Is it appropriate to ask local poor people to volunteer?
08:35, 5 February 2010
.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management.. Link
The focus on doing projects in the developing world at the direction of local community members themselves has been a mantra among aid and development agencies for a long while now, but few organizations or governments have explored the idea of local people -- very poor local people -- donating labor as volunteers, rather than being paid for their work. On the surface, the idea may seem cruel, because these people need the project *and* the paid jobs it brings, and to ask them to work for free sounds unethical.
But sometimes, it's a great idea and it can work. European Simon Maddrell and Kenyan farmer and engineer Joshua Mukusya founded the charity Excellent Development in 2002, and they are not only focused developing projects exclusively at the direction of the local community, they also have come up with a successful model for volunteer (unpaid) local labor in Kenya. Schemes such as sand dams, which provide a year-round source of filtered water, and terracing soil to reduce erosion, repay the community's investment of free labor by giving a more reliable harvest of valuable food and dramatically reducing the number of hours individuals spend walking miles to collect clean water. "Nothing comes for free," says Mr Maddrell, 44. "It is generally true that people don't value what they are given for free as much as what they have worked for. We want communities to engage with and own the process of the project." You can read an article about this local volunteering model at the Telegraph.
"Here's what we'll do -- what will YOU do?" is something I heard again and again in Afghanistan when funding for a local project was offered by foreign funders, and it's not an entirely new approach; aid and donor agencies have been asking recipients of service to show how they themselves will be investing in a project and showing their support for such for at least a few years now -- maybe through donated labor, maybe through being in charge of security, maybe donating materials, etc. It creates a real partnership through a sense of local ownership of and greater value for the project funded primarily by outsiders.
But you have to be careful in asking local poor people to volunteer (again, by volunteer, I mean to provide unpaid labor). The wrong approach can lead to some bad PR and a lingering bad image of the concept of volunteering you (your agency, your government, your country) may have great difficulty in overcoming.
If you have employed this model of volunteering in an economically-poor community, please share your experience here.
