We gathered research on orphanages in South East Asia from every source we could get our hands on - documentaries, forums, blog posts, official orphanage websites, and personal accounts - to get a broad overview of the state of things. Immediately, we knew that we wanted to make sure that our project did not engage in ‘voluntourism’ (the amalgamation of ‘volunteering’ and ‘tourism’). The general process involves individuals traveling to a destination, most often developing countries, to donate their time, energy and funds to a cause in the region, while also enjoying tourism on the side. This in theory sounds like a good deal – you get to enjoy a nice, exotic holiday and do something good for the local community/environment.
One of the most popular methods of voluntourism is teaching or looking after orphans or children in underprivileged conditions. However, there are a few glaring issues with this:
- voluntourism creates a scenario where children can be attached to short-term volunteers but then suffer through the pain of volunteers leaving shortly after – further compounding the loss already incurred from the loss of their parents;
- the majority of volunteers have a lack of training and do not hold professional credentials or experiences (such as high school or college students) to effectively deal with children who have severe trauma;
- there’s a huge issue of scam orphanages in South East Asian and African regions. The children are often exploited and abused for the benefit of the head of the orphanages. Many of the children are also coerced to join the orphanages despite having living parents, with a promise of education and a bright future. Instead, they are kept in poor and impoverished conditions to attract more donations from foreign donors or to be utilized as slaves for the head of the organization.
These factors are detrimental to a child’s wellbeing. We didn’t want to be a part of this, so we instead sought solutions that would be a good medium between being useful to these children without them being attached to us.
We thought about giving these children excursions so they could experience opportunities that they might not otherwise be able to do so (similar to the Pillar program mentioned in the ‘Why did we start this project?’ post). But through our research, we realized that not even the essential basic needs are met (e.g. food, clothing, shelter, carers). Since direct giving is more effective than donating through an intermediary (a radical method implemented in organizations such as Give Directly1), we decided to ask orphanages about their specific needs, purchase the requested items, and provide them directly.
As mentioned above, we also realized that not all children in orphanages are orphans. In many cases, a large proportion of the children are in fact foster children with living parents who cannot care for them due to poverty or family violence. We realized this most strongly via the anecdotes of Australian philanthropist Tara Winkler, the co-founder of Cambodian Children’s Trust (CCT)2.
This led to a bifurcation in how we wanted to allocate resources and time to support orphanages. We saw two strategies that could make a difference. A two-pronged approach where we would (i) fund orphanages with their unmet needs, and (ii) financially support parents or programs that enable the reintegration of foster children back into their families.
With a clear vision for the two arms of our approach, we chose Indonesia, India, Cambodia and Vietnam as our South/Southeast Asian destinations and pooled our capital together to form an $AUD6000 fund to be split approximately equally between them.
In the next two posts, we expand on these two strategies.
1https://www.givedirectly.org/
2https://cambodianchildrenstrust.org/