Volunteering
Community or conservation volunteering can be the most fulfilling elements of travel. Read our planning tips to make the most of your time
More and more travellers are looking to put something back into the places they visit via a stint of volunteering.
Volunteering comes in many guises: it could be developmental volunteering, where you work with local communities – maybe teaching, building schools, running clinics or generally using your time and skills to benefit the people of a particular region.
For instance, you could use your nursing qualifications to work at a hospital in Malawi, transport your admin experience to an aid office in Indonesia, or lend your muscle to rebuild homes after a catastrophic earthquake.
Conservation volunteering is another option, involving you helping to protect a species or environment. This could range from studying meerkats in the Kalahari to recording the coral growth on a Thai reef to counting tiger pugmarks in the forests of India. You may need biology or research skills, or you could just offer your enthusiasm to help with data collection or trail maintenance.
The main thing to remember when considering a volunteer placement is: do your research. Whether you chose to go on a pre-arranged trip with a volunteer agency or whether you find a placement independently, ask lots of questions so that you are satisfied the project you will be working on is legitimate and actually helpful to the local place and people.
Placements vary massively in time scale – you might tag three days of litter collection onto a trek in Morocco or devote two years to running a school in Peru. They also vary in cost – some will be expensive ventures, others may pay you a small fee. But such variety in duration, theme, location and remuneration means that there’s a perfect volunteering experience out there for everyone.
Top 10 Volunteering trips
- Help conserve the rare giant tortoises of the idyllic Indian Ocean on a placement in the Seychelles
- Volunteer in the UK at one of the National Trust’s network of historic houses and gardens
- Snorkel and dive to help the coral and reef-life of Ko Chang, Thailand
- Tidy up on your travels by mixing sightseeing and litter collection on the banks of the Nile, Egypt
- Visit the inspirational chimpanzee reserve in the remote interior of The Gambia
- Join a project to monitor the lumbering but lovely turtles of Costa Rica
- Use your skills to benefit a community in the long term on a Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) two-year placement
- Work to safeguard the future of rare wild horses in Hustai National Park, Mongolia
- Go out on an anti-poaching walking safari with the rangers of South Luangwa National Park, Zambia
- Take a TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language) course and head abroad to work in a local school or community