Volunteerism or Labor Exploitation? Harnessing the Volunteer Spirit to Sustain AIDS Treatment Programs in Urban Ethiopia

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this paper describes NGO efforts to encourage AIDS care volunteers to eschew material returns for their labor and instead reflect on the goodness of sacrificing to promote the survival of people living with HIV/AIDS. Consensus analysis of motivational survey data collected from a sample of AIDS care volunteers (n=110) suggests that they strongly share a sacrificial and prosocial motivational model. These results may be explained by several factors, including the efforts of the organizations to shape volunteers' motivations, the self-selection of volunteers, positive reinforcement in seeing one's patients become healthy, and social desirability bias. In-depth interviews examining the motivations and behaviors of volunteers reveal a more complicated picture: even ostensibly devoted and altruistic volunteers strongly question their service commitments. The complexity and ambivalence of volunteers' motivations reflect the profound uncertainty that they face in achieving improved socioeconomic status for themselves and their families amid widespread unemployment and sharply rising food prices. Their desires for economic opportunities explain why local NGOs exert so much effort to shape and sustain-and yet fail to completely control-their motivations. This recasts economically-insecure volunteers' consent to donate their labor as a process of negotiation with their organizers. Future research should explore how models of health care volunteerism and volunteer motivations are shaped by individual and collective experiences in political-economic context.

Shaping subjects of globalisation: at the intersection of voluntourism and the new economy

“…In Workaway, the motivation for working is not money but, as portrayed by Workaway and workawayers themselves, a variety of other reasons such as personal development, solidarity and a desire to help. Notwithstanding the anti-capitalist ethos, this attitude towards work ties in neatly with the needs of the neoliberal order of work, and especially the growing scene of voluntarism, with their reliance on employees with commitment and inner motivation, on workers seeking to fulfill themselves (Rose 1996;1999;Bröckling 2007;Kauppinen 2013;Baines 2004;Maes 2012). The Workaway scheme not only makes it possible to harness "the volunteer spirit" (Maes 2012) but also contributes to evoking it, thereby catering in the contemporary world rather for globalised capitalism than its counterforces.…”

“…Notwithstanding the anti-capitalist ethos, this attitude towards work ties in neatly with the needs of the neoliberal order of work, and especially the growing scene of voluntarism, with their reliance on employees with commitment and inner motivation, on workers seeking to fulfill themselves (Rose 1996;1999;Bröckling 2007;Kauppinen 2013;Baines 2004;Maes 2012). The Workaway scheme not only makes it possible to harness "the volunteer spirit" (Maes 2012) but also contributes to evoking it, thereby catering in the contemporary world rather for globalised capitalism than its counterforces. In the same vein, the nexus of voluntourism and the new economy examined here shows how investment by the state in the globalised governmentalities of neoliberal "structural development" (Heller 2011) can backfire: while Pia has taken the opportunity to set up her own business, she has also pushed the neoliberal logic beyond the interests of the state, in that by 'hiring' volunteers as workers she effectively avoids paying not only wages, but also taxes as part of the wages.…”

“…NGOs) or otherwise reorganised to make use of volunteer work (e.g. Baines 2004;Maes 2012). As Baines (2004) points out in her study, in the neoliberal order of work, volunteer work constitutes not only a form of work in its own right but also an extension of paid work in the form of unpaid internships, extra shifts and overtime, which accompany people throughout their working careers.…”

“…In this connection, critical studies (e.g. Baines 2004;Maes 2012) have interrogated the ways in which these rearrangements produce and operate on new forms of exploitation, e.g. exploitation of the precarious working conditions and the altruistic orientation of unwaged workers, as well as the structural gender bias inscribed in these processes -aspects relevant also for the present study.…”

Special Issue: Population and Development: Comparative Anthropological Perspectives

“…Very often the findings suggest they do not (Campbell 2003). Much has been learned by examining not just whether NGOs achieve their stated aims, but by also by attending to the effects they have beyond their ostensible purposes, in relation to institutional and organizational transformations (Elyachar 2005;Swidler 2006Swidler , 2009 and with regard to the lives of individuals working for or receiving assistance from NGOs (Bornstein 2005;Dahl 2014;Mosse 2011;Maes 2012;Peters 2013). This literature suggests that although NGOs are powerful actors that in some respects appear to create institutional homogeneity across diverse cultural settings, in other ways NGOs and the individual actors associated with them must constantly adapt to complex local realities (Smith 2003;Meyer 2010;Closser 2010).…”