This dissertation is composed of four papers. It builds on the postcolonial and post-development theories to provide a critical and a multifaceted approach to understand volunteer tourism as a poverty business. Using an extended case methodology, I held an ethnographic study in an orphanage in Nepal. The first paper I explain how volunteer tourism is a cooptation of the development agenda serving capitalist goals. The second paper builds on the approaches of the society of individuals to analyze the volunteer's perspective. In the third paper, I mobilize the concept of infrapoltics to show how Nepalese engage in a dialectical tension between compliance and resistance in their relationship with volunteers. Finally, the last paper uses the actor-network theory to highlight the role of material poverty in shaping the volunteer tourism experience, both for host and guest.