Volunteering and giving back

Swotah does not sell volunteer placements. Between 5% and 10% of the price of every trip we run already funds schooling for the children of porters and remote-village families, and 34 students are on scholarship because of it. If you want to contribute more, tell us the skill you have and the time you can give, and we will ask the communities we work with whether it is genuinely needed. Often the honest answer is that your money helps and your presence does not.

Where does your trip money already go?

The schooling deduction comes out of trip revenue rather than sitting as an optional donation at checkout, so every booking pays into it whether or not the traveller thinks about the subject. The 34 students currently on scholarship are funded from that line alone.

Each year's spending is published rather than summarised. The corporate social responsibility archive lists the scholarship rounds by year, including the 2025 round. Our responsible travel policy covers porter loads, wages and waste.

Why doesn't Swotah sell volunteer placements?

Because most of what the volunteer-travel market sells in Nepal either harms children or takes paid work from local people. A two-week placement would be easy revenue. It would also mean manufacturing a need the community never asked for.

Orphanage volunteering is the clearest case, and Nepal is one of the best-documented examples. In a 2021 study published in Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond, Martin Punaks and Samjyor Lama of Next Generation Nepal recorded 15,565 children in Nepali childcare homes before the COVID-19 pandemic and found up to 85% had living parents. Most children presented to foreign visitors as orphans are not orphans. Many were recruited out of poor rural districts on a promise of education, into institutions whose income depends on volunteers arriving.

The second problem has nothing to do with children. Unskilled volunteer labour displaces paid local labour. Writing for Bond, the UK network for international development organisations, Hayley Still put it simply in October 2025: volunteers taking roles that could be filled by paid staff undermine local economies. A visitor painting a village school is doing a local painter's paid work, more slowly.

There is a legal problem too. Nepal's immigration framework treats volunteering as work, so a tourist visa does not cover it, and any agency that tells you otherwise is unreliable on everything else.

What actually helps in rural Nepal?

Money attached to a named local budget line, a skill the community cannot source locally, and time measured in months rather than days. In that order.

Money comes first because it is the only contribution that converts directly into a salary. A teacher's wage, a school lunch budget, a scholarship covering uniform and exam fees decides whether a child attends, and none of it needs a foreigner present. Nepal's Act Relating to Children 2018 prioritises keeping children with their families and treats institutional care as temporary.

Skills come second, and only the scarce ones: a paediatric nurse, a structural engineer, a bookkeeper who can build an accounting system, a specialist teacher-trainer. Duration comes third, because it multiplies the first two. Better Care Network is blunt that a long stay on a bad project just extends the harm, but a scarce skill given over three months can train a local counterpart who continues it.

How do you check a volunteer programme before you pay?

Run these checks on any operator, including us, and walk away from anything that fails more than one. They are adapted from the guidance Better Care Network publishes for volunteers.

• Who defined the need? The community should have named the problem before the programme existed. If nobody can say who asked for this work, it was built to be sold.
• Would it be legal at home? If you could not teach a class or work unsupervised with children in your own country without a qualification and a background check, the same bar applies abroad.
• Where is the child protection policy? Ask for it as a document, with the screening process described. Refuse verbal assurances.
• Does the role displace a paid job? Ask in those words. A credible operator will say which tasks are reserved for paid local staff.
• What is the fee breakdown? Most of a placement fee should reach the community or the project itself. If nobody will put percentages in writing, assume the split is bad.
• How does the project end? A project with no exit plan is a dependency.
• What happens if you are not needed? An operator willing to say "not this time" to a paying customer is telling you the community's need outranks the sale.

How do you volunteer with Swotah?

By enquiry, not by booking a listed placement, because we keep no catalogue of them. The process takes time and sometimes ends in a no.

1. Tell us the skill and the time. What you are qualified to do, what you have done with it, and how many months you can give. "I want to help" is not something we can take to a village.
2. We ask the communities we work with. We know the schools and families in the villages along routes such as the Millennium Homestay Trek and the Khopra Ridge Community Trek. Your offer goes to them rather than being judged on their behalf.
3. We give you the honest answer. Frequently that answer is that the school needs a funded salary, not a visitor, and we will say so and point you at the scholarship fund instead.
4. If the role is real, the legal side comes first. The correct visa category and a registered local organisation, settled before you buy a flight.
5. We arrange the logistics around a trek. Transport, accommodation, permits and a guide are what we charge for. The contribution itself sits with the community organisation.

Send it through our contact page, addressed to the operations team. Expect questions back before you get an answer.

Nepal figures from Punaks and Lama, Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond, 2021; volunteering guidance from the Better Care Network and ReThink Orphanages coalition. Reviewed July 2026. Confirm visa rules with the Department of Immigration.