How Not to Save the World
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are "voluntourists" - foreigners coming to do well-meaning voluntary work - actually doing more harm than good at developing world orphanages?
Manuela Saragosa speaks to one who says she saw the light. Pippa Biddle travelled to Tanzania to help do construction work at an orphanage. But she soon realised that the shoddy work she and her fellow American students were doing was creating more work for the people they were supposedly helping, and the whole project was really designed for their own benefit.
But the harm goes further than that, as James Sutherland, who works in Cambodia for the child welfare organisation Friends International, explains. Voluntourism creates a demand for an industry of fake orphanages trafficking in children who are not even orphans.
(Picture: American woman with two African children; Credit: MShep2/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. In this edition, |
| 0:07.0 | stop kidding yourself. You're not saving the world. You're on holiday. It doesn't make you not a tourist |
| 0:12.4 | just because you want to go and pick up a shovel. The reality is just the thought process that |
| 0:17.9 | says, I as an unskilled person, have something to give, is a colonialist thought process. Coming I as an unskilled person have something to give is a colonialist thought |
| 0:22.8 | process. Coming up, the problem with volunteer tourism or volunteerism. It's a growing industry, |
| 0:29.6 | but is it doing more harm than good, like creating a market for fake orphanages? They're exploiting |
| 0:36.0 | the children in the institution. They're exploiting the goodwill of the donors who support them. And they They're exploiting the children in the institution. They're |
| 0:38.0 | exploiting the goodwill of the donors who support them. And they're also exploiting the young |
| 0:41.8 | people who come to volunteer in them. That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:49.3 | So you want to save the world and your first stop is helping out at an orphanage in Southeast Asia or Africa. |
| 0:56.5 | Well, think carefully. |
| 0:57.8 | Even the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is on the case. |
| 1:01.5 | She helps set up a charity, Lumos, that campaigns against orphanages, such orphanages. |
| 1:06.3 | Here she is speaking at a global campaign launch a couple of years ago. |
| 1:10.4 | We all of us in this room will have given money to try and help children. |
| 1:13.6 | And that is an honourable and a magnificent thing. |
| 1:17.1 | However, what you may be doing is contributing towards real harm. |
| 1:23.5 | Poverty, as you say, is the number one driver into institutions. |
| 1:31.3 | The only place I can feed my child is if I give them up to the institution. The only place I can get the medical support, that's why we have many disabled children |
| 1:34.3 | in these institutions globally, is if I put them in the institution. |
| 1:38.3 | Unfortunately, the research shows even well-run institutions do a lot of damage. Then, unfortunately, you have |
| 1:47.3 | institutions that really are run as businesses, because we know that where a lot of donor money |
... |
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