Voluntary Labor in Kenya and Beyond

As the articles by Emma Hunter and Felicitas Becker in this issue underline, voluntary labor has a long history and legacy in East Africa, which reaches across the colonial and postcolonial periods and across social, economic, religious, and political domains. While voluntary labor has been important to religious activities, civic associations, women’s groups, and political activism, colonial and postcolonial states sought to harness, promote, and direct voluntary labor toward “development” goals with a view toward establishing a political community and political subjects. During late colonial rule in Kenya, the state encouraged local-level volunteer associations and committees and trained laypeople, mostly women, as volunteers in social welfare initiatives directed at changing people’s health and hygiene practices in the home (Lewis Reference Lewis2000). “Women’s development” clubs, called Maendeleo ya Wanawaka, started in the 1950s by colonial wives, were popular among Kenyan women and were considered by the state to be role models for the new policy of “community development,” which stressed “self-help from below” (see Wipper Reference Wipper1978). Meanwhile, communities were encouraged to form voluntary associations as a demonstration of unity, solidarity, and self-reliance.

Volunteerism continued to play an important role during the postindependence era, particularly in the construction of health and education infrastructure and public works. Newly independent governments in Kenya and Tanzania promoted voluntary labor in development projects as a central plank of citizenship and nation-building (Marsland Reference Marsland2006; Jennings Reference Jennings2009). In Kenya, under the rubric of harambee, “let’s pull together,” President Kenyatta called upon citizens to provide labor and pool funds to build clinics and schools, and promised to staff them with health workers and teachers (Thomas Reference Thomas1987; Maxon Reference Maxon, Ogot and Ochieng’1995). Like ujaama in Nyerere’s Tanzania, harambee was rooted in ideals of African communitarianism and drew upon colonial-era policies of promoting self-help and voluntary labor in rural development. As a collective, voluntary effort, harambee drew upon the social solidarity that was imagined to lie at the core of nation-building. Participation in state-led development was supposed to give Kenyans a sense of “pulling together” toward a common destination. However, historical scholarship argues that an ambiguous mélange of authoritarianism and coercion, patriotism and patronage, cooperation and self-interest suffused participation in development (Barkan & Holmquist Reference Barkan and Holmquist1989; Jennings Reference Jennings2003, Reference Jennings2009; Burton & Jennings Reference Burton and Jennings2007; Lal Reference Lal2012; Branch Reference Branch2011).

Voluntary labor was also promoted as part of the “community health worker” programs of the late 1970s and 1980s, supported by the W.H.O. and driven by its goal of “health for all by the year 2000,” as articulated during the Alma Ata conference in 1978. Governments across Africa trained volunteer health workers as a means of expanding access to primary health care in rural areas (Newell 1975). With structural adjustment, state backing for volunteer health workers fell, alongside huge reductions in state health budgets (Justice Reference Justice1983; Pigg Reference Pigg, Cooper and Packard1997; Haines et al. Reference Haines2007; Lehmann & Sanders Reference Lehmann and Sanders2007). The HIV/AIDS epidemic compounded the pressure on health systems, but particularly in East Africa, it also led to grassroots initiatives, which drew almost entirely on voluntary labor and were organized mostly by women, who shouldered the burden of care (Iliffe 2005). From the mid 1990s these grassroots initiatives received recognition and some economic support from NGOs and governments (Brown Reference Brown, Prince and Marsland2013).

The contemporary scaling-up of voluntary labor as a central plank of community-based development and global health interventions, by African states and by NGOs, has echoes of these earlier trajectories. Its present forms appear less indebted to the vision of Alma Ata, however, than they are to the effects of structural adjustment, the lack of resources, the huge demands the AIDS epidemic has made on health systems, the “NGO-isation” of public services (Hearn Reference Hearn1998), and the neoliberal preference for service delivery on the cheap (Gibbon Reference Gibbon1996; GoK 2001, 2005; Johnson & Khanna Reference Johnson and Khanna2004; Boesten et al. Reference Boesten, Mdee and Cleaver2011). In this context there is heated debate over whether volunteers are “liberators or lackeys” (Werner 1981, quoted in Lehmann & Sanders Reference Lehmann and Sanders2007:5)—whether voluntary labor should be understood as a neoliberal ploy to deliver minimal services cheaply or as a route to meaningful community empowerment (e.g., Berman et al. Reference Berman, Gwatkin and Burger1987; Boesten et al. Reference Boesten, Mdee and Cleaver2011).

Beyond Africa, the use of unwaged labor is on the rise. As states withdraw from twentieth-century promises of work, care, and social redistribution (Eliasoph Reference Eliasoph2011), voluntary labor is being positioned within an “economy of affect” (Hardt Reference Hardt1999: 95), which relies on unpaid labor and nonprofit infrastructure to do the work of the state (Adams Reference Adams2012).^{Footnote 4} While voluntary work in twentieth-century Europe was situated in the leisure time of the employed or of their dependents (hence it was usually predominantly female), today it occupies the more ambiguous space that exists between paid and unpaid work (while retaining its political or religious underpinnings; see Allahyari Reference Allahyari2000). Across both public and private sectors, voluntary labor is also being promoted as a means of providing young people with “work experience” and giving them a leg up in the job market (Perlin Reference Perlin2011).^{Footnote 5} Volunteering is thus part of a larger re-signification of the meaning of work and citizenship as governments confront growing unemployment rates and an increasingly perilous, low-wage labor market (Muehlebach Reference Muehlebach2012).

Volunteering has also become an increasingly global phenomenon, which takes shape through global inequality. Large numbers of young volunteers from the global North travel to the South to take part in humanitarian, environmental, and development projects (e.g., Smith & Laurie Reference Smith and Laurie2011; Redfield Reference Redfield2012). While they may be driven by humanitarian motives or political solidarity, participation in such projects also promotes the future careers of young, predominantly middle-class volunteers. These projects often highlight or entrench inequalities as much as they mitigate them.

Volunteers in Kisumu

During the past fifteen years, Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, with an official population in 2010 of around half a million people, has emerged as a center of global health and development projects, which focus on HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria, and poverty alleviation initiatives such as microcredit, orphan care, and cash-transfer programs. The city hosts a large number of nongovernmental and transnational organizations: In 2008, 907 NGOs were registered with the government as operating in Kisumu and its hinterlands (117 of them with headquarters in Kisumu and 790 with headquarters elsewhere).^{Footnote 8} These organizations include large international NGOs, national NGOs, and local community-based and self-help groups. They share the city with numerous Northern donor agencies, Northern medical research institutions, and university research groups, as well as with religious charities and churches running orphanages and poverty-reduction projects. Government institutions also have a large presence, particularly since the expansion of HIV/AIDS treatment throughout the country in government and NGO sites.^{Footnote 9} These global health and development interventions have put material resources, expertise, and technologies into circulation, as well as knowledge and globalized discourses about human rights, HIV/AIDS, and gender equality. However, they are spatially circumscribed and temporally limited. While a few NGOs (like the local Catholic NGO set up in Kisumu in the mid-1970s) are stable features of the city’s landscape, others “come and go,” as the manager of an NGO told me, and many projects disappear, are interrupted, or come to a standstill. The spatial and temporal features of this “projectified” landscape (see Whyte et al. Reference Whyte, Biehl and Petryna2013) have wider effects on political structures, economic opportunities, and forms of self-fashioning, as well as on imaginations of development and the future (Geissler Reference Geissler2013; Prince 2013; see also Pfeiffer Reference Pfeiffer2003; Mains Reference Mains2012).

Alongside the expansion of global health and development activities, and the emergence of Kisumu as an “NGO city,” as one resident put it, the city itself is growing. Physical infrastructure is being revamped and middle-class housing, along with gated compounds and private security companies, is expanding. This coexists with deepening poverty, fueled by rural‒urban migration, population growth, and lack of employment, and revealed in the mushrooming of informal housing lacking sewage, water, or electricity. There is an increasingly obvious divide between the “haves” (the salaried population, many of whom are working for the government or NGOs), and the “have nots” (those surviving in the informal economy).

Volunteers are prominent figures in Kisumu. Since 2004, the rollout of HIV/AIDS and TB treatment programs throughout Kenya has intensified the use of volunteers. It is volunteers who do much of the work of “mobilization” and health education, providing HIV testing and counseling, visiting TB patients at home to observe treatment, following up “defaulters,” and establishing links between project, patient, and “community.” In smaller NGOs volunteers do much of the auditing work of project life, filling in forms and updating records. Microcredit and orphan care projects also rely on volunteers, while volunteers run the numerous community-based, self-help, and patient-support groups.

Volunteers are not paid and most have no employment contract, but they are given some remuneration in the form of material support. There appears to be little standardization here; some are given “lunch money,” others “transport reimbursement,” while others receive a small stipend (KSh100 a day [less than U.S.$2.00] in 2008‒9, or if lucky, KSh 3,000 a month). These sums are small, do not add up to a livelihood, must be combined with other forms of making a living, and sometimes never materialize. Members of CBOs usually have no stipend at all but receive occasional material support, sacks of flour, and mobile phone credit from NGOs. However, a major motivation for volunteers is the opportunity to attend “trainings” or workshops. Workshop participants gain new skills and receive certificates as well as per diems.^{Footnote 10}

Figures on volunteers are hard to come by, perhaps because they occupy a gray area between formal and informal work, and because they are a large but shifting and poorly defined population. As mentioned earlier, a national survey in Kenya, conducted in 2007‒8, gives a figure of 90,411 volunteers attached to the 1,334 NGOs that responded to the survey (compare this to the much lower numbers of formally employed staff: 14,217). While there may be a tendency for organizations to exaggerate their membership in order to claim more funding, actual numbers of volunteers in Kenya could be even higher. What is clear is that volunteering is becoming a field of competition. As one NGO director told me, “There are so many people coming by who wish to become volunteers, and we have to turn them away.” The number of volunteers attached to the three government clinics and five NGOs I surveyed ranged from ten to thirty. Within each institution, four to six volunteers worked on a daily basis and received a standard, albeit minimal, stipend. The other volunteers offered their labor whenever there was an opening. Several were attached as volunteers to more than one institution. This again underlines the fact that statistics on volunteer numbers cannot be taken at face value.

In Kisumu, volunteers included people of different ages, socioeconomic position, and aspirations. Of the forty-three volunteers I interviewed, twenty-nine were women and fourteen were men. Twenty-three were thirty-five years or older, while twenty were under thirty-five years. Thirty-nine were volunteers at the time of interview, while four had been volunteers but had recently gained employment with an NGO on short-term contracts. Of those over thirty-five years old, the majority (15) had only primary school education (and many had not completed that). Many were openly HIV-positive (although I did not ask about HIV status). Eight volunteers over thirty-five years old had some high school education; two of them had college education but had never managed to find a formal job. All were married, widowed, or separated. Among the younger volunteers, all twenty had high school education (although four had dropped out before graduating due to lack of fees). A minority (7) were married. Only one among the younger volunteers referred to her HIV (positive) status. All the volunteers were, like most western Kenyans, Christians.^{Footnote 11} Seven of the forty-three volunteers interviewed had set up and were leaders of a CBO.

The sample appears representative of the sociology of volunteering. In recent years older people, particularly women, who became volunteers for HIV/AIDS projects due to their experiences of being HIV-positive, compete with younger people who speak English, have secondary school or even tertiary education, are familiar with technical terms, and have a more “professional” look (see Brown & Green, this issue). The older volunteers in my sample, who were supporting families, often combined their voluntary work with work in the informal economy—for example, selling vegetables or fast food along the roadside, or driving bicycle taxis. What they could offer to the projects was their intimate experience with HIV and of caring for others as well as the advantages that accompany belonging to the communities being targeted.

The younger volunteers also combined voluntary work with other sources of income but were more reluctant to talk about this lower-status work. Instead, they presented their voluntary work as a kind of profession and as a route to socioeconomic mobility. For them, volunteering was a form of “tarmacking,” a Kenyan idiom that refers to the search for work in the formal sector and implies a continual movement from place to place (Prince 2013). It is distinguished from juakali work (physical labor “under the hot sun” in the informal economy), which includes selling goods by the roadside, transporting water carts, and working as a roadside mechanic. Most of these young people came from families of middle-class status (their parents were teachers, nurses, civil servants, or modest businesspeople), but their parents had been unable to send them to college. Unlike the older volunteers, they were skilled in speaking English and were familiar with the material and semantic culture of development intervention, such as bureaucratic forms, computers, and talk of “gender sensitization.” Introduced to volunteering by relatives who had contacts with NGOs or government officials or by friends involved in youth groups, the young volunteers regarded it as a means of accruing knowledge, skills, and certificates as well as contacts. Their dreams were to enroll in tertiary education and gain formal employment, preferably with an NGO.

Howeover, both younger and older volunteers shared experiences of suffering and the struggle within their own families and communities with HIV/AIDS—and this colored their conceptions of volunteering as a moral project “to help others.” At the same time, they approached volunteering with particular hopes and dreams: volunteering, they told me, was a way of “moving ahead” in life.

Kisumu and its hinterlands have also become a destination for visits from what may be termed “global” volunteers. They include “gap year” volunteers (mostly from the U.K.), Christian volunteers (mostly from the U.S.) whose churches run projects, volunteers for the VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), the Peace Corps, and Médecins Sans Frontiers, as well as medical students who volunteer on a short-term basis at local hospitals (for a similar situation in Malawi, see Wendland Reference Wendland2012). The global mobility and relative affluence of expatriate volunteers (as well as of development workers and researchers, including anthropologists) present a significant contrast to the lives of many Kenyans. Although their presence is transient, the flow of expatriate volunteers into Kenya provides exchange, encounters, and points of connection with locals. Especially for unemployed youth who aspire to work for NGOs, the lifestyles and mobility of these global volunteers feed hopes, desires, and imaginations of their own future trajectories, and provide a counterpoint to their more limited mobility.^{Footnote 12}

While global volunteering provides a backdrop to the lives and aspirations of Kisumu’s local residents, my concern here is with local economies of voluntary labor and local volunteers. These volunteers do not belong to a privileged class of globetrotters. Neither do they have firm foot in the Kenyan middle class. They occupy an ambiguous position, between formal and informal labor. While all volunteers sought both some kind of livelihood and a socially valued identity, their motivations and aspirations concerning volunteering were diverse, as were the skills they offered.

Life Stories of Volunteers

Precariousness was a striking feature of the narratives I collected from volunteers. Indeed, their trajectories suggest that volunteering is not so different from piecemeal work in the informal economy, which is similarly unreliable, unstable, and uncertain. Volunteering took place across a constantly shifting landscape of projects. Dependent on funding from external donors, NGOs often shifted their priorities. Projects were limited by funding cycles, and several came to a standstill for other reasons. Getting oneself “inside” a project within this uncertain terrain meant gaining visibility, inserting oneself into particular spaces, and being on the ball—ready to grab the next opportunity (Prince Reference Prince2014). It also meant cultivating a network of contacts and relationships with more powerful actors within NGOs and other organizations in the city.

Pamela and MamaAtieno were widows in their forties who had suffered abuse at the hands of their in-laws and had left their rural homes for the city, where they lived (at least while I knew them) without a man and took care of their own and relatives’ children and grandchildren. Echoing a common trajectory, both women had initially been taken by a female friend to get an HIV test and had enrolled in a transnational HIV/AIDS research project, where they were given privileged medical treatment and care (see Geissler Reference Geissler2011). Joining HIV-positive support groups, they had become visible to NGOs and their projects, which opened up opportunities for volunteering. They took pleasure and pride in their work; they were known among their neighbors as people who had contacts with staff members of government clinics and NGOs, and they were praised as “active” and hardworking women who had, moreover, “a good heart.” Having been through considerable hardship themselves, they knew what others were going through.

Even so, their trajectories were precarious. Pamela’s landlord abused her about her HIV status and kept threatening to throw her out of her single room, where she lived without water or electricity, in one of Kisumu’s informal settlements. Finding the money for the rent (KSh800 per month, or about U.S.$14.00) was difficult, even though she combined volunteering with selling chapatti (fried flat bread) alongside the road. Moreover, there was little continuity to volunteering. In the years I knew her, Pamela moved from volunteering at the government HIV clinic to various NGO projects, but none lasted more than a few months. She was recruited by a national NGO to provide home-based care for a project sponsored by UNICEF; later she was enrolled (without any remuneration) by another NGO to do the same thing, and then she became a volunteer “TB tracer” attached to a public hospital (she had to visit patients in their homes, watch them swallow their TB medicine, and fill in an adherence form). Some projects came to an end when funding ran out. She left one project when the promised remuneration did not materialize. Still, she managed to make a living by combining volunteering with selling chapatti or vegetables, and with some support from her eldest son who worked as a mechanic in the juakali sector. Meanwhile MamaAtieno was dependent on the money that her son made from illegal sales of marijuana. She lived in fear of his being arrested—as indeed he was—but she sold marijuana for him. The irony of her situation did not escape her, but she could not survive on the handouts she received from volunteering.

Some of the volunteers were more successful than others. Four of the forty-three volunteers I interviewed had recently gained employment, and in every NGO I surveyed I found a staff member who had earlier been a volunteer. This longed-for employment was the outcome of years spent cultivating contacts and going to training workshops where, as I explore below, one could gain new knowledge and skills.

Moving Ahead?

All the volunteers surveyed regarded the access to training workshops as one of the most valued aspects of volunteering. Volunteers attached to an NGO or government institution expected to be given opportunities to attend workshops and strove to attend as many as they could. To do so, they had to convince staff members, who triaged workshop attendance and tried to distribute these opportunities fairly, that they were worthy candidates. Organized by NGOS, workshops took place in hotels with attendees receiving much appreciated per diems. More important, workshops taught new ways of speaking and acting, which, together with the manipulation of charts, files, and power point presentations, form the material and semantic culture of development governance. Volunteers greatly desired to gain new knowledge and skills. Associated with the development economy and the world of NGOs and government, such knowledge was marketable and held out the hope of eventual employment. Workshops also offered certificates providing evidence of skills gained (for example, in “peer mobilization,” “HIV counseling” or “community health work”). These were highly valued objects, repositories of much hope as well as pride. In Pamela’s one-room dwelling, for example, framed certificates held pride of place along with a photograph of her at a workshop on HIV/AIDS, a poster of Senator Barack Obama getting an HIV test while visiting Kisumu in 2006, and posters proclaiming messages such as “Know your status,” “Know your rights,” and “The miracle of ARVs” (anti-retroviral drugs). However, certificates rarely seem to propel people into formal employment. To actually achieve employment, volunteers had to build up a network of patronage, and workshops provided an opportunity to mingle with staff of NGOs and government institutions.

Rosalind, Elias, and Omandi were three volunteers who had enjoyed a measure of success. Omondi was an openly HIV-positive father of four whose wife was also positive and a volunteer HIV counselor. He had spent five years as a volunteer peer-mobilizer and counselor for a government HIV clinic and for an NGO, which he combined with leading a “community-based” patient-support group and driving a bicycle taxi. In 2008 he finally gained formal employment as a community health worker attached to an HIV clinic on a one-year contract. Although his daily work was no different from the tasks he had carried out as a volunteer—enrolling people in the HIV clinic, counseling, giving HIV tests, and visiting patients at home—his formal contract gave him KSh11,000 a month.

Rosalind had volunteered for some years before she managed to gain a paid position as an HIV counselor for a large national NGO on successive twelve-month contracts. Like Pamela, she was a widow in her forties and had moved to the city after her husband had died from AIDS. Unlike Pamela, though, Rosalind had a high school education. She saw herself as a “figure of success” (see Banagas 2001), as someone who had transformed misfortune into a new trajectory in life. During her three years in employment she had saved money and bought a piece of land in her natal village on which she planned to build a house. She also planned to set up a support group for HIV-positive women in the village, and she described herself as a “role model.”

When I met him, Elias had spent the previous five years as a volunteer and had just gained a one-year contract as a paid HIV counselor for an NGO. He had started off selling sodas from a mobile stand outside an NGO’s office, which gave him “exposure” to staff working there. Using these contacts, he had joined a youth group, been sent to various training workshops, and volunteered for various projects with different NGOs. After years of “trying and trying,” he managed to use his contacts with the first NGO to enroll in evening classes for an HIV/AIDS counseling course, gain a certificate, and secure a paid (albeit time-limited) job.

These stories of relative success were unusual. Few of the volunteers I knew realized their hopes of “moving ahead.” They spent months (and some even years) attaching themselves to NGOs and cultivating networks, but rarely did these efforts translate into employment. Pamela, for example, was an active member of several HIV support groups, had been to several “trainings,” gained certificates, and volunteered with many projects, but she had never gained any paid employment—perhaps because, unlike Rosalind and Omondi, she did not speak English and she lacked a “professional” look. Volunteering appears, then, to be less a road to success than a struggle back and forth. Even those who manage to gain employment are not secure, as their contracts are short term.

Even though volunteering is unreliable, and volunteers rarely “move ahead,” they still insist that they “learn a lot.” Volunteering rarely leads to the formal employment that is so eagerly sought after. Yet volunteers often talked about “developing myself” and “moving ahead.” Volunteering, they said, gave them access to new knowledge and skills, contacts and networks, and novel ways of seeing, speaking, acting, and moving in the city. They took pride in their certificates, which gave them a sense of agency and self-worth. Many insisted that their exposure to new knowledge and skills had “empowered” them (Prince 2013), opening up a sense of mobility and of having a future. “Look at me, I am an HIV graduate,” Pamela exclaimed as she showed me her shiny shoulder bag emblazoned with an NGO’s logo and containing a home-based care kit, “and people think I am going to America!” While her actual trajectory remained more modest, she enjoyed a sense of connection to important organizations and their global networks.

A Working Identity

Given that success is so rare, the hope that volunteers project is striking. Indeed, success may lie less in the endpoint that is so rarely reached (formal waged employment) than in the ability to cultivate a certain status and project an identity that others have to take seriously. For some, particularly those of the younger, more educated and aspirational generation, being a volunteer allows them to inhabit a “working identity.” This identity resides to a large extent in cultivating the “professional” look of a person who is educated and speaks English with ease, works in an office and not doing juakali work on the streets, wears smart clothes and carries a briefcase. Such a person has a certain authority and commands a certain respect. While the ability to cultivate a working identity depends on some prior social capital—speaking English and having high school education are both important—“trainings” also offer opportunities to cultivate a working habitus. Volunteering may confer access to the institutional environments in which one can cultivate such an identity, even if the other accoutrements of professional working life—such as a monthly salary—are absent. This is illustrated in the following story.

It was only after I had met Jomo several times that he admitted to me that he was a volunteer. In his early thirties, always immaculately dressed in pressed shirt, trousers, and polished shoes, he was the “director” of a youth group attached to a national NGO and had his own small office in the NGO’s headquarters near the city center. He was rarely there (the office was mostly used by members of the youth group who typed up their CVs on the old desktop computer). Instead, he spent his time attending meetings and workshops, conducting training sessions for youth groups, and meeting staff working for NGOs. Jomo had invited me to several training workshops and outreach activities of the group, but his revelation came only when, at his suggestion, we met at a cafe (one of Kisumu’s shiny new cafes catering to middle class and expatriate populations). “Did you know I am only a volunteer?” he said. He told me he had kept this a secret, fearful he would lose his authority among his youth group members. After almost two years in this position, during which he received at most KSh3,000 a month from the NGO (and often much less), and during which he had been promised repeatedly that he would eventually be employed, he was fed up. A few days earlier, the NGO’s manager (a man who had long supported Jomo) had told him that funds were scarce. Jomo was worried about his future. He was not yet married. His parents had died while he was still in secondary school and he felt responsible for his two younger sisters, who lived with an aunt and had both interrupted their schooling due to lack of fees. Volunteering had as yet “led nowhere” and he was getting increasingly frustrated.

Jomo’s story reveals the gray area between formal and informal labor, as development interventions intersect with informal economies and the struggle to make a livelihood. It also shows that not all volunteers are proud to be so, and some seek to manipulate the line between volunteer and professional. Their struggles to enact a professional identity underline the fact that volunteering is a performance in which dress and style are important. The struggle for such an identity is a double-edged sword, however, as being a “professional” also raises expectations among family members for financial support. Jomo’s relations with the NGO’s manager and with the youth group volunteers also underline the uncertainties suffusing volunteers’ relationships with staff who work for powerful institutions and their struggles to act as patrons themselves.

“Helping the Community” and “Developing Myself”

Volunteers, then, are people who are excluded from the world of formal work, professional identity, and economic stability, and some volunteers—particularly the younger, educated, and upwardly mobile generation—pursue volunteering because it brings them closer to this longed-for world of institutional work. However, volunteering is not only about pursuing a working identity and its associated social status. The rhetoric of compassion and care that is part of the “volunteer spirit,” of “helping the community” and “making a contribution,” is not merely performed; it is often deeply felt. Volunteers often spoke of turning their knowledge into useful action. For example, Pamela and MamaAtieno were typical of women who had struggled through stigma and rejection to make a new life of community involvement based on their experience of living with HIV. The younger volunteers had come of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic and lost parents or siblings to AIDS. Having lived through a time of silence and denial about the disease and of helplessness in the face of suffering, many felt empowered by the messages promoted by workshops and health projects. Recalling the death of her mother from what she suspected was AIDS, a young volunteer told me, “If only I had known then what I know now, I could have helped her.” Others talked of how their volunteering had given them not only knowledge about HIV but also, more importantly, a language with which to speak about it. Being able to speak and act, to be heard and recognized, to turn empathy into agency conjured a sense of empowerment, which contrasted with earlier experiences of helplessness.

Beyond their desires for employment, then, the volunteers were motivated by a sense of being able to contribute to something larger. However, they were uncertain about what this larger project could be. None of the volunteers mentioned the postindependence nationalist project of harambee. Instead of “developing the nation” they spoke of developing themselves. Self-development indexed the ability to gain the economic standing necessary to set up an independent household and to support one’s (extended) family (see Green Reference Green2000). In Kisumu, where NGOs are such prominent and powerful institutions, the best way to “develop oneself” was to get attached to an NGO. Development horizons were therefore narrowed to the individual and associated with the world of NGOs and their projects. Yet the search for self-development was not necessarily inward looking. Volunteers spoke eagerly about “helping the community” and “making Kenya a better place,” and many were proud of their contribution to, as one volunteer put it, “the future of our country.” Even on a more personal level, improving one’s situation implies improving the situation of others, since all the volunteers had family responsibilities—even the young volunteers were struggling to support their siblings’ education.

Yet while compassion, empathy, and care were emphasized in volunteer training, and while the volunteers were often motivated by goals of improving the life of others, these affective registers were often submerged by the need to market the self. As a volunteer HIV counselor told me, “It’s just about numbers receiving an HIV test, numbers counseled, and numbers on treatment now. It is not about having the heart for the work.” He described counseling as a “selling package,” orientated toward quantitative targets. “They want a target and you have to meet that target. So you are going there . . . not to reach those people, but as a career. Because if I meet that target, I will be given more money, and the organization will be happy with me.”

Tensions and Conflicts

The work that volunteers do is not easy, and it is volunteers who are at the forefront of the tensions that emerge around development projects. Jomo was not the only volunteer who expressed frustration. Volunteers, along with those who are the targets of their interventions, often feel disappointed and let down by the instability of the projects they attach themselves to and the large gaps between expectations and realities. Expectations are fueled by the material resources that appear to circulate around projects, such as the per diems handed out at workshops, or the four-by-four vehicles emblazoned with NGO logos that traverse the city. People expect that these projects will produce something tangible. Yet many of the projects have less tangible aims: to disseminate knowledge about HIV or to persuade people to take a test. Such knowledge may be of little use if disclosing your HIV-positive identity means that your boyfriend or husband rejects you. It does not improve your material circumstances.

While some people appreciate the care demonstrated in home visits by volunteers, others find such visits cumbersome, inadequate, and intrusive. Some are suspicious of volunteers’ motivations and accuse them of “eating” the benefits they believe flow from NGO projects. As Pamela explained, “They feel that when you follow them to their house, there will be material benefits, and that you yourself gain from them. When they see you coming three times with empty hands, they feel you are wasting their time.” So while volunteering creates new networks and contacts, opens up new ways of seeing and acting and the hope of gaining new opportunities, it is also competitive, frustrating, and disappointing, and points to the limitations of a model of development that promotes care and intimate contact but little material change.

The Multiple Moral Horizons of Voluntary Labor

The case studies presented above underline the need to understand voluntary labor and volunteers’ motivations in relation to social, economic, and political contexts. First among these is the context of massive unemployment, the decline in rural and urban livelihoods, and the lack of opportunity for socioeconomic mobility faced by most of the population, in which voluntary labor gains meaning as a form of recognized and valued work. Opportunities for formal employment in Kenya are scarce, even if one has higher education, and volunteering provides an opportunity to attach oneself to NGOs and their projects, as well as to government institutions. As twentieth-century paths to social mobility and economic security through formal employment and state-led development have contracted, an attachment to NGOs through volunteering provides one way of picking through the debris of earlier dreams of mobility, of piecing together a livelihood and searching for a future (Schler et al. Reference Schler, Bethlehem and Sabar2009). Voluntary labor may not be paid, but it is valued and meaningful. It identifies the volunteer as an actor who has socially valuable knowledge and skills. Meanwhile, the moral salience of voluntary work as “helping the community” imparts a sense of moral purpose.

A second, related, point is that volunteering has become a site, or rather a pathway, of self-fashioning, in which individuals have the opportunity to create new identities through orientations to new knowledge and skills (see Nading Reference Nading2012; Prince Reference Prince2014). In local parlance, such a person is referred to as being “enlightened.” Volunteering opens up new encounters and exchanges, while volunteers learn new ways of speaking and moving. As they navigate new institutional landscapes and traverse familiar landscapes in new ways, they can position themselves as people who are “moving ahead.” This focus on identity speaks to continuities with the past: to attempts to shape colonial subjects through regimes of medical hygiene, health, and scientific knowledge, and to postcolonial nation-building projects, in which citizenship became tied to the gift of voluntary labor in “development.” In the present moment, however, pathways of self-fashioning through work appear particularly fraught and uncertain. “Working” identities have to be reworked, and one must continually re-orientate and reposition oneself in a flexible and shifting (development) economy (see Feher Reference Feher2009).

Third, voluntary labor provides volunteers with some form of attachment to the powerful institutions (both state institutions and nongovernmental organizations) that hold the key to personal mobility and to developmental futures. By seeking incorporation, even temporarily, within these institutions, volunteers hope to become part of a forward movement that will take them somewhere. Such opportunities are important in a political context in which the state is seen as disengaged and uninterested yet powerful, and in which citizenship is rarely articulated and realized in the form of formal rights and entitlements (Mamdani Reference Mamdani1996; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2011). To become “part of the project” of development (Mains Reference Mains2012:17), people need to actively engage powerful institutions (state and nonstate) and their control over resources and opportunities, and in doing so, they cultivate personal relationships with potential patrons and the institutions they represent.^{Footnote 13} Volunteers seek out relations with the staff of institutions, as these relations open fields of recognition and mutual obligation.^{Footnote 14} As they move between projects and the communities they target, volunteers gain visibility and insert themselves within networks of patronage and care. They do this by presenting themselves not as passive recipients, but as people with skills to offer. Still, such attachments are uncertain. Voluntary work is dependent not only on the cultivation of personal relationships and social networks but also on the availability of projects, which are themselves dependent on donor funding cycles and flows.

The question remains whether volunteering provides people with a sense of being part of a larger societal project. Ferguson argues that the search for dependency is an agentive mode through which dispossessed or unemployed people, finding themselves as “surplus” and without value (see Li Reference Li2010), seek attachment, recognition, and care from more powerful institutions or individuals. However, his material does not include the desires of African citizens to contribute to developmental futures and civic collectives. Volunteering is not only about “declaring dependence.” It indicates a desire not only to gain access to resources and forms of care, but also to participate in a future. Moreover, volunteers present themselves not only as dependents but also as people with skills to offer in this progressive future. It is of course such desires that government and NGO staff encourage when they speak of volunteers’ altruistic spirit and sense of community. Yet by placing the emphasis on the voluntary spirit, these institutions abrogate their own responsibilities to provide necessary and sustained forms of attachment, belonging, and care, which could provide a more substantial grounding for civic commitment and participation.

Like participation in development more broadly, then, volunteering is infused with “multiple moral horizons” (Pandian Reference Pandian2008:160; see also Bornstein Reference Bornstein2003), which defeat simple categorizations and judgments. Part performative, affective, and aesthetic, volunteering is pleasurable, opening up a sense of agency, responsibility, and participation, and a connection to wider horizons. Volunteering has many meanings for those who enact it, from making some form of income to the pleasure of gaining knowledge, mobility, and social recognition (see Swidler & Watkins Reference Swidler and Watkins2009; Meinert Reference Meinert and Geissler2011; Maes Reference Maes2012; Nading Reference Nading2012, Reference Nading2013; Maes & Kalofonos Reference Maes and Kalofonos2013).^{Footnote 15}

However, positioned as it is in a gray space between formal and informal work, between paid and unpaid labor, and between community development, collective futures, and individual self-fashioning, voluntary labor is also riddled with ambiguities and contradictions. While volunteers in Kisumu seek incorporation into institutions they hope will take them forward or move them ahead, what they are often left with are short-term attachments, contacts, exchanges, and encounters, as people and projects continue to circulate through the city. Voluntary labor and volunteering emerge, then, as significant sites of struggle over livelihoods and futures, moral personhood and community, and broader issues of social value, recognition, and care.