You may have come to the Teach Ghana Trust website because you are thinking about taking a year out. We’d like to ask you to think long and hard about what you may be on the verge of embarking on…

The Teach Ghana Trust was initially founded due to the frustration felt by some of the trustees about some gap year organisations not prioritising the needs of the country in which they were operating.

At first, our aim was to arrange volunteer teaching placements in schools in Ghana with the schools’ and the children’s needs placed first and foremost. However, at a meeting of the trustees in February 2006, the question of whether even this was a beneficial activity was raised.

The trustees therefore decided to debate this question at their next meeting in March 2006 and at this meeting they resolved not to arrange volunteer placements.

This may seem like an odd decision, particularly if you are thinking about arranging a gap year placement yourself. We would like to ask you to read our reasoning (summarised below and available in full in the minutes of the meeting):

We knew that as an organisation we were in a good position to arrange placements in schools in Ghana. However, we wanted to make sure that any volunteering scheme we offered was offering a real, long term and sustainable solution to the issue we were seeking to resolve.

·We did not want to make schools in Ghana reliant on volunteers. There was a danger that a reliance on volunteers would lead to schools not recruiting Ghanaians to teach, which would not be good for employment levels and the internal economy.

Equally, the Teach Ghana Trust had no guarantee that it would be able to send out volunteers consistently, but rather numbers would fluctuate throughout the year. As such, we would not be able to guarantee a consistent service for schools, making it difficult for them to plan effectively.

The majority of our applicants are unqualified. We were anxious that we could not be sure that we were arranging a placement for somebody who was an able teacher and who would be of real benefit to the children they taught.

As we will go on to say, there are already a number of organisations who offer excellent volunteering schemes. We did not want to duplicate their work, or increase competition for volunteers and funding that are so badly needed elsewhere.

Ultimately, the goal for the Teach Ghana Trust would be for schools in Ghana to no longer require volunteers, but to be able to teach their pupils with a staff of trained, salaried Ghanaian teachers. We belive that a better way to ensure this would be to act as a charity which endeavours to ensure a greater number of able, locally bred and locally trained teachers rather than alternatives to such teachers.

These arguments hold not just in our case but quite possibly in many other volunteering scenarios. One organisation whose volunteering placements we regard very highly is the Voluntary Services Overseas. Their minimum requirement of 1 year is there for a reason and their strict prerequisites of experience within the field of the relevant placement are to ensure the ability and quality of the volunteer, and the best possible service to the people and communities they are endeavouring to support.

It may be very tempting to take a year abroad, but we would urge you to seriously consider its consequences. Try exploring more locally based volunteering opportunities – e.g. in administrative roles with charities based in the UK, with homeless charities, working with disruptive children, working with mentally or physically disabled people etc. You may contribute more to a developing country as a tourist because your money will boost what is often an ailing internal economy. This may not have the appeal of working overseas but the assistance you can provide may be far more significant than you otherwise could.

Alternatively, you may wish to reconsider volunteering for a relatively short amount of time now in order to gain valuable experience under employment. With relevant skills, a 2-year placement in the future with an organisation such as the VSO could prove far more beneficial in the long-term than a short term volunteering placement now.

Finally, if you do decide to arrange a volunteering placement through a year-out “specialist”, please investigate your chosen organisation carefully to ensure that they utilise their funds, their staff and their volunteers as appropriately as possible and be warned that a number of gap-year organisations do not work on a charitable basis but, in fact, on a profitable one.