Overseas Voluntary Work with Projects Abroad

The overseas voluntary sector can be a tricky thing to navigate yourself around at the best of times, but has become increasingly difficult over the last few years, as hundreds of small companies have entered the market. As the world’s most successful international volunteering organisation – sending around 5,000 volunteers out to our 24 developing world destinations every year – we are used to catering for all types of people, from school parties to career-breakers, and from gap-year students to people volunteering during their retirement. We understand the difficulties people have in finding the type of overseas voluntary work to suit them, which is why we have put together this guide.

Overseas Voluntary Work – the myths

The first myth surrounding overseas voluntary work is that it is possible to volunteer for free. This is simply not true. For every volunteer there are a whole bunch of costs, including travel, accommodation, food, insurance and training. This means that taking on a volunteer actually works out as more expensive than simply employing a local person.

Having said this there are a handful of organisations who will take volunteers on, and they may even offer a modest monthly stipend - or allowance – but these organisations require lengthy commitments, usually of 2 years or more, and only take on “skilled” volunteers. In addition to this, they will often expect you to “fundraise” an initial sum of money in any case – usually well in excess of £1000; essentially a fee by another name!

The second major myth involved in volunteering is that you can expect to “change the world” as a volunteer. Thankfully this is something that we are encountering less and less, as people seem to be becoming more realistic about the differences that exist between cultures, but there is certainly a persistent - almost colonial - attitude which can occasionally be detected, and which many overseas volunteering organisations do their best to cultivate. We find that the happiest volunteers tend to arrive without expectations, either about what the country is going to be like or about the role that they will be able to play.

Overseas Voluntary Work – the pitfalls

• No Local Staff

  Choosing the right company to volunteer with can be incredibly difficult, especially in an age when almost anybody can put together a reasonably impressive website. One of the major problems with a great many overseas volunteering organisations is that they are little more than just a website and a small UK-based marketing office.

  You can recognise these companies because, when you travel out to a destination with them you will be met by a person who either works for an entirely different organisation or is effectively just a hired hand – an “agent” who is paid a set fee to run the entirety of your project. Any money remaining at the end of your project is theirs to take home, and therefore they are likely to ensure that your experience costs them as little as possible!

  At Projects Abroad we directly employ all our staff – in fact we have around 280 full-time staff around the world. This means that your safety, well-being and enjoyment is their priority, and everybody is directly accountable to our head office.

• No Flexibility

  One of our key tenets is that volunteers should have as much flexibility in their choices as possible. This means that our volunteers choose their own destinations, projects, start dates and project lengths. After this our local staff will work with them to find a placement which fits their interests and abilities, from a large selection of partner organisations who accept our volunteers.

  This is simply not the case with the majority of international volunteering organisations – they have to have rigid start dates and when volunteers do go out they find that they are part of a group on what turns out to be a completely generic placement. These cater for no volunteer-individuality and are usually run by staff who have been through the same scenario tens, if not hundreds, of times before!

• No Positive Impact

  One of the hardest things to assess about overseas voluntary work is the value it has to the local communities that it purports to help. Because of the relative low costs of working in developing countries it is easy for somebody to set up in the industry, and all too often their focus is on profit rather than actually helping. We’ve all heard stories about people who’ve gone abroad to volunteer and found themselves doing what they felt was pointless work which didn’t help anyone, and this is the reason that it happens. Worse than these, however, are the projects which actually have a negative impact on communities - when by volunteering you are actually just becoming a part of the exploitation.

  Projects Abroad operates a wide range of projects, from the purely altruistic ones, like our Care placements, to our Business placements, which tend to be more focused on the individual’s own career-advancement. We try to ensure, however, that even these projects have some positive impact – Business projects, for example, allow local organisations to have access to volunteers with good English-language ability, thus enabling them to become more competitive in global markets. And do not forget that, as part of a large organisation, these projects are subsidising other projects – such as our Conservation & Environment projects – which would otherwise be unsustainable. They also enable us to make contributions (in the shape of resources, repairs and renovations) to our partner organisation – the schools, orphanages and care homes, which really need our help.

Projects Abroad - Projects and Destinations

Projects Abroad offers our volunteers a choice of 24 destinations and around 20 project types, with many hundreds of individual placements. To find out more please click on either “Projects” or “Destinations” on the top menu-bar.