Savior Barbie may be a new name for you to hear, but trust me it’s worth learning about. Savior Barbie is an Instagram account dedicated to cleverly show what’s wrong with “voluntourism” in Africa.
In the satirical Instagram account, Barbie is in Africa running an NGO that provides drinking water to locals. The tagline for her organization goes by the motto “Harnessing broken white hearts to provide water to those in Africa, one tear at a time,” ironic, huh?
The account, created about a month ago by two 20-something white women who have worked in East Africa, already has almost 44,000 thousand followers. These 44,000 followers are no match for the 1.2m followers of the Sociality Barbie account, which likely inspired the creation of Savior Barbie. But however many followers this account has, it managed to join the grand tradition of making fun of Western volunteers on short term, ineffectual assignments in Africa.
The account even takes a dig at Taylor Swift, whose music video for “Wildest Dreams” was filmed in an African landscape, with few black characters.
Savior Barbie also highlights the key point that advocates and experts working in Africa have been observing for years – intentional, yet naive, volunteerism (or “voluntourism“) is just ineffective and actually harms the developing countries it’s meant to serve.
In fact, the damage can be depressing directly. Jacob Kushner, a journalist in East Africa, pointed out that while volunteers temporarily care for children who lost their parents to the virus, the children are left with attachment disorders and orphanages purposefully keep them in poor conditions to attract more volunteers.
