Aiding the poor or boosting your ego?

LET’S talk about money. Giving money away. Be it pocket change or full-on bank transfers. Philanthropy, charity, donations – it’s all about giving money to people who need it. Or is it?

I received two requests to give money in the past couple of weeks and said no because I won’t support exploitation in the fast name of charity. Especially the exploitation of our most vulnerable children and women in the world.

Voluntourism, poverty tourism and slum busting, it doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s not philanthropy. It’s selfish and dangerous and feeds a growing industry taking advantage of the poor. These false charity practices often add to the misery of disadvantaged communities.

Adventure-style charity trips are exploitation: voyeurism and grandstanding masquerading as philanthropy. The main purpose of these trips to poor countries and institutions appears to be to provide wealthy do-gooders with social media posts for their friends to see – not to mention the heartfelt dinner party conversations back in their privileged lefty suburbs.

Take the whole class of high school students who are collecting donations “to help out at an orphanage” in Thailand. This whole concept is a lie. They are raising money so they can buy airfares and travel and stay at the orphanage. The aim is to play rich white empathetic saviour, digging a few holes, moving a few stones for a week in front of desperate orphans.

And often these are not even genuine orphanages – another awful aspect to this fake charity industry.

Surely the better option is to raise the money, stay home and give it all to the orphanage and not use the money to fund their own “life experiences”.

And don’t give me the tired old excuse that these trips create lifelong connections with poor communities and lead to further good in the future.

Or the other recent example. The company director who (again) proudly boasted at a corporate function of his long-term commitment to help build schools in Cambodia. Not only is this do-gooder track record trotted out at every opportunity to promote himself, it isn’t even doing much good. He appears to be using it to help himself.

Mr Do-Gooder is using his charitable reputation to boost his personal brand and corporate reputation on the back of this public voluntourism. Too harsh? Not by half!

This executive also earns a squillion bucks and has every expense you can imagine paid for by the shareholders of his company.

Yet he has to put himself at the centre of the attention, instead of just donating the money.

If he felt the need to genuinely give, he wouldn’t spend thousands on business class airfares and five-star accommodation stopovers while “helping to build new classrooms”.

Instead he could donate the money to pay a local workforce to build the classroom. Give the work and wages to local families and community.

These trips by students, do-gooders and wealthy experience hunters are not charity, they are selfindulgent and exploitation.