HE crucial to match student volunteers with communities

For years, international volunteering has been a popular activity with young men and women, often students, especially from the Global North sojourning in the Global South in the aid of local populations in fields such as healthcare, education and social development.

The movement has been largely successful, facilitating cultural exchange and related exposure. As a phenomenon, it has also been attracting the attention of researchers who have been probing best practices, shortcomings and trends in this field.

Based on experience and a growing body of knowledge on volunteerism, one East African organisation thinks it can improve the impact it is making by strengthening its partnerships with universities. Change Africa for Good (CAFG) has already devised a working plan to do so.

“Our model aims at conducting needs assessments of local NGOs [non-governmental organisations] and other CBOs [community-based organisations] to determine what they really need before we link them to expert volunteers,” said Francis Sekate, founder and CEO of CAFG.

“We help local NGOs to get the right volunteers, and the volunteers to work in the most appropriate fields,” he said.


According to Sekate, the organisation is not just looking for “any volunteer, but for volunteers with skills and who understand the challenges in the areas where they work”.

The organisation has been reaching out to universities, especially in the Global North, who are seeking partnerships, as part of its wider strategy to generate volunteers who have skills to work in vulnerable Global South communities.

This initiative is expected to receive a boost during a virtual conference on 30 January in partnership with the Rescue our Future Foundation.

Titled “How can Africa take command of its destiny by mobilising its potential?” the forum will enable experts from Africa, including those based at higher education institutions, and the youth of Africa to meet and share ideas.

“Universities contribute more of the young volunteers who come to work in Africa every year,” said Sekate.

“In fact, many of them [volunteers] are still students when they come here. So, we have to engage them [universities] and develop clear partnerships that can equip the students with relevant skills before they start volunteering.”

Changing the region

Since its inception in 2018, CAFG has linked more than 50 volunteers, many of them experts in their fields, with NGOs in East Africa. The volunteers have provided critical support to more than 400 women and children in the region.

Fortunate Elizabeth Bakanansa, the director of a child welfare attainment centre in the Mubende district in central Uganda, said she has worked with volunteers recommended by CAFG and they “know what they are doing”.

“Their volunteers are skilled,” she said. “The numbers we have worked with have helped integrate vulnerable children and aided in their development.”

Trusha Sharma, a Canadian volunteer who worked with CAFG in 2018, described her experience with the organisation as “nothing short of wonderful. Francis is a great leader and I learned a lot from him.”

But CAFG didn’t spring out of nowhere, and neither did its leader.

An electrical engineering graduate, Sekate envisioned himself intertwining wires and mounting other electrical installations in his early 20s.

He spent most of his early years after college (Uganda Technical College, Masaka) traversing the country and region, and interacted with thousands who still needed quality education, and thousands who still need quality healthcare.

“I was in Congo [DRC)], I have been to Kenya. I have covered three-quarters of Uganda. And I can tell you, people are poor,” said Sekate. “The quality of education services is appalling.”

He had to do something. That was when he started the Kalambi Community Development Project.

It was aimed at improving the livelihoods of disadvantaged populations and vulnerable children who were born with HIV in Central Uganda.

This venture opened his eyes to the challenges a number of local NGOs faced, especially related to funding and staffing.

Sekate had hoped to utilise international volunteers who were, and still are, popular to plug the staffing gap, but found many of them lacking in skills and the right mindset to deliver the changes he wanted to see.

“Most of the volunteers we received were novices, usually fresh graduates without the experience or skill to work in a charitable organisation in rural Africa,” said Sekate.

That is when he decided to form CAFG in 2018 to train and link skilled volunteers to NGOs and other CBOs who needed a hand, to ultimately achieve his goal: improve the region's quality of healthcare and education.

“CAFG conducts needs assessment for a number of local NGOs and other CBOs,” said Sekate. “We determine what these NGOs and CBOs need, and link them to relevant expert volunteers that can make a difference.”

The organisation also trains volunteers, many of whom are young students coming from Global North universities, to hone their skills before they start work.

But it needs a hand from higher learning institutions. Recent research has shown the way and points to the need to prepare volunteers for the work they need to do in communities.

Volunteers require training

Universities have a role to play in improving the quality of international volunteering, said Malgorzata Dziminska, Justyna Fijalkowska and Lukasz Sulkowski, in a 2020 paper.

“As culture change agents for sustainable development, institutions of higher learning today are regarded as significant drivers of a knowledge-based economy, and increasingly they play a more active and interventionist role, related to innovation and the economy and the delivery of wider social goals and the transformation of society,” said the researchers.

But the institutions must consciously impart “skills related to volunteering, empathy, and social responsibility to drive this change,” they wrote.

Fényes Hajnalka at the University of Debrecen writes about volunteering among higher education students in a paper.

The paper noted that the young generation today participated in new types of volunteering, in which their motivation is not dominantly altruistic, but the volunteers are actually benefiting.

“These results call our attention to the necessity for new measurements and indicators of volunteering,” the paper said.

“Volunteering does not only benefit vulnerable communities, it also improves learners’ soft skills such as communication, time management, and teamwork, and improves their confidence.”

Still, many of the volunteers are not prepared when they arrive abroad.

Carina Strohmeier and Savo Heleta, in another paper on the topic, has highlighted lots of gaps in international volunteering related to volunteer naivety.

This challenge is not helped by the fact that volunteers are often not offered any training or orientation by the organisations that send them abroad.

Also, when they arrive in Africa, volunteers are not given enough, and in some cases any, orientation, preparation, training or supervision.

The authors said this oversight was “highly irresponsible, unprofessional and unethical for the organisations and businesses that promote and sell volunteering experiences to tell young Westerners that they can work in orphanages, schools and community projects in the Global South without any previous experience or qualifications”.

Strohmeier and Heleta suggested that preparation of volunteers before or upon arrival, as well as training and supervision throughout their stay in the Global South, must be a key part of every project that hosts volunteers from the Global North.

They also called countries in the Global South and their national departments of social development and basic education to provide training and workshops for local NGOs and school staff on how best to use and support international volunteers.

CAFG is trying to do this in East Africa.

Conference to help show the way

“We need organisations like Change Africa For Good, which can sieve the volunteers we accept into the country,” said Andrew Mugabe, a town clerk based in Bushenyi, western Uganda, who has previously volunteered with CAFG. “A lot of the volunteers we get here are inexperienced.

Mugabe continued: “Almost all international volunteering organisations are based in Europe and the USA, but CAFG is local, and it is training both the CBOs and the volunteers on how they can create better and sustainable impact for vulnerable populations here.”

Said Sekate: “CAFG offers robust training to local NGOs and CBOs to prepare them for recruitment and management of volunteers.”

“The organisation also empowers the volunteers, especially the young students coming from the Global North, equipping them with skills to put them in a better shape for work.”

The organisation, which has partnered with the Rescue Our Future Foundation to host the conference on 30 January, will be focusing on enhancing its efforts to strengthen the impact of volunteers.

Glenn Sankatsing, a board member of the foundation and co-organiser of the conference, said the conference was about the creation of more independent and self-reliant societies in Africa. “We need to make Africa thrive ... and all of us have a duty to create this change,” he said.

The conference is expected to feature more than 1,000 participants.

Pan-African activist Patrick Lumumba, also the director of the Kenya School of Law, is expected to attend; and so are Nnimmo Bassey, director of the ecological think tank Health of Mother Earth Foundation and Vanessa Nakate, a 24-year-old climate activist from Uganda.

For more information about registration e-mail rescue@rescueourfuture.org.