I'm not sure why I took so long to write this review as I remember promising myself almost a year ago that I would. After my 6 weeks volunteering with African Impact in Livingstone, Zambia, I was so angry and I wanted to make sure that people could understand why. People should know why programs like African Impact are not what they seem. I will craft a thorough and well-thought out review and if you want to still volunteer with AI, then go. But I only ask that you read the following with an open mind (and heart) and maybe it will change your perspective and hopefully you'll do more research into another, better program or organization.
I worked for African Impact in Livingstone, Zambia as a medical volunteer from late-November 2012 to January 2013. African Impact is NOT a non-profit organization (ask them); it is a “volunteerism agency” and it has volunteer projects all around the continent. It works with a charity called the Happy Africa Foundation, which is based in the U.K.
For a month before I arrived in Zambia, I worked as a medical volunteer in Namibia with an organization called Naankuse, at their medical clinic. It was an incredible experience and working with Naankuse proved that it is a seriously organized non-profit that is deeply helping the community it promises to help. African Impact turned out to be the opposite.
There were so many issues with African Impact and how it was organized that it frustrated me constantly to the point that I became extremely angry and saddened that I was a part of it. Any good that came of working with African Impact was because of the people I met: my fellow volunteers, staff, community members, etc. Other than that aspect, the work that I did as a medical volunteer was incredibly useless and I saw no point in being there other than to witness extreme poverty and a medical system severely lacking in efficacy, resources and simple intelligent planning.
Our jobs as medial volunteers consisted of two parts: clinic work and home-based care. Every week, I was given a new schedule, which assigned me to one of about 6 villages surrounding Livingstone. I (along with 1 or 2 other volunteers) would either help out in its clinic or to go around with a translator and community caregiver to visit people who required medical care. Clinics in Livingstone are supposedly understaffed, however, most days I spent in clinics consisted of about an hour helping with various duties and 2 to 3 hours doing absolutely nothing--just sitting around. Home-based care was fascinating as it allowed us to walk throughout the rural villages and see things most tourists will never see. We were welcomed into people’s homes and lives, and while it is something that has certainly impacted me—the “work” we did had no impact on them, whatsoever.
We would bring backpacks filled with basic medical supplies and medicine such as aspirin, ibuprofen, Pepcid, antiseptic solution, bandages, etc. We also carried with us thermometers and sphygmomanometers (manual blood pressure machines), most of which didn’t work. We were trained how to take their vitals and how to asses common illnesses—this training session did not take three to four years, as with doctors and nurses; it took 2 hours. They armed us with a few pills and suddenly we were doctors. Of course, we weren’t doctors but the villagers thought we were—and maybe some other volunteers didn’t find that disturbing but I did.
We sat in someone’s yard and he or she would tell us his or her problems—we’d ask a few questions and decide whether to give medicine or refer them to a clinic for further review. If we did refer them and they couldn’t get to the clinic on their own, we would arrange transport for later that week. Most times, they would go to the clinic and get similar medicine to what we would give, even if we suspected the problem was more serious. This is because nurses ran the clinics and there were no doctors to diagnose complex illnesses such as blood clots or heart problems. The next week, we would often return to the patient and see that nothing had changed. Many patients refused to go to the clinic for this very reason—they knew we would give them the same medicine from the comfort of their homes.
Another problem was with HIV education. A few volunteers—including myself—would accompany our medical coordinator, Brave (who was awesome but has no medical training), to conduct lessons that would teach a group of students about HIV. We would read off pre-prepared notes and Brave would translate. They were never listening to us; they listened to Brave—our presence was completely irrelevant. African Impact put us there for us, not for them.
Eventually, I had the chance to sit down with the head of the African Impact office in Livingstone and voice my concerns about the medical project. Every issue I would bring up would have a response. She defended everything I complained about which made me realize that there would never be anything that I could do to change the program. Her response to my implication that home-based care was useless was that we were helping the patients on a psychological level: they were happy just to know that someone cared about them. Well, that may be valid however, I did not go to Zambia to be a therapist or to simply visit sick people.
I am not comparing African Impact to some ideal volunteer program that I made up in my head—Naankuse never made me feel useless and constantly proved to be making a sustainable impact on the surrounding community. As I wrote in a handwritten feedback letter that I handed to an African Impact program coordinator before I left: “to put people like us [non medical-professionals] in the situations some of us have been in and let villagers think that we’re doctors who can actually do something for them, is insane. To let us witness such sick and helpless people and to let us come here thinking we might be able to do some good and then tell us we can't, is inexcusable.”
African Impact makes a profit off our dreams of making the smallest of differences in the world. There is no reason for African Impact to be a for-profit company and when I politely requested their financial information from its business coordinator, she explained why African Impact and its partner, the Happy Africa Foundation are organized the way they are. She told me that African Impact uses its profits to pay for the salary of its employees, making it easier for donations to Happy Africa to get to where they’re needed most. Non-profits' employees salaries are not considered profits. This makes no sense, whatsoever. No other major non-profit has a sister profit-making company that does this—this is simply the sketchiest excuse I’ve ever heard. The business coordinator never gave me those numbers, by the way.
Like I said, my time in Zambia was incredible due to the people that I was surrounded by. I met people from around the world and Zambia itself who made my 5 weeks extremely special. I only wish that African Impact was not the program that enabled me to meet these people. I plan on making sure that future prospective African Impact volunteers know about the business and that it is not what it seems—that there are much better ways to spend their time with organizations who are really in Africa to make an impact.
