Clear financial structure

Transparent volunteering abroad is what Volunteer Abroad Alliance stands for. No fiddling with percent or pie charts at Volunteer Abroad Alliance. All numbers end directly where they belong.

Do you think it is logical that you pay the costs associated with your stay to an intermediary? We certainly do not, therefore you pay for your accommodation and all possible costs related to your stay directly at your destination to the person who’s taking care of this.

Housing & Meals

Volunteering abroad comes at a cost and it is not the intention that the community you will help have to pay for it. If there were sufficient budgets to cover these costs, we would spend this on local employees who understand he local culture and daily customs.

Did you know that you pay these costs directly on site to the people who organize your stay. That way you are 100% sure that your contribution ends up where it belongs and not in the hands of some intermediate station.

The costs for housing differ from country to country and from project to project. Where you may have a hot water shower and western toilet in a single room at one destination, you may stay in a group bedroom with shared sanitary basic facilities at another destination.

Each stay has its own charm, but does affect the accommodation costs. On the information page of each destination you will learn more about the type of stay and the associated accommodation costs that you logically pay on site.

Connection fee

We want to ensure that there is a sufficient influx of volunteers to keep each project viable, after all, many projects require continuity of volunteers to make the project successful or to create sufficient impact.

Unfortunately marketing costs and looking for volunteers a lot of money. We do not receive subsidies for our volunteer work and all budgets that our organizations collection during fundraising campaigns are used to develop projects in the south for the benefit of the local population and we therefore do not want to address them for marketing campaigns.

The membership fee serves to cover the costs of our volunteer platform. We ask each participant for a one-time contribution of €130. This is only a one-time contribution when volunteering for the first time and only after you have been accepted. After payment of this contribution, you can do unlimited volunteer work in the future at any project (if there is availability and you meet the requirements of course).

As soon as you are connected, we will inform you as soon as new projects are added to our alliance.

You get your own personal webpage where you can write everything about your experiences abroad and in that way keep the home front informed about your adventure abroad.

What is your connection fee used for?

Despite our good intentions, we also have official obligations. We then use the balance for:

1. Annual costs for the management of our platform such as management of the registration database, website, administration…. We try to keep these costs to a minimum, but they must be covered. We have a beautiful website that needs to be maintained and on which all information regarding our programs and our organization must be kept up-to-date.
2. Promotion costs money and we want to make ourselves as visible as possible in the streets in order to find enough volunteers for each project. This contribution is therefore also used for promotions on various media, printed matter, but also the presence at trade fairs & network events.
3. We are also only volunteers and are committed to our projects, but also spend a lot of time in your preparation. In the past we had volunteers who did not show up, which is very disruptive to our team and the local communities we support. We also see this contribution as a form of guarantee that you actually fulfill your commitment.

Registered NPO

We are registered as a Non-Profit Association and published under Belgian law under number 0639.967.396. Like any other non-profit association, we submit our annual accounts to the Enterprise Court every year.

Want to volunteer elsewhere?

We have no problem with you volunteering elsewhere. On the contrary, it is our mission to convince as many people as possible to get involved in development cooperation.

Make sure that you include the following points of attention in your evaluation of the organization you want to work with:

• Say that you want to pay for the accommodation on the spot.
• If you are unable to pay for the accommodation on site due to organizational circumstances, always ask for proof of payment. In this case, also ask the organizer of your stay (wherever this is) how much he/she has received.