Mission

Africa Volunteer Corps is a service corps for Africans to do long-term volunteer work in African-initiated development projects. We train and place African university graduates at local, grassroots NGO’s in Africa to work for one year.

The goal of AVC is to harness the power of motivated, educated Africans and put it to use for locally-initiated development projects in Africa, opening doors for Africans to leverage their own resources and strengthening grassroots development efforts.

What We Do

We aim to foster a generation of Africans dedicated to development, empowered to decided what "development" means for them, and equipped with the tools to make it a reality. Our pilot program will be in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania and we expect to have our first volunteers on the ground by 2011.

Founder Caitlin Kelley came up with the idea for AVC while volunteering in Tanzania. She noticed that it took most of her fellow volunteers and her the majority of their stay in Tanzania to adjust to the enormous cultural differences which severely hindered any real progress.

During the same trip, Caitlin met many motivated locals who, with degrees in community development and social work and possessing cultural fluency, were more qualified to work for these same NGOs and yet were unable to find a job. So with the help of partner Jafari Msaki, she decided to create an organization to fill that gap.