Please click here to view the first of many documentaries from the Love to Africa expeditions. 

The following article was written by Raffaella Delle Donne for Cape Town Live (www.capetownlive.co.za) in November 2007:

Love to Africa

The first time I came across the term voluntourism was when I met two high-school teachers from Canada who were staying in a backpacker where a friend of mine works. Keen to do some volunteer work as part of their holiday in sunny SA, the pair made contact with a number of volunteer travel organisations. To their dismay, they discovered that they could expect to pay anything up to R36 000 for a few weeks of stroking leopards or hugging poor, starving children in Africa. Move over Deborah Patten - I decided it was time I did some of my own investigative research into the industry. A quick surf on the net revealed that outside of South Africa, the voluntourism industry is highly controversial, so much so that even Time Magazine ran an article with the headline: ?Vacationing like Brangelina?. As the majority of these organisations and travel companies are based in affluent countries, its hard not to see this profit-driven industry as a new form of colonialism. But not long after I published an article about voluntourists in the Argus, I came across a home-grown initiative called ?Love to Africa? which is aiming to create a social tourism network from Cape to Cairo. Essentially what this means is that the ?compassionate adventurer? (Rikus Nieuwenhuis, Love to Africa?s project manager prefers this term to voluntourists) can travel a volunteer route offering services to various community projects throughout the continent. ?There are a lot of poverty issues in Africa and NGO?s don?t want to connect. If we are able to profile and link the various projects we can maximise resources?, says Nigerian-born Yewande Ogunnubi who has worked with many NGOs and is the field specialist for Love to Africa. What makes Love to Africa different from volunteer travel organisations which for the most part, offer little more than a package holiday with a week of, as Rikus puts it, ?squatting horse-flies away in Kenya?, is that it is a non-profit venture and there is a strong emphasis on sustainable community development. ?We see love in terms of discovering how to help yourself with limited resources and it has to be reciprocal. The volunteers have to gain something also, there?s a lot of skills that local communities can share with volunteers?, says Yewande. For the first expedition, Love to Africa has teamed up with a group of 20-somethings who share a similar vision. The team, calling themselves ?Doing it for Africa?, will embark on the first stage of mapping out the trans-African volunteer route that Love to Africa want to establish. On their travels, the team will assist Love to Africa by gathering information about communities and NGOs that potentially could form part of the volunteer network. The ?Doing it for Africa? boys will be setting off in February and if you want to follow their adventures make Love to Africa your homepage (www.lovetoafrica.co.za).         

The Getaway magazine will feauture Love to Africa's pioneer expedition, Doing it for Africa  in the January 2008 adventure edition.

You can also read live expedition blogs on www.getawaytoafrica.com