This is a place for people with little or no academic or practical experience with development issues, who are now, or are about to be, in a development context. Like a volunteer. Volunteering can be rewarding both for the volunteer and the organisations and the people receiving volunteers. It can be a way for (especially young) people to broaden their world, experience new things, meet new people, and contribute. However, there are some risks involved, but if you are aware of those risks they automatically become smaller.
This blog will explore the opportunities and the risks. It is a way for our readers who are not development professionals (or academics) to get introduced to some aspects of what it means to be in a development context, what roles they play and important things to consider to avoid some of the traps of volunteering. This blog is about, and a way of communicating development. We will touch upon several themes, all connected to Communication for and about development.
Volunteering is no longer a simple business, on the contrary, it has a multifaceted character as diverse as the world in which we are living. Certainly, the arrival of new major players in the aid industry with their own specificities, the size and profitability of a sector that seems to be expanding forever, and the almost impossible balance between doing good and looking good are, more often than not, putting ingenuous volunteers to the test of choosing between sticking to their values or taking quite a different drift.
Similarly to any other sector in development, public health care presents several urgent challenges, partly due to the digital divide. There is a need to develop people’s eHealth literacy and at the same time, limit the use of poor health information which could worsen existing health disparities. There are also opportunities through global health campaigns and projects on-the-ground to decrease existing disease burden, create online communities and enhance community actions. However, addressing such issues requires the comprehension of socio-demographic health determinants of the given population along with the understanding of power relations in digital technologies as well as in organizational settings. This also affects international healthcare volunteering in many levels, which is becoming more and more popular (especially now, given the current challenging situation worldwide brought by the Covid-19 pandemic). While personal and professional developments often arise from volunteering, some programmes could also result in unintended damage for the communities they seek to serve and harm the motivation of volunteers itself.
Many volunteers choose to work with children by either doing social work or becoming a teacher. In recent years these practices have received critique and it is important to be aware of the issues that are involved with volunteering with children. It is also important to be aware of how the field of education keeps evolving and how technology can be a useful tool in an educational setting. The current pandemic and the shift to online learning has emphasised not only the digital divide but also the educational divide in the global south.
For anyone working in a development context in the global south, postcolonialism is an important concept to engage with. As someone coming from the global north, you should be aware of the colonial residue, the power structures and the problems with white gaze and the idea of white expertise. It is also important to know that if you intend to tell your story and share your experiences, you might also tell someone else’s story, talking about someone else’s experiences, someone who is not able to say it for themselves, at least not to the audience that you might have. Considering these things will hopefully make you avoid the traps, and rather use the tools at hand to do something good, which is of course why you are here in the first place.
There are many ways to volunteer, you don’t have to go from the Global North to the Global South. You can volunteer in your home country, there are plenty of organizations who would happily receive new volunteers in any given city in the Global North. And by the way, not all volunteers are from the Global North. All across what we call the Global South there are domestic organizations engaging locals in volunteer- and aid work. The same goes for development communication, it doesn’t always have to be about helping people in far away places, it can be about so much more. It can be about gender equality, LGBT-rights, removing the taboo of menstruation and so on.
These are some of the issue we will focus on here, we hope you will keep reading!