> Also, consider the money aspect: each team member probably paid around $2000 - $5000 for the whole trip. What if that money had gone directly to the project?

> Also, consider the money aspect: each team member probably paid around $2000 - $5000 for the whole trip. What if that money had gone directly to the project? I think that's really the main point here. For example I'm familiar with Morocco, a country with significant unemployment issues even for those who are well educated. You can hire a worker there for $10 to do manual labor for an entire day of 10 hours of work (pretty insane). So this notion that $3000 goes towards 6 days of work for 5 hours of work each day, just makes no financial sense. Instead of paying $30 for 30 hours of labor from someone who has experience in e.g. construction, we're seeing two orders of magnitude, $3000, spent on an equivalent amount of hours to a person without experience in construction. You might as well take 1% of your budget, pay a local worker and just go on a holiday and you'd not only contribute as many hours, but those hours are more effective, you're also creating a local job, local income and tax revenues. (well the latter might be a bit optimistic seeing as taxation either isn't enforced, or voided for low-income groups, but you get the point). Or hell, take 5% of the budget. I tried to persuade my girlfriend when she left for India on a similar project last summer to do something else. At least that was a 3 month project and she did quite a bit of teaching and was able to do a bit of knowledge transfer. I think that makes the most sense though, knowledge transfer, i.e. an engineer or a doctor who teaches engineering or health practices in places where there's knowledge deficiencies. There's quite a bit of that going on, it's also far from without flaws but it feels much more structural. Engineers without borders has been pretty transparent about their failures in the past while not giving up. Almost anything else and you're really just overpaying rich people.