This post is part of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative’s month-long spread of articles aimed at raising awareness around the issues of orphanage volunteering, under the hashtag #StopOrphanTrips. The campaign ends on June 1st, International Children’s Day, with a call to volunteer travel organisations to remove orphanage trips from their product offerings. Authors of these blog posts and articles urge people to sign the petition to put an end to orphanage volunteering. You can sign the petition here.
In this post, the author shares her top five tips for being a responsible, child safe aware traveller. The post asks travellers not to visit or volunteer in orphanages, not to encourage begging, not to buy from or use the services of children and to report abuses when they see them.