‘This word volunteer is killing us’: Making sense of volunteering in social welfare provision for orphans and vulnerable children in rural Zimbabwe

Abstract

This qualitative study explored how volunteers delivering social welfare to orphans and vulnerable children through a community initiative supported by donors made sense of volunteering during a period of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. Findings confirm that volunteering in Africa is influenced by a normative value system embedded in Ubuntu. Volunteering emerged as contradictory given the contextual prevalence of the social obligation discourse rather than individual choice as embedded in the European sense of voluntarism. Volunteering masked the cost of participation, thereby potentially making poverty worse for the poor in a context without a formal welfare system.