The activities which claim the title “international volunteering” are diverse. Some are funded by government, others by private donors, others at the volunteer’s own expense or fundraising efforts. Some can be slotted into a few days of an existing holiday while others demand two full years. Some take all comers, others are more selective. Some focus on short-term manual labour, some on technical skill transfer, others on relationships of mutual empowerment. They are run by charities, governments and for profit businesses.

Because of this diversity, volunteering is often seen by many development workers as a bad thing, an activity which promotes notions of a “white saviour” helping people incapable of helping themselves. Sadly, it seems the programs which fit this description also appear to be those most attractive to many volunteers. In order to defend volunteering as worthwhile if “done right”, let’s consider volunteering “done wrong”. It may offend some, but there is no point being coy to cushion the sensibilities of a global upper-class if it means perpetuating the “White Saviour Industrial Complex” which does no good for anyone.

This is the first installment of a series outlining what Palms Australia does not do. The next installments will be linked at the bottom of this article when they come online.

This is what we don’t do.

1. “Unskilled” labour

Volunteers with shovels are like politicians with hard hats.

While I would not want to denigrate bricklaying or childcare as unskilled (I know I don’t have the skills for either), numerous volunteer programs exist which send people as inexperienced as I am to do these or similar jobs in developing countries. If these skills can be learnt by visitors travelling through, they can be learnt by local people. For the cost of one expat visiting you could employ many locals or simply one local for an entire year, keep skills in the community, stimulating the local economy and allow people the dignity of work.

2. Short-term volunteering

A second type of “volunteering done wrong” involves sending in expatriates to fill a role for a week or a month. Even if teachers are recruited to teach, nurses to nurse, builders to build, etc. there are questions about what sustainable difference is made locally. Occasionally there may be a call for a specific technical skill to be provided, which cannot be provided locally, though this is rarely the case in these sorts of programs. Short-term volunteering is mostly a stop-gap solution which leaves a community no better off when the volunteer returns home. Often it can actually be damaging as expatriate volunteers make one of the following two errors.

3. Take local jobs

Short-term or long-term volunteer placements should be assessed against a criteria of the local community’s ability to fill the role locally. If an electrician does not exist in the local community/project/NGO, there may still be one running his own small business in town. Does it make more sense to fly a volunteer in for a month or to pay a local worker to carry out the work? There is rarely a case when the real cost of recruiting, preparing, sending and supporting a volunteer on a project like this will be less than paying a local a fair wage. Longer-term placements should also be assessed against the local job market. Expatriate volunteers should only be sought where specialist skills cannot be secured locally. If possible, the volunteer’s role should involve some component of mutual skill exchange, so that the community will develop its own skills and that the volunteer will learn from local counterparts what works and is sustainable in this context.

4. Take control of the project

Simple. Foreign volunteers should never be in charge. They should answer to a local boss, NGO or committee. Even if they have greater expertise or experience in their professional field than their counterparts, they do not know all the cultural, political, technical or environmental barriers exist to their “brilliant” foreign solutions. If an expatriate owns and drives a project it is almost bound to fail, if not while they are present soon after they leave. Locals must make the decisions. Expatriates can provide advice but must be prepared to be told “no”.

5. Send unprepared volunteers

In addition to their professional expertise, volunteers should understand their role as a cross-cultural development agent. This is not as simple as providing a checklist of cultural attributes or faux pas. Understanding their own cultural adjustment can help a volunteer realise when their judgments reflect their own process rather than some “truth” about their hosts. Learning strategies to pull through culture shock, build cross-cultural relationships, understand the impact of one’s own culture and personality and seek local advice are essential if their work is to be sustainable. Volunteers should understand asset based community development, human rights, disability, gender equity, environmental sustainability, and learn to manage expectations and relinquish power to local people.

Pre-departure orientation also helps build relationships between the support organisation and the volunteer and demonstrates a humility of the volunteer – that they understand this will be different than working in their home context. It is no great loss when someone who doesn’t recognise the value of preparation withdraws their application, though unfortunately they may simply seek out less thorough organisations.

This is a cross post from Palms Australia’s own blog, reproduced with permission from the author.

As extreme as this seems, criticism of AusAID is not wholly misplaced. Previously I have expressed concerns about the neo-liberal paradigm which sees so much of the aid budget spent through corporations, the managerialist requirements which eat up time and resources of NGOs and public servants, the risk aversion and fear which discourages genuine relationships between aid workers. I’ve written submissions to Senate Inquiries, the AusAID Volunteer Program Review and the Independent Review of Aid Effectiveness with criticisms, praise and suggestions for positive change.

Yet, reading the news articles above left me feeling that Rowan and Steve weren’t on the same side as me – they weren’t interested in improving development assistance, merely reducing or eliminating it.

A few facts to start with:

• Australia’s aid, as a percentage of total federal budget is set to grow to 0.5% by 2015 (from about 0.3% in 2007).
• With presumed economic growth, the percentage target would see a doubling in dollar value of the aid budget.
• Yet, it would still fall short of the 0.7% target first pledged in 1970 and reaffirmed repeatedly since.
• This promise was made by the Labor Party, and matched by the Coalition, in the lead up to the 2007 election. It has since been reaffirmed by both major parties, with the Greens favouring 0.7%.

Obviously, a massive increase in funding must be managed carefully.  It would be foolish to think simply multiplying current programs would be the most effective use of the budget. It is not  inconceivable that some opportunists might want access (or more access) to this growing pile of moolah. And so, it is right to question the effectiveness of government programs, challenge what would be considered overspending, and ensure that the people the program intends to serve are better off as a result of the increased funding.

And taking care and asking questions appears to be what AusAID has done.  Aid effectiveness has been front and centre of AusAID’s priority under Stephen Smith and Kevin Rudd. The Office of Development Effectiveness, founded under Alexander Downer in 2006, has produced internal evaluations and published independent reports by the Brookings Institution.  The Independent Review of Aid Effectiveness, (which featured numerous submissions from whydev contributors/friends) was the first independent public review since 1996 and “will guide the growth of the aid program to 2015-2016”, the end target date for the MDGs.

Callick sometimes mentions the reviews, occasionally quoting senior AusAID staff or the Foreign Minister defending the program or vowing to keep focussing on aid effectiveness.  More evident though is a particular animosity towards AusAID and towards the current Labor government.  For example, in recent articles critical of the corporations receiving AusAID funds, there is no mention that this practice was the norm under Downer.  If there were articles critical of this practice during Downer’s 11 years, a quick search indicates they did not seem to directly target him. None of the articles mention that the amount contracted out has been halved under Labor.

The authors appear to be skeptical of development’s value at all, outside disaster relief, and make snide partisan attacks, drawing tenuous parallels between Kevin Rudd and Mao Zedong. Valid criticisms are given little context – “We should spend aid money in the Pacific (where, by the way, we can’t get it right), not Africa” but never mention the poverty in sub-saharan Africa (except when making emotive points about priorities). They imply AusAID’s growth is just another example of Labor’s wastefulness, rather than pointing out its bi-partisan support. When discussing FOI documents which “reveal the difficulties of trying to manage a $4.5billion budget while dealing with some of the most corrupt nations in the world”, they bury how admirably small fraud is as a percentage (0.017%) in this context towards the bottom of the article, instead highlighting seemingly high dollar amounts first. Another contributor’s whine that “an overseas consultant, who believes women are more vulnerable to climate change than men, was given almost $20,000 by AusAid last year” was comprehensively demolished by Archie Law of ActionAid. Of course, fewer people read the thoughtful blogs of experts than hysterical sensationalist tabloids.

Steve Lewis' articles - recommended by no one in three states.

What’s really going on here is that, in this one instance, the market fundamentalism which supports supply and demand and which demands that if the government must pay for a service it should tender it out, is being put aside because of a particular distaste for AusAID. It’s just a populist dog-whistle designed to use the “virtuous aura” of aid workers against them, by holding them to a loftier standard than other citizens.  It’s a classic culture war trick of turning your opponents against each other by selectively pointing out hypocrisy (never mind the sheer chutzpah of using emotive images of the suffering of refugees to score points against aid in papers which regularly stir up hysteria against asylum seekers). One wonders if AusAID’s funding of aid advocacy would even be necessary if it wasn’t for such disinformation campaigns by aid opponents.

Australians generally support our overseas aid expenditure, but few would think aid workers should earn $500,000 – a new house every year.   Personally, I don’t believe anyone really “earns” this amount, no matter what field they work in.  But this is where the criticism falls silent – there is not a single mention of the context in which other consultants get paid similarly huge amounts. As a society, perhaps we need to challenge all who earn such obscene amounts, not just aid consultants.  When I tried to make this point in response to an article in 2010, Callick selectively quoted me to support the anti-AusAID case being put by Barnaby Joyce (no relation).

Development may be the only field where you might regularly engage with people earning 100 times less than you but still be the lowest paid of your friends.  It sometimes feels strange, knowing that your income exists because people are donating (or having tax deducted) to reduce poverty.  But should we be more critical of an aid consultant than a military consultant on the same pay? Both are using tax-payer dollars. Should earning a below-average, but liveable, wage in any part of the social sector be considered ethically worse than earning more in a different, perhaps ethically dubious or simply ethically neutral, field?

The big question here is broader than aid. Partisan, anti-aid and small-government agendas aside, there are some valid questions about our priorities as a society.  I am all for recognising the flawed assumptions inherent in competitive tendering. We should end massive consultant salaries, occasionally dubious spending priorities and all undeserved virtuous auras across the entire public and private sectors. Let’s also be honest though that sometimes a thing we want – like the end of Malaria, education for girls, human rights for all – may cost us some money and that achieving it is worth the cost.  A just world is such a massive project that it would be foolish to think all in it will be saints.

And if you think aid workers should earn bugger all, Rowan and Steve, why not encourage your readers to live on 99% of their income to help us support those who do? It’s tax deductible, which will mean less for your nemeses at AusAID but more for development work overall.