Volunteers should stop visiting orphanages and start preserving families

Mark Riley - The Guardian Development Professionals Network

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(link is external).

In this post, Mark Riley describes an encounter with well-intentioned, but uninformed, mission trip participants from the US who planned to go to Uganda to volunteer in an orphanage, and the subsequent research that Riley and a colleague conducted on mission trips to Uganda. The study found that over $5 million has been spent on missions to Uganda in 2016, “ money that could have been put towards much needed welfare reforms and social services.”

“Orphanages are an intervention without an exit strategy,” says Riley. “They do nothing to solve the problems that cause separation and, in many cases, the fact that they provide children with free education, meals, and clothing actually causes children to be separated from their families.”