FW:

Voluntarism

Spurred by a UNHCR remark some years ago that: Payment can destroy the sense of responsibility that refugees feel for their welfare. I wrote the following

I actually have a fairly jaded attitude to voluntarism in Africa just now, not about work-camps, joint seminars etc. but trying to get labour for free as we often do in refugee camps. It is complex and coloured by various experiences, including in some work I am doing in Congo just now, where the international NGO pays almost nothing for teachers getting training in the afternoons on the grounds that ‘that is the government’s job’. Since the government doesn’t even get round to paying them a salary, displacing themselves to be trained (with no guarantee of promotion at the end of it – also the government’s job) involves the teachers in significant costs (not able to farm, fish etc on those days).

Why, firstly, asking mostly poor Africans to volunteer when they have no job, no ‘cushion’, no alternative is dubious I feel. In refugee camps teachers and young people are asked to volunteer to get the schools going, and that is fine …. For a year. Then they also have the right to earn some money for their work. Secondly, there is a world of difference between the first world volunteer and the third world volunteer. This is particularly relevant when you think of Red Cross’s fundamental belief in the value of volunteering.

In another aspect of the same thing, when I was doing HIV/AIDS prevention work in Congo in UNICEF one of our partner NGOs (In this case the partnership was like that I have with my small dog who hangs around the table wagging his tale waiting for me to throw him something) rightly identified the bicycle taxi boys as good carriers of the prevention message to youth (like hairdressers and rap singers, for example) and told them to come for five afternoons’ training.

They refused on the grounds that

a) they were being given nothing to compensate for the income they would lose and

b) the NGO was full of fat people who were obviously getting ‘something’ from UNICEF which they were not passing on.

They were right of course.

(I told them to make themselves into a suitable partner we could deal with directly! Thus indirectly encouraging that proliferation of NGOs that is so difficult to handle).