not transparent where the money from the volunteers' pockets actually goes.
What thus appears at first glance to be meaningful work reveals itself as a solution that is not thought through long-term at all for problems in formerly colonialised countries. Anyone who really wants to change something must therefore not be blinded by such actions. The money would be far better spent with local organisations and one's own energy should instead be invested in urging politicians in one's own country to finally stop the exploitation of the Global South. For therein lies the actual root of the problem.

Liora Shahrestani Mayer