Mobile Professional Voluntarism and International Development: Killing Me Softly?

This book explores the impact that professional volunteers have on the low resource countries they choose to spend time in. Whilst individual volunteering may be of immediate benefit to individual patients, this intervention may have detrimental effects on local health systems; distorting labour markets, accentuating dependencies and creating opportunities for corruption. Improved volunteer deployment may avoid these risks and present opportunities for sustainable systems change. The empirical research presented in this book stems from a specific volunteering intervention funded by the Tropical Health Education Trust and focused on improving maternal and newborn health in Uganda. However, important opportunities exist for policy transfer to other contexts.

Helen Louise Ackers holds a Chair in Global Social Justice at the University of Salford, UK.  She has been actively involved in high impact social research for many years with a focus on the mobilities of the highly skilled and knowledge mobilisation processes. For the past eight years, she has been actively applying this expertise to the specific context of professional voluntarism and its impact on maternal and newborn health in Uganda.

James Ackers-Johnson holds a project management role at the University of Salford, UK. His background is in Business, Economics and Management. He has been involved in managing Global Health related projects in Uganda and India for the past seven years, focusing primarily on professional volunteer deployment, staff exchanges, capacity building, infrastructure development and the management of UK student elective placements.