When one considers the profile of development sector workers/volunteers in the developing world they are quite different to the common understanding of volunteers and volunteerism in the west. The majority of developing country volunteers tend to be young people who have some level of education (at least up to secondary school) and who have aspirations of getting Government/Private Sector jobs or entering higher education. They are not the rich and famous who have nothing else to do or are doing it from the goodness of their heart: Or the children of the rich and famous who have to do voluntary work as they are forced to do so by their parents or the law.
The kind of volunteer you meet in South Asia and I suspect in Africa as well, are those who earn less than a dollar a day and are indeed the very poor. So, they look at volunteerism in a very different way; that is to learn English, develop ICT Skills and other job related skills. Therefore a high turnover of these volunteers would be a given.
In short volunteerism in the 3rd world is looked as “on the job training” by most, and once they are able to secure a regular paying job or a placement in an institute of higher studies they are unlikely to live within their community and therefore they are unlikely to contribute towards the development project any further. Therefore the use and selection of volunteers must be done at a minimum if you are to have any chance of a reasonable level of success in your development project.
The bastion of volunteerism; (the organization which writes its name in red) seems not to be able to get this simple understanding in the design of their development projects across the Asian region. Another surprise is that “volunteerism” seems to be a strategy that is in increased use by other development organizations to reduce the number of paid staff of a project to enable them to keep the overhead percentages and staff salaries well within their policies. I have come across many project designs where the implementation is done through a combination of paid staff and volunteers. This is not a good mix; as almost immediately you have two kinds of people from different backgrounds implementing a project. In this scenario the paid staff almost always tend to be recruited from the urban areas (as they may have access to better schools that teach English and ICT) and the volunteers tend to come from the village. Another unsavoury factor is that both categories of staff tend to be of similar age. Talk about re-enforcing stereotypes of urban and rural youth; this type of development project is doomed before they even start to implement due to the design and strategy of implementation. In most cases the implementing organization and the target group communities clash. This clash invariably starts with a personality clash between the paid staff and a volunteer; this clash then escalates to involving his/her family and friends who are from the target group. In some rare cases local socio/ethnic/religious/cultural/political sensitivities are used to muster opposition to the implementation of the project by the volunteer who has now fallen out with the staff of the implementing organization. This is then viewed as a segment of the target group community disliking or objecting to the project.
While on several participatory mid term evaluation missions in South East Asia I highlighted this issue to the management of the donors and the implementing organization (in this case they were one and the same organizations: INGOs with in country implementing offices). I did this as the main aim of the participatory mid term evaluation is to highlight lessons learned and best practices to ensure successful implementation of the balance project as well as transfer this knowledge to other similar projects being implemented by them. However the reaction I got from the donor was shocking. They were simply unwilling to accept that the failure of the project was due to the poor design and implementation strategy adopted by them. They were more interested in pointing the finger at the implementing staff and blaming them for the failure of the project. These were such unsavoury experiences; I have since then declined many participatory mid term evaluation assignments passing them on to my colleagues. Not to my surprise several colleagues have since experiencing similar issues started to steer away form participatory mid term evaluation assignments.