Literature and Studies about Voluntourism

Learn about the dangers of voluntourism in our literature section.

There is a huge amount of literature dealing with the topic of voluntourism. With the massive increase of commercial volunteering agencies, scientific and journalistic research gain interest into this topic. Recently, the criticism on the negative impact that so-called volunteers have on developing countries is overwhelming. People that join commercial agencies do more harm than good!

We would like to encourage you to go through the literature, studies and articles that we are presenting here. It is important to us that you understand that we are not making things up. Our concerns about commercial volunteering organisations is not only based on our experiences with certain volunteers. There is proof in the scientific and journalistic world that unprepared volunteers have a negative impact. Even former volunteers report on that issue, warning future volunteers to join commercial agencies. You can find more below in the section “journalistic articles”.
We know that reading scientific research is hard. Therefore, we have summarised The Dangers Of Voluntourism on our website.


Journalistic Articles on the negative impact of Commercial Voluntourism


Scientific Literature and Studies about Voluntourism

If you are a university student or if you access to online libraries, just search for the term “voluntourism” and you will find loads of interesting research articles. Unfortunately, we cannot upload those PDFs due to copyright of the publishers. Nevertheless, we have tried to find you some other official research which are freely available:


If you have further questions or you need more information, please feel free to Contact Us.