Using a practice approach focused on interactions between foreign volunteers and local staff, this study examined the impact of volunteer tourism on Zion Primary School and Tamale Children’s Home (an orphanage), both in Tamale, Ghana. These two projects were selected because they represent two very common forms of volunteer tourism, and Ghana is one of the most popular destinations for volunteer tourism. Qualitative methods including participant observations and face-to-face interviews were used to identify consequences of the interactions among volunteers, local employees, and the children; notably, interviews were only conducted with the volunteers and local staff, but not with the children. A few positive aspects were reported across both projects, including that the presence of volunteers helped alleviate the workload of the local staff, that volunteers made financial contributions to the projects, and that the local staff appreciated the “affectionate and softer approach to the children by the volunteers.” However, the presence of the largely-unqualified volunteers frequently decreased the productivity of the local staff and lead to frustration among all actors. For example, at Zion Primary School, the inexperienced and unqualified volunteers did not abide by the lesson plans prescribed by the Ghana teaching system and instead prepared their own lessons, causing the local teachers to have to spend time catching the children up on missed content. In addition, local staff at the orphanage reported being frustrated at having to frequently spend time training new, unqualified volunteers because of frequent turnover among the volunteers. Both local staff and volunteers reported misunderstandings or confrontations arising from different cultural approaches to working with children and language and communications barriers.
