Oversea volunteerism should: Recruit only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.

summary: Too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.

1st Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/opinion/09strauss.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Summary: The reason the Peace Corps is overlooked as a development organization has a lot to do with the youth and inexperience of the majority of its volunteers.

For applicants, the Peace Corps emphasizes the personal experience, not the volunteers development impact.

The real problem is that the Peace Corps has never done a serious job of evaluating its impact.

If it is a world peace and friendship organization designed to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served, then, as a start, it ought to ask the peoples served if they even know which country Peace Corps volunteers come from. If its a development agency, then it needs to undertake rigorous measures to assess its impact. Currently, it does neither but rather relies on biannual surveys in which volunteers comment on whether they think they are making a difference. Its a bit like asking a bunch of doctors how they think they are doing without ever talking to the patients or even checking to see if they are still alive. 2nd source:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/04/21/think_again_the_peace_corps

Issue: Creating one-off projects which have little long-term impact

How to choose: Ask the tour operator about their relationship with the NGO partner. Have they worked together long? If the answer is yes, that’s a good thing. How do they choose what projects the travelers will engage in? If the local communities or NGO partners are making the decisions and have veto power over ideas they don’t like, that is better than ideas coming from the tour company based on unfounded assumptions of needs. For all of these answers, getting in touch with both someone who had gone on the trip before and someone working in the country where you are visiting to get their perspective on the company and NGO partner will shine a more realistic light on the situation.

Issue: Forgetting that volunteers are NOT free

How to choose: If you know that your skills are not precisely matched with the needs of a project, or if the interactions you are having with partner NGOs are taking their time away from their core mission, ask and find out if the tour company is compensating the person or group presenting to or facilitating your community interaction. If they are not, yet the tour company is marking this part of the experience as a selling point of the tour, then they are probably putting the desire for their own profits over a the need to provide real support for these groups.

Issue: Giving unskilled volunteers jobs that require skills

How to choose: If you are looking for a long term placement, make sure to pick an operator that does very thorough matching of skills and needs. For short term placements, choose groups focused on educating you as a traveler, and giving you the skills and tools to improve the world when you go home. We have to learn before we can help. Choosing a trip focused on your education, which doesn’t assume that every wealthy traveler has construction skills, will empower you to be better equipped to support responsible initiatives in the future.

3rd source: http://goodintents.org/staffing-or-employment/voluntourism-what-could-go-wrong