Most Peace Corps type voluntourism works on the premise that throwing "white" folks into a country and telling them to fix things will generate results. This is because, you know, we understand the incredibly complex social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics of countries better than they know themselves.
We're better educated, and if these backwards countries would just start doing XYZ they'd start to lift themselves up and out of poverty. You know, things like alternative livelihood by making souvenirs out of trash. That's the ticket.
But we don't understand the issues and aren't equipped to be able to even determine what a particular region of the country actually needs, especially not in 2 years or less.
Real results can only come from funded research into what the underlying issues are and how best to combat them. Also, if the United States weren't so economically oppressive.
I disagree however, with the notion that being "white" is a hindrance in the developing world. Being "white" is an advantage everywhere.
I've met people who did Peace Corps, and my opinion was much better after meeting them. First they actually became fluent in the local language. Second their focus was often more on enabling locals than on trying to do stuff themselves. For example, they would work with locals on how to push through applications for grant money from developed countries. Dealing with American foreign aid bureaucracy was actually a skill they were well suited for due to their background and education. Finally, they lived on almost no money in the community for a long period of time. The standard of their living was commensurate with the average person in the host community.
Personal development is fine and yes, the Peace Corps is incredible for that, but only one thing you mentioned is beneficial to the host country: money.
If pushing through grant money is the volunteer's primary talent, they can just as easily do so without spending all that useful money on plane tickets and training.
The other issue is that money by itself doesn't solve problems. You have to use it to solve real issues. But the Peace Corps doesn't fund research into what the issues are, because that's expensive and unsexy to anyone touting what the volunteers are up to. So you get grants to fund construction of libraries when everyone in the country can already go to an Internet cafe and read Wikipedia.
There are multiple decent reasons for Peace Corps not to fund formal research into what the issues are. There is no general recipe to make such research actually useful, especially without local knowledge. The function is already being done by development agencies or NGOs in their own flawed ways, and Peace Corps doesn't have funds for it. Peace Corps doesn't fund big infrastructure projects like building new libraries either. Its capability and mandate really only extends as far as placing and training requested volunteers. Volunteers are limited to the missions requested by the host government and local hosts. If those hosts want help applying for grants, volunteers might help them with that. It's unlikely we know better than locals how we should be helping them. It's actually impossible to determine and carry out locally meaningful interventions entirely from offices in the US, still less if nobody has any training. Even just applying for grants (for what, to be used by whom?)
Peace Corps isn't saving the world, but it does a little in a lot of places and it costs peanuts. If you can do better local work in the same places with the same resources, that's great, do it.
>you get grants to fund construction of libraries when everyone in the country can already go to an Internet cafe and read Wikipedia //
Everyone?
Perhaps you misunderstand what a modern library is - it's a place for accessing information, not limited to books. Most likely it's effectively a free internet cafe or an information centre for a particular school.
Mind you I've seen government funded medical centres without even beds (well mattresses, they had the frames) - so the chances of the information resources turning up and staying put are perhaps slim.
Libraries are also community centers. They offer a lot more than just books. They can offer community programs, children's programs, and assistance on a lot of matters from librarians. They also can offer plenty of fiction that is copyrighted and not on the Internet (legally). Internet cafes are expensive, libraries are completely free. They are also a meeting place for the community and a sense of pride. For some reason they get a bad rap here on HN and in the tech world in general.
To add a git to abat's comment, sometimes "white" volunteers will be willing to go places where local people don't want to go, like remote or dire poor villages. The most hard working people will have found their way out, and they will focus on maintaining or improving their situation rather than going back to help (except if they are really successful). At some point these places will lack educated and forward thinking people, and volunteers coming out of nowhere can actually have a positive impact, at least on the mental side. Highly inefficient globaly, but not always meaningless.
I disagree. I think a volunteer from the US or Europe can have a big impact for exactly the reasons you list as negatives.
For a start, they come bundled with the optimism, determination and an innovative mindset that is normal in the Western World. Even if they're way off the mark and not skilled enough to build a school, sometimes just seeing someone from outside their community who isn't shackled with local politics or local racism and is just doing something, anything, can be a source of inspiration to the local population.
One Peace Corp volunteer I met was posted to a former Soviet block country. The locals were still stuck in the Soviet mindset that the government would provide for them. He introduced them to computing, he mapped out their entire town onto Google Earth and set up a WiFi service. Yeh it's not much, and they weren't dealing with starvation or illness like parts of Africa, but just by having an 'outsider' living in the community can be a help just by itself.
"we understand the incredibly complex social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics of countries better than they know themselves."
Yeah, that's exactly what the qualified ones do. Exactly why we send them. But there are not enough qualified volunteers.
The problem with the Peace Corps, from discussion with my cousin who did his tour in Africa in the 80s and scared me out of even considering it myself, is the PHBs say they only send over qualified volunteers but fundamentally, "we need one thousand warm bodies" so they have a ranked list where he came in very near the top with a recent degree in agronomy and unfortunately somewhere between near the top, and warm body 1000, it drops into the article description of "unskilled inexperienced untrained barely educated laborer white girl or boy". They really needed 1000 agronomists and livestock qualified veterinarians and technician level workers, but what they got was like 100 regional teams of ten or so where on average about one guy per local group had any real idea what he was doing. You're going over there to help modernize farming out of the ancient era and you have no idea what soil chemistry is... well, I guess you get to hold the shovel, not much else you can do while I run this soil analysis. Another problem is it dilutes the brand so to speak of the work they do... there really are useful volunteers, just the ratio of useful/useless depends strongly on who volunteered that year and the demand and a variety of political concerns. Finally he spent most of his time basically managing at a distance and without any official authority his unskilled fellow americans as they attempted to do a highly skilled and technical job, so the locals didn't even get any direct benefit from his work (although via levels of indirection he did benefit them). One interesting perspective is that our world wide logistical distribution system can, in the absence of warfare, quite easily provide people in the middle of nowhere with enough rope to hang themselves, along the lines of just because you can now purchase a certain seed doesn't mean it'll grow, or if one unit of chemicals improves yield 50%, you'd be amazed how many otherwise logical humans will want to try a hundred units of the same chemical, what could possibly go wrong? Not to mention intelligent use of modern tools, finally having the technology to wash all your topsoil downriver doesn't mean its a great idea to do so, trying to make the desert bloom is a fools errand, etc, but I digress.
Now it would not surprise me if there's at least four perspectives opposed to each other, that being what they claim to do, what they actually did in the 80s, what they do now, and my cousin's story. But he did tell a compelling and believable story at the time, as I recall it and there might be some insight in it anyway.
We're better educated, and if these backwards countries would just start doing XYZ they'd start to lift themselves up and out of poverty. You know, things like alternative livelihood by making souvenirs out of trash. That's the ticket.
But we don't understand the issues and aren't equipped to be able to even determine what a particular region of the country actually needs, especially not in 2 years or less.
Real results can only come from funded research into what the underlying issues are and how best to combat them. Also, if the United States weren't so economically oppressive.
I disagree however, with the notion that being "white" is a hindrance in the developing world. Being "white" is an advantage everywhere.