Everyone should be familiar with the complex ethical qualms surrounding volunteerism and its sometimes-negative implications for those it seeks to help. Although in theory it supports those in need short-term, many international volunteering agencies are more concerned with their volunteer gaining their costly four-figured ‘worldly experience’, an exposure to the ‘have-nots’ of the world, and adding a line to their CV. Catering to the visitor, they often fail to create long-term change. Fundamentally, volunteerism skews ethically sound and effective charitable work with its emphasis on the experience of the volunteer, not the needs of the communities it strives to support. This should be inverted, with the needs of communities being the primary concern.

Painting or constructing schools, digging trenches, or building roads do help communities, but only in the short-term. Even then, one can still object to their usefulness. Why should a wealthy foreigner (as one needs a lot of money to partake on these experiences) assume the labour of a local who needs the work to live? Why should an under-experienced 17-year-old without formal training be trusted with building long-lasting infrastructure which is of critical importance to a community? Wouldn’t training and empowering locals to do this work not only create jobs and grow expertise, but ensure the long-term maintenance of these important constructions without constant volunteer intervention?

A core issue with volunteerism can be demonstrated through comparing some possible projects one might undertake to fix a disused school in a rural and underfunded village - a very common project in the volunteerism business. Consider which of the following would create lasting and impactful change to a community:

• Recruiting a group of visiting volunteers fully renovate the school, including fixing its structural issues, redecorating, and preparing it for students once again.
• Utilising skilled or pre-trained volunteers to spending a period of time training locals on how to use and maintain construction equipment and building tools, perhaps repairing the school in the process. Meanwhile, also training teachers (new or existing) to create curriculum and lessons plans with long-plans for the education of students in the school, providing them with training resources which can also be consulted in the future.
• Consider why the school was disused in the first place and ask communities what the most effective and impactful project would be to conduct in the local area before committing to the renovation a school which may only be decommissioned again a couple of years down the line. This ensures consensual work and allows communities to get support with their most pressing issues, not ones dictated by non-locals.

My biggest issue with the volunteerism industry is that although the second and third scenario are the most ethical, substantial, and long-term impactful projects, volunteerism agencies are too heavily focused on the likes of the first.

As someone who was initially sceptical of the work I was going to be undertaking in Western Uganda with the Kibale Forrest Schools Programme (KFSP) and the Kasiisi Project during my Leadership in Action project, I was being conscious and constantly reflective of the ethical and impactful nature of my work. In Uganda, I conducted a wide variety of tasks and was pleased that most were in fact ethical and genuinely impactful, and I spent a lot of time discussing the theme of volunteerism vs. impactful and genuinely change making work with fellow the Laidlaw Scholars I was working alongside. We constantly asked ourselves all sorts of questions: Why are we here? What value do we add to this work that makes traveling here worthwhile? Is the change we are seeking to create long-term and actually needed? How ethical and righteous are our projects? From these discussions and my own personal reflection, I learned a lot about what makes a volunteer project impactful and ethical, and what’s important to consider and implement when striving to make real change and be a force for good in the world.

I came to the realisation that what makes a good short-term volunteer project is utilising one’s own unique skillset and expertise, applying that to help communities in the short-term, whilst simultaneously supporting and training local agents of change to continue that work into the long-term. And of course, any change you are trying to make must genuinely be needed and mandated by the communities it has an effect on. I couldn’t have made lasting change in Uganda by laying bricks, as I am not a bricklayer and could not teach other how to maintain the work after I left, nor would my presence be needed as such labour can be easily recruited locally. Yet, I have years of experience in University-level qualitative interview-based research and ethics, planning and coordinating anthropologic studies, and using audio recording technology. That is exactly the skillset and knowledge I employed in Uganda to help pursue the KFSP’s goals, and the skills I shared with staff to support their future endeavours for years to come. I aided a charity’s conservation and cultural preservation efforts using a set of technical skills which they simply did not have available, and I spent a significant portion of my time sharing these skills with them to add value to their future conservation efforts. Skill sharing and making use of your technical knowledge and experience, not merely volunteering your labour, is the most effective and useful way to spend time to making a difference and helping other to do so.

Besides my own work across the six weeks I spent in Uganda, my fellow scholars also conducted skill-sharing workshops to teach the KFSP staff to use simple technologies and applications which they were unfamiliar with. Google Drive and Google Documents were integrated into the operations of the charity to make file sharing and collaboration on documents much easier. The accountant was introduced to Google Lens, almost thirding the time it would take him to scan the charity’s receipts every week. Staff were shown how to use basic recording equipment to film a good-quality video to improve their promotional material - an area they had been struggling with for some time. One scholar even attempted to show the useful time-saving applications of Open AI to aid time consuming work.

This led me to a second realisation. Skill sharing doesn’t need to be highly technical or be drawn from experience gained from further educational institutions, even simple guidance on how to use certain software can make a substantial difference. The likes of Google Lens or using the Google Drive, or learning the basics of Microsoft Excel to keep records simply save hours of office admin and allow charities to spend more of their time in the field or doing more impactful tasks. And this is by no means ‘corporatising’ charities, rather sharing skills and knowledge which can make their operations far more efficient to ease their workload, allowing them to spend more of their time achieving their goals and aspirations.

After I discovered the value of such a simple and easy yet highly effective and impactful approach to aiding charities like the KFSP, my mind started whizzing about how to transform this idea into a larger way to support charities worldwide. Using pre-trained volunteers to share office admin skills and other practical knowledge, to not just to give hours of their labour away, in an effort to streamline and assist charities to make the most out of their staff and workplace is certainly a concept I have spent a lot of time thinking about since Uganda. Only after I worked with the KFSP did I realise the different ways in which one might volunteer their time to make effective and positive change, escaping the shortcomings of the volunteerism industry, and perhaps this has been my largest take away from my Leadership in Action project. All in all, skill sharing, no matter how technical, can be a great way to help charities do what they do best - changing lives.