The contemporary world order leans heavily on volunteers. If often overlooked in sweeping discussions of capital flows and geopolitics, actual relations between people and places involve both material and imagined forms of voluntary action. Indeed, upon inspection, the figure of the volunteer appears increasingly vital to global governance and exchange. As this volume demonstrates, voluntary labour and associated sentiment play a particularly prominent role in Sub-Saharan Africa. Both national and international efforts to foster public health and economic development have repeatedly sought to inspire altruism and a sense of social solidarity as a means to mobilization. In the aftermath of European empire the voluntary actor could thus appear an heir to the anti-colonial nationalist and the earnest missionary alike, mediating strikingly disparate political visions, forms of expertise and conceptions of community. As a consequence it has grown hard to imagine social change without some appeal to civil society, as premised on national or global citizenship.

The case studies assembled in this volume underscore tensions running through this world of voluntary action. First and foremost, the degree to which individuals can separate labour from livelihood reveals stark inequalities between their economic positions, part of a larger fault line that limits efforts to promote solidarity across social divides. Simply put, who can afford to volunteer? The reality of unequal economies hits home whenever altruism stretches beyond a momentary gesture, and the ‘spirit of volunteerism’ clashes with material necessity as well as self-interest. From development projects in Lesotho to clinical trials in Zambia, moral sensibilities and social obligations mix uneasily, returning repeatedly to questions of payment. On top of economic inequality, the often fragmentary and unstable associations that connect non-profit ventures with political organization fail to gel into unified endeavour. Thus efforts to encourage community engagement in response to health threats such as HIV/AIDS or malaria encounter the problem of defining and stabilizing a shared conception of public good. Shifting focus to the exchanges and encounters engendered by voluntary action reveals other spheres of inequality, along with their political and economic constraints. Thus international volunteers played a role even in Tanzania's initial effort to achieve self-sufficiency in addition to independence. More recent efforts by clinical volunteers to ‘make a difference’ in resource-poor hospitals can ignore costs as well as benefits, even as they overshadow other discussion of the very inequities that make them possible.