This article traces how scarcities characteristic of health systems in low-income countries (LICs), and increasing popular interest in Global Health, have inadvertently contributed to the popularisation of a specific Global Health business: international clinical volunteering through private volunteer placement organisations (VPOs). VPOs market neglected health facilities as sites where foreigners can 'make a difference', regardless of their skill set. Drawing on online investigation and ethnographic research in Tanzania over four field seasons from 2011 to 2015, including qualitative interviews with 41 foreign volunteers and 90 Tanzanian health workers, this article offers a postcolonial analysis of VPO marketing and volunteer action in health facilities of LICs. Two prevalent postcolonial racialised tropes inform both VPO marketing and foreign volunteers' discourses and practices in Tanzania. The first trope discounts Tanzanian expertise in order to envision volunteers in expert roles despite lacking training, expertise, or contextual knowledge. The second trope envisions Tanzanian patients as so impoverished that insufficiently trained volunteer help is 'better than nothing at all'. These two postcolonial racialised tropes inform the conceptual work undertaken by VPO marketing schemes and foreign volunteers in order to remake Tanzanian health professionals and patients into appropriate and justifiable sites for foreign volunteer intervention.

While free antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Tanzania has undeniably increased accessibility of services, the effects of ART programs as they are brought into existing health facilities are more ambiguous. As transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) establish clinics within government hospitals, we see a telling example of how NGOs are providing services from within the state. The conditions of NGO-operated clinics within government health facilities act as a daily reminder of the failures of the government to provide health workers with that to which they feel entitled: adequate pay, access to sophisticated technology, upgraded training, extra-duty allowances, and a professional working environment. At the same time, health personnel compete to position themselves in such a way to be able to make claims on the state through these NGO clinics, which is the only means available for them to access the very resources to which they feel entitled by their profession.

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