There is a question that has started to precede almost every invitation to a youth engagement programme in Dhaka: venue kothay, TA/DA kotu? Where is it, and what does it pay?
It is asked casually, almost automatically, before anyone asks what the programme is actually about. And it should give us pause — not because the question is unreasonable, but because of how quickly it has become the first question, rather than one of the last.
By the international definition used by the ILO and endorsed at the UN level, volunteering rests on three simple pillars: it is undertaken freely, without coercion; it is unpaid, beyond the reimbursement of direct costs; and it is done for the benefit of someone other than the volunteer. Nothing about that definition has changed. What has changed, at least in parts of Bangladesh’s youth development ecosystem, is how loosely the word is now applied to activities that no longer resemble it.
A Familiar Monthly Rhythm
Spend a few months following youth capacity-building programmes in Dhaka and a pattern starts to emerge. In the first week of the month, a residential training convenes at a resort on the outskirts of the city — three or four days, full board, a per-diem attached. Midway through the month, a similar programme runs somewhere outside Dhaka, often justified as “field exposure.” By month’s end, the circuit returns to a three- or five-star hotel in the city for a day-long series of morning, afternoon, and evening sessions.
The programmes differ in name — leadership training, climate fellowship, youth dialogue — but the venues repeat, the format repeats, and increasingly, the faces repeat.
This is the detail worth sitting with. Training, by definition, is meant to produce change: a participant who has been trained should need that same training less the next time around. Yet the same young people surface across programme after programme, organisation after organisation, often within the same month. If a single well-designed programme were doing its job, why would the same cohort need to keep returning?
There are two possible explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is that these trainings are not producing durable change, so organisations quietly keep drawing on the same reliable, “programme-ready” pool of young people rather than investing in new ones. The second is that the invitation itself has become the reward — attending is the point, not what follows it.
Two Different Kinds of Volunteering
It is worth pausing here to draw a distinction, because it matters. As this piece is being written, floods in Feni, Chittagong, and Sylhet have displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Young volunteers are loading boats onto trucks, wading through waist-deep water to deliver relief, and working through the night in shelters — with no venue confirmation, no per-diem discussion, and no certainty about when the work will end. This is volunteering in its fullest, original sense: urgent, unpaid, and entirely in service of someone else’s crisis.
That this instinct still runs so deep in the country is, in fact, the strongest evidence against cynicism. The problem this piece is raising is not that young people in Bangladesh have stopped wanting to give their time freely. It is that a separate, parallel system — the project-driven capacity-building circuit — has borrowed the language of that same instinct and attached it to something structurally different: scheduled, compensated, resort-based engagement. The two should not be confused, and conflating them does a disservice to both. The urgency of a flood response and the routine of a quarterly training are not the same category of activity, even when both are filed under “volunteering” in a project report.
The Allowance Is Not the Problem
None of this is an argument against paying young people for their time. Travel costs money. A day spent in a training hall is a day not spent earning, studying, or caregiving. For a student or an early-career professional without institutional backing, a stipend can be the only thing that makes participation possible at all. That is a legitimate and necessary form of support, not a corruption of anything.
The concern lies elsewhere: in what happens when payment stops being a support mechanism and becomes the primary basis on which a young person decides whether a cause is worth showing up for. When venue and allowance are the first questions asked — ahead of what the programme hopes to achieve, or who it hopes to reach — something has quietly shifted in how young people are relating to the work itself. Attendance has started to function less like commitment and more like a transaction, and the sector has, in many cases, structured itself in exactly the way that produces that outcome.
Where the Pressure Comes From
This shift is rarely a decision made by any single organisation acting in bad faith. It is, more often, a structural by-product of how development projects are designed. Most funded projects carry a youth engagement or capacity-building component, because donors expect one and log-frames require one. Deliverables are counted in attendance sheets, participant numbers, and completion certificates. Under that kind of pressure, recruiting a known, dependable group of young people — people who will show up, sit through the sessions, and fill in the post-training evaluation form correctly — is simply more efficient than building a genuinely new volunteer base from the ground up.
The result is an unintended feedback loop. Organisations return to familiar names because they are reliable. Familiar names become professionalised participants because the invitations keep coming. And the language used to describe the whole arrangement — “volunteering,” “youth engagement,” “capacity building” — stays fixed even as the substance underneath it drifts further from what those words are supposed to mean.
What This Is Not Saying
It is worth being explicit about what this argument does not claim. It does not claim that the international definition of volunteering has formally changed — it has not. It does not claim that paying young people for their participation is inherently wrong, or that the young people who ask about allowances before committing are behaving unreasonably in a country where opportunity is unevenly distributed. And it is not a case against capacity-building programmes themselves, many of which are well designed and genuinely transformative.
The claim is narrower and, hopefully, more useful: that a widening number of paid, project-driven engagement activities are being labelled “volunteering” when they no longer meet even a loose version of that definition, and that this labelling matters, because it obscures a set of questions the sector should be asking about itself.
Questions Worth Asking
Before the next residential training is scheduled, a few questions might be worth sitting with. Is this programme designed to build a new volunteer base, or to reconvene an existing one? If a stipend is necessary — and often it is — would the programme be more honest calling itself a fellowship or an engagement contract rather than volunteering? And when the same cohort appears at the third programme of the month, is that a sign of sustained commitment, or a sign that the sector has not yet worked out how to reach anyone else?
None of these questions have easy answers. But the alternative — continuing to use the word “volunteering” for something that increasingly runs on venue and per-diem — risks hollowing out a concept the sector still relies on rhetorically, even as it quietly stops practising it.
There is a question that has started to precede almost every invitation to a youth engagement programme in Dhaka: venue kothay, TA/DA kotu? Where is it, and what does it pay?
It is asked casually, almost automatically, before anyone asks what the programme is actually about. And it should give us pause — not because the question is unreasonable, but because of how quickly it has become the first question, rather than one of the last.
By the international definition used by the ILO and endorsed at the UN level, volunteering rests on three simple pillars: it is undertaken freely, without coercion; it is unpaid, beyond the reimbursement of direct costs; and it is done for the benefit of someone other than the volunteer. Nothing about that definition has changed. What has changed, at least in parts of Bangladesh’s youth development ecosystem, is how loosely the word is now applied to activities that no longer resemble it.
A Familiar Monthly Rhythm
Spend a few months following youth capacity-building programmes in Dhaka and a pattern starts to emerge. In the first week of the month, a residential training convenes at a resort on the outskirts of the city — three or four days, full board, a per-diem attached. Midway through the month, a similar programme runs somewhere outside Dhaka, often justified as “field exposure.” By month’s end, the circuit returns to a three- or five-star hotel in the city for a day-long series of morning, afternoon, and evening sessions.
The programmes differ in name — leadership training, climate fellowship, youth dialogue — but the venues repeat, the format repeats, and increasingly, the faces repeat.
This is the detail worth sitting with. Training, by definition, is meant to produce change: a participant who has been trained should need that same training less the next time around. Yet the same young people surface across programme after programme, organisation after organisation, often within the same month. If a single well-designed programme were doing its job, why would the same cohort need to keep returning?
There are two possible explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is that these trainings are not producing durable change, so organisations quietly keep drawing on the same reliable, “programme-ready” pool of young people rather than investing in new ones. The second is that the invitation itself has become the reward — attending is the point, not what follows it.
Two Different Kinds of Volunteering
It is worth pausing here to draw a distinction, because it matters. As this piece is being written, floods in Feni, Chittagong, and Sylhet have displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Young volunteers are loading boats onto trucks, wading through waist-deep water to deliver relief, and working through the night in shelters — with no venue confirmation, no per-diem discussion, and no certainty about when the work will end. This is volunteering in its fullest, original sense: urgent, unpaid, and entirely in service of someone else’s crisis.
That this instinct still runs so deep in the country is, in fact, the strongest evidence against cynicism. The problem this piece is raising is not that young people in Bangladesh have stopped wanting to give their time freely. It is that a separate, parallel system — the project-driven capacity-building circuit — has borrowed the language of that same instinct and attached it to something structurally different: scheduled, compensated, resort-based engagement. The two should not be confused, and conflating them does a disservice to both. The urgency of a flood response and the routine of a quarterly training are not the same category of activity, even when both are filed under “volunteering” in a project report.
The Allowance Is Not the Problem
None of this is an argument against paying young people for their time. Travel costs money. A day spent in a training hall is a day not spent earning, studying, or caregiving. For a student or an early-career professional without institutional backing, a stipend can be the only thing that makes participation possible at all. That is a legitimate and necessary form of support, not a corruption of anything.
The concern lies elsewhere: in what happens when payment stops being a support mechanism and becomes the primary basis on which a young person decides whether a cause is worth showing up for. When venue and allowance are the first questions asked — ahead of what the programme hopes to achieve, or who it hopes to reach — something has quietly shifted in how young people are relating to the work itself. Attendance has started to function less like commitment and more like a transaction, and the sector has, in many cases, structured itself in exactly the way that produces that outcome.
Where the Pressure Comes From
This shift is rarely a decision made by any single organisation acting in bad faith. It is, more often, a structural by-product of how development projects are designed. Most funded projects carry a youth engagement or capacity-building component, because donors expect one and log-frames require one. Deliverables are counted in attendance sheets, participant numbers, and completion certificates. Under that kind of pressure, recruiting a known, dependable group of young people — people who will show up, sit through the sessions, and fill in the post-training evaluation form correctly — is simply more efficient than building a genuinely new volunteer base from the ground up.
The result is an unintended feedback loop. Organisations return to familiar names because they are reliable. Familiar names become professionalised participants because the invitations keep coming. And the language used to describe the whole arrangement — “volunteering,” “youth engagement,” “capacity building” — stays fixed even as the substance underneath it drifts further from what those words are supposed to mean.
What This Is Not Saying
It is worth being explicit about what this argument does not claim. It does not claim that the international definition of volunteering has formally changed — it has not. It does not claim that paying young people for their participation is inherently wrong, or that the young people who ask about allowances before committing are behaving unreasonably in a country where opportunity is unevenly distributed. And it is not a case against capacity-building programmes themselves, many of which are well designed and genuinely transformative.
The claim is narrower and, hopefully, more useful: that a widening number of paid, project-driven engagement activities are being labelled “volunteering” when they no longer meet even a loose version of that definition, and that this labelling matters, because it obscures a set of questions the sector should be asking about itself.
Questions Worth Asking
Before the next residential training is scheduled, a few questions might be worth sitting with. Is this programme designed to build a new volunteer base, or to reconvene an existing one? If a stipend is necessary — and often it is — would the programme be more honest calling itself a fellowship or an engagement contract rather than volunteering? And when the same cohort appears at the third programme of the month, is that a sign of sustained commitment, or a sign that the sector has not yet worked out how to reach anyone else?
None of these questions have easy answers. But the alternative — continuing to use the word “volunteering” for something that increasingly runs on venue and per-diem — risks hollowing out a concept the sector still relies on rhetorically, even as it quietly stops practising it.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.