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Palgrave Macmillan
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Mobile Professional Voluntarism and International Development

Killing Me Softly?

  • Book
  • Open Access
  • © 2017

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Overview

  • Analyzes aid by focusing on human giving through donations of embodied knowledge, i.e. volunteer time and expertise, rather than financial instruments

  • Presents direct evidence from managing and evaluating the Sustainable Volunteering Project, which has has deployed over 40 UK volunteers across the Ugandan Maternal and Newborn Hub

  • Offers valuable policy recommendations aimed at volunteer deployment agencies in the UK and beyond

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Table of contents (5 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

This book is open access under a CC BY license.



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.

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Salford , Salford, United Kingdom

    Helen Louise Ackers, James Ackers-Johnson

About the authors

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.





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