On the BOND (British Overseas NGOs for Development) website, there is an article by Adam Davies and Tom Allen discussing what they see as the curse of unpaid internships:

These days, unpaid internships are a well-established way, indeed perhaps the only way, to start a career in development. The deal is that you work for nothing - or for a pittance - for six months or so, or however long it takes for someone to employ you properly and pay you.

Today's young graduates are often stuck in a classic Catch 22 situation: they need experience to get a job (since most international NGOs will not hire graduates without work experience), but they have no way of getting it without volunteering to work for free.

We get many applications for unpaid internships here at the Institute from recent graduates. I would be wary of us taking on someone in that stage of life who wants to work for free. Graduates come across as unimpressive if, having entered the big wide world of work, they are looking to sell their labour for free. If they need internship experience after university, it begs the question of why their CVs are so weak up to that point.

It is different with full-time students who have (admittedly modest) funding and are looking to do something for a day or two a week that strengthens their CV and also helps them support something they believe in. And of course, it’s different also with people who have other jobs and choose to support an organisation as a part time thing.

If I try and put myself in the shoes of someone in charge of hiring graduates at, say, Amnesty International, what would I think? I’d think that the ideal person to hire for a paid position is someone who as a first year student joined the Amnesty International Society at their university, worked their way up to being its head, moved heaven and earth to raise the money for a summer holiday trip to work with a pro-democracy group in a country with poor human rights, and made a real success of it and made lots of friends within the Amnesty head office. Perhaps I have the wrong idea, but I doubt I would have any problems hiring that person on a salary straight out of university.