The Ethics of Orphanage Volunteerism?

Olivia Barker White
6 hours ago
7 min read

Children belong in families, not in our fundraising. Stop volunteering at orphanages. Start changing systems.

On Monday, I had the privilege of joining a roundtable discussion hosted by Time to Help (UK) around the topic of the ethics of orphanage volunteerism. This came about as Time to Help received a gentle challenge to their overseas volunteering programmes in orphanages and instead of ignoring or dismissing this, decided to use this an opportunity to listen, to learn and to understand more about this topic - a hugely admirable stance and one I wish many other organisations would follow!

A huge thank you to Yusuf Kar and the whole Time to Help team for inviting me to be part of this important discussion, and to my fellow panellists Ridwana Wallace-Laher, Dr Nelly Ali, Imtiaz Patel, and David Lewis for their invaluable insights. Our overall conclusion - it is complicated!

The topic of orphanage volunteering is something I care a lot about and advocating against this harmful practise is something I am extremely passionate about. I volunteered in an orphanage in Thailand when I was 16 and felt extremely uncomfortable about it. Overseas volunteering, however, has shaped my life - I would not have founded Kids Club Kampala without it - but it has to be undertaken appropriately.

I am sharing my speech from this roundtable below to hopefully help shed some more light on this important topic, and to offer a gentle challenge to anyone involved with, or thinking of getting involved with, overseas orphanage volunteering.

Round table discussion - my perspective on orphanage volunteering

I want to begin with a question. If a practice you championed — one you gave your time, your money, and your goodwill to — turned out to cause measurable harm to the very children you intended to help, what would you do?

I ask this not to indict anyone. I ask it because that is precisely the situation many of us in the NGO sector now face. And our answer — as institutions, as professionals, and as people with a duty of care — must be radical honesty followed by decisive reform.

Across the UK and many other countries, individuals, faith communities, and organisations give generously because they care. They respond to what they understand as a call to help children in need. That generosity is real, and it matters. The problem is not the impulse. The problem is the system into which that generosity is sometimes channelled — a system that, without proper safeguards, can cause the very harm it claims to prevent.

“Good intentions do not protect children. Robust systems do.”

What are the most common misconceptions volunteers hold about helping vulnerable children?

The most pervasive — and the most dangerous — is that presence equals help. Volunteers arrive believing their time and affection are inherently beneficial. They are not. A child who forms an attachment to a rotating stream of strangers, each of whom disappears after two weeks, does not experience warmth. They experience abandonment — again and again. Developmental psychology is unambiguous on this point: children require consistent, stable caregiving relationships. We cannot manufacture that through short-stay volunteerism.

A second misconception is that the existence of poverty justifies institutional care. Volunteers see poor families and assume that orphanages offer children a better life. But we know that more than 80% of children living in orphanages have at least one living parent. Many also have grandparents, siblings, and extended family members who love them — but who are struggling with poverty. In too many cases, orphanages do not respond to family breakdown. They cause it. They become magnets that draw families — under economic duress — to surrender their children. A full orphanage is not a success story. It is a symptom of a system that has failed families.

More than 80 years of research shows that institutional care has detrimental effects on children’s physical, cognitive, social, and psychological development. One study found that children lose approximately one month of linear growth for every three months spent in institutional care. Institutions can cause or exacerbate attachment disorders, and there is a greater risk of abuse, neglect, and maltreatment. Therefore, residential care should only be used as a last resort, as no matter how well-run an orphanage is, it is still detrimental to a child’s well-being and development to grow up without the commitment and love of a family for life.

Third: that doing something is better than doing nothing. It is not. A poorly trained volunteer who engages in unsupervised contact with children in a poorly regulated facility may cause psychological harm, enable abuse, or crowd out investment in local, family-based care solutions that would actually serve children’s long-term interests.

The revolving door of volunteers visiting children in orphanages and then leaving is extremely detrimental to children, and this stream of broken attachments further exacerbates already-existing trauma and attachment issues. Children need and deserve consistent love and attention, and these needs should be met by permanent caregivers, rather than volunteers who come and go. Work that focuses on supporting and strengthening parents, caregivers, staff, and the local community is preferable to directly volunteering with children in orphanages.

What documented risks have emerged from poorly designed child-volunteering programmes?

The evidence is extensive and it is damning.

First, there is the business model problem. Where volunteer fees and donations are tied to the presence of children, institutions have a financial incentive to maximise their resident population. This creates conditions in which children are recruited — sometimes trafficked — from families under false pretences. I have seen this happen first hand in Uganda. This is not the fringe of the orphanage sector. In some regions, it has become the norm.

Second, there is the safeguarding gap. In many jurisdictions, foreign volunteers undergo no criminal background checks, no child protection vetting, and receive no safeguarding training. This is not hypothetical risk — it is a structural invitation to abuse. Reports compiled by Lumos, Orphanage Ventures Research, and Save the Children have documented physical, psychological, and sexual abuse linked directly to inadequately supervised volunteer access.

Third, there is the harm of the institutional environment itself. The body of research comparing institutional care to family-based alternatives demonstrates that children raised in residential institutions experience significantly worse outcomes across cognitive development, emotional regulation, and physical health — regardless of the quality of material provision.

We must stop measuring the success of these programmes by the smiling photographs volunteers post online. We must measure them by outcomes for children — and by those metrics, the model is failing.

Should short-term placements involving direct child contact be restricted?

Yes. Unambiguously, yes.

The evidence on attachment disruption is not contested. Placements of less than three months involving regular direct contact with young children are not merely ineffective — they are actively harmful. For children under the age of 12, and for children who have experienced trauma or prior abandonment, any short-term volunteer placement involving direct relational contact should be prohibited.

This does not mean there is no role for short-term international volunteers. There is — in construction, in skills transfer to local staff, in fundraising and advocacy conducted at distance. What there is no legitimate role for is the placement where a volunteer plays with children they will never see again, returns home with photographs, and calls it development work. That model must end.

We would never allow an unqualified, untrained volunteer to turn up at a children’s home in the UK expecting to have direct contact with children, photograph them, begin to build relationships and never return again. Children in the Global South deserve no less.

So what does good practice look like?

But I do not want this speech to be only a catalogue of harm. Because alongside the evidence of what goes wrong, there is evidence — powerful, human evidence — of what goes right when we get the model correct.

The Ewafe Project, run by Kids Club Kampala, offers exactly that model. Ewafe — meaning “Where We Belong” in Luganda — focuses on rescuing, rehabilitating, and reintegrating abandoned and at-risk children back into loving families. Since its launch in 2013, Ewafe has rescued over 250 children, with almost 200 successfully reintegrated into family care.

When a child is referred to the project, social workers begin tracing their immediate and extended family. Where reintegration is possible, a plan is put in place to bring that child home. Where it is not, trained foster families step in. Each family receives a care package — food, clothing, educational sponsorship — alongside ongoing social work support. This is not a stopgap. It is a sustainable, dignity-respecting alternative to institutional care.

I want to share one story from that project — because policy arguments are important, but human stories remind us why they matter.

Annabel* was 11 years old when she ran away from home after a family disagreement. She spent several weeks living on the streets before being found by a local child protection officer, who referred her to the Ewafe Project. At the Ewafe home, Annabel received one-on-one counselling, shelter, medical care, and the stability she had never had. Over three years, she became a role model to younger children. She was not placed with a rotating series of foreign volunteers. She was supported by trained local social workers who stayed.

In May 2025, family tracing efforts reunited Annabel with her grandmother. The family continues to receive ongoing support. Annabel is now 14, and her own words speak louder than any policy recommendation:

“I hope to join high school.”

That is what success looks like. Not a child in an institution. A child going home.

*Name has been changed

Where to go from here?

For more information about the work of Kids Club Kampala around family based care and our advocacy work around this, you can read another article I wrote last year about this here.

I am also proud to be part of an initiative called The Homecoming Project — a coalition spearheaded by Home for Good and Safe Families — which is doing vital work in encouraging donors, faith communities, and organisations to redirect their giving toward exactly these kinds of outcomes: family strengthening, reunification, kinship care, fostering, and local adoption. We should be amplifying that work, not competing with it.

They have lots of really useful resources on their website to educate, inspire and equip people with more information about overseas volunteering, including a due diligence tool for if you are supporting a project overseas and want to make sure that your money is protecting, not harming, vulnerable children.

Connect with me on LinkedIn to continue this conversation!