Orphanage Tourism: More Harmful Than Helpful
Sustainable Travel
This episode exposes the truth about orphanage tourism and its harmful effects on children. Listen to this episode to learn more and find out what you can do to help instead.
Orphanage tourism is a way that volunteers can be involved in the lives of children in care during their travels, helping to fund orphanages to, in theory, offer children better lives. In reality, it’s not always the case. Orphanage tourism originated from an appetite to experience real life, and an increased ability to travel to more of the world, including developing countries. Most commonly, volunteers who want to work with orphaned children come from backgrounds of comparative wealth, and genuinely hope their involvement will help the children, while also enriching their own travel experience. For orphanage owners and managers, this is how they make money, and while the volunteers might feel social gratification, the children almost certainly don’t. Children are not and never should be tourist attractions, and yet many orphanages are profiting from the good intentions of well-meaning volunteers.
Orphanage Tourism: More Harmful Than Helpful
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