Narrowing The Digital Divide Notes On A Global Netcorps by Ian Smillie - October 1999

The Evolution Of Volunteer-Sending

Prior to a discussion of the NetCorps concept, this section of the paper will review the broad evolution of volunteer-sending schemes and some of the problems they have faced in recent years.

Roots
International volunteerism has roots in European attempts after World War I to build better understanding between people in countries that were former adversaries. The Australian committee of World University Service (WUS) began sending teachers to Indonesia in 1953 and the British Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) began in 1957. Several Canadian initiatives coalesced in the 1961 formation of CUSO (then 'Canadian University Service Overseas'), followed some months later by the creation of the American Peace Corps. By the mid 1960s, there were a dozen or more national volunteer-sending organizations in operation around the world.

Although they did not focus exclusively on youth, most volunteer-sending organizations did appeal to the sense of adventure and idealism of youth.* Volunteers lived simply and were paid local wages, making the arrangement less accessible to mid career professionals with families. Additionally, because the human resource needs of newly independent countries were so large, there tended to be a greater emphasis on the numbers of volunteers than on their qualifications. In the early years of most organizations, the majority of assignments were filled by BA generalists straight out of university.* Most were assigned to teaching positions in secondary schools, and individuals with teaching degrees or teaching experience were the exception rather than the rule.

To those who understood the initial motivation of the volunteer movement, its dual nature - building relationships and understanding as well as contributing to development - was always important. An Indonesian official explained it well in 1959:

The fact that for the first time in our experience - and our experience includes many long years of European rule - white people have been ready and eager to live among us on our own standards of salary and living, to share family life with us, to become in truth real members of our community, is indeed striking. Such a contribution is worth immeasurably more to us than the rupiahs which it saves our treasury. It is a demonstration of goodwill and understanding which has moved our hearts greatly and which we feel can do more than all the speeches of people in high places to cement friendly relations between our two nations.

Changing needs; philosophical dilemmas
As time passed and as countries developed their own human resource base, the demand for volunteers with limited qualifications declined, and requests for teachers dried up almost completely. By the early 1980s, the profile of the 'average' volunteer and the average volunteer-sending agency had changed dramatically. The average age of a volunteer had risen by at least ten years. Few volunteers by then were BA generalists and most had worked in their profession for at least five, if not ten years. There had always been individuals with solid experience and credentials in volunteer-sending organizations, but instead of being the minority, they tended by the mid 1980s in most organizations to be the majority.

This had a number of implications for the sending organizations. First, costs rose because older, more experienced volunteers required more intensive recruitment campaigns and they often required greater professional support in the field, and greater financial support for families and non-working spouses. Secondly, the size of most volunteer-sending organizations declined significantly from the high numbers of the late 1960s and early 1970s because as requests became more sophisticated and costly, they became harder to fill. This added to recruitment costs as economies of scale declined.

Third, identity crises of differing dimensions arose. The 'do-gooder' image of 'smiling faces going places' was repudiated, and there were attempts to build a more professional, more technocratic image, one devoid of the amateurism associated with the term 'volunteer'. For some, the very idea of 'volunteering' meant to give something up, to make a sacrifice, and this did not match the reality that most returned volunteers readily admitted - that they gained more from their experience than they gave.

From the outset, all volunteer-sending organizations had a practical as well as a philosophical side. On the practical side, they aimed to respond to real development needs as effectively and efficiently as possible. On the philosophical side, there was a variety of motivations. Although the early opportunities for youth had declined by the mid to late 1970s, the building of cross-cultural awareness and solidarity with the poor remained central to most organizations. This idea was, however, more than occasionally sidelined in efforts to justify budgets to the institutional funders on which all the organizations were heavily dependent. Gradually, the practical side of volunteer-sending began to overshadow the original philosophy, with many organizations placing greater emphasis on their comparative advantage over higher-cost technical assistance schemes and downplaying their 'volunteer' image.

Mohan Srivastava, a CUSO volunteer serving overseas in 1985, complained about the change:

Dissatisfied with its 'volunteers', CUSO changed them to 'cooperants' and now it appears that we may become 'development workers'.

What was wrong with being young? CUSO trumpets the fact that it is now recruiting people with specific development skills... what was wrong with being 'a keen idealist filled with romantic notions of saving the world'? I really don't know if Nigeria is a better place for my having been here. I know only that I am a better person for having been here. My idealism was scuffed a little and lost some of its shine, but that makes it more valuable. Experience tempers idealism... It bothers me that CUSO is always struggling to prove that it is not some sort of Third World Outward Bound. I wish that CUSO would take pride in apprenticing development workers; in showing Canadians first-hand the Third World, its injustice, its frustrations and its joys; in returning more aware, more thoughtful and more concerned citizens to Canada.

Fifteen years later, the problems of image and purpose remain unsolved in many organizations. A recent UNV study is a case in point.

Experience shows that opting for 'soft' terms or acronyms to replace the word 'volunteer' does not solve the image problem. On the contrary, the double understating - first by diluting the essence of voluntarism, and second by ...half dropping the term volunteer - of the essential idealistic components of volunteers, created new contradictions... [the] recurrent insistence on cost-effectiveness, disconnected from the idealistic premise of the UN Volunteer concept, was soon presented as the main comparative advantage of UN volunteers. While in principle providing a good marketing argument to the [UN] agencies, it could only increase the feeling that UN volunteers are just 'cheap labour'.

Volunteer-sending organizations have an in-built dilemma that grows as time passes. Most are significantly more than 'Third World Outward Bound' organizations. They have contributed significantly to the development process in two ways. First, they have provided invaluable services to organizations, governments and individuals in developing countries at times when they were most needed. Often it was gap-filling, but the gaps were large and the consequence of not filling them would have left hundreds of thousands of children without teachers, clinics without nurses and doctors, farmers without extension and veterinary services. Sometimes it was considerably more than gap filling. Youth corps in more than a dozen countries were modeled on the Peace Corps and VSO. The Southern NGO movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement and human rights organizations all received important boosts of adrenalin from Northern volunteers whose services and enthusiasm were available from no other source.

Secondly, volunteers have contributed to improved 'global understanding'. Unlike professionals who return to their jobs at home after an overseas experience, volunteers have spread out into government, the private sector, the media and politics. They form the backbone of most bilateral and multilateral development agencies and are present at all levels in most foreign ministries. They are responsible for the founding and growth of many Northern NGOs and have played important roles in the environmental, human rights and women's movements. The volunteer 'apprenticeship' has served host and sending countries well, and has provided an invaluable experience for the individual.

Most of the obvious development gaps that could be filled by idealistic young people have now been filled, however. Hence the rise in the average age of volunteers to meet requests of a more professional nature; hence the rise in costs to service older personnel in less structured situations; hence the growing justification of volunteer-sending in terms of its comparative cost advantage over mainstream technical assistance in an era of reduced aid budgets; hence a reduction in emphasis on idealism and the cross-cultural experience that provided much of the original justification.

The high cost of technical assistance

'Technical assistance', sometimes known as 'technical cooperation', refers to the sending of experts to work on development projects by official development agencies. It normally does not include volunteer sending, but where it does, the cost of volunteer programs is minuscule compared to the cost of recruiting and remunerating experts on expatriate salaries, with expensive support packages for their families. Technical assistance absorbs a large and growing proportion of official development assistance. The 1981-82 average expenditure on technical assistance represented 19% of global official development assistance (ODA). By 1997, it had risen to 26.6% - over a quarter of a declining total.

While technical assistance may be important or even essential, its cost and its value are two different things. The value to a Southern recipient of an international advisor is only as much as would have been paid to a local had such a person been available. Certainly, were qualifications not an issue, a local person would be preferable in most cases to a foreigner - whether cheap or expensive. But the cost of sending an expatriate can be twenty to thirty times the cost of hiring locally, representing an enormous drain on aid resources. It is not surprising, therefore, that volunteer-sending organizations - at a significantly lower cost - have highlighted their comparative cost-effectiveness.

This section of the paper has dwelt on the practical and the philosophical rationale of volunteer-sending because clarity in these areas will be important in the evolution of the NetCorps idea. Will NetCorps be an ICT-related 'Third World Outward Bound'? A cheap alternative to high-priced technical assistance? Or something more?

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