In 1997 I travelled in the Philippines with Voluntary Service Overseas, on a trip designed to use its then president, the actor Richard Wilson some coverage for this important charity.

Britain's curmudgeon-in-chief sees volunteers bringing middle class values to the poor world....

Richard Wilson, actor and Labour-luvvie, was dressed in surprisingly jolly resort gear as he squatted cheerfully on a low stool and played a blow-torch on a wicker basket in a back street of Manilla. "Am I doing this about right?", he inquired benignly of Kate Knight, 30-something craft specialist and Voluntary Service Overseas volunteer. Wilson was VSO's Ambassador for 1997, and his visit to the Philippines - much filmed and photographed - was intended as a warm-up act for the charity's 40 anniversary in 1998.

Wilson's portrayal of Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave has become a beacon of curmudgeonly probity, whereas throughout his trip, unless very travelled-out, Wilson displayed the British qualities of generalised kindliness and a certain waspishness. He is, at least in real life, the volunteer-personified: Rector of Glasgow University, trustee of Oxfam.

VSO is a trusted but rather silent service. It is held in much affection by its past alumni, amongst them high-flyers such as James Lowden, CEO of Blue Circle and David Allen of DHL. But it is barely known in the wider world. Hence Wilson's visit to some of VSO's current workers in the Philippines: as well as Kate, these included her fellow Britons, Stuart Green and Simon Taylor, and a Dutchwoman, Elles Santegoets.

The quartet share a good deal. They are all do-gooders, and will not relish being so called. Their work also proclaims Western values, and - the last people on earth to be triumphalist - they might dislike being reminded of that even more. Most of VSO's money comes from the official British aid budget, which is increasingly devoted to helping countries develop good government, including informal democracy and what's universally known as "civic society". VSO is an ideal vehicle for the latter bits of this policy, because it is an NGO (Non Governmental Organisation) helping burgeoning NGOs abroad.

VSO's nearly-2000 volunteers tend to be in mid-career, professional, and adventurous. Kate, for instance, is a designer who got a taste for such work whilst visiting a friend in the far east. She is in the Philippines' traffic-choked capital helping crafts workers realise that the Western market for cane thingummies of every sort is capricious. Very tactfully, she tells them to have more confidence in their work, and to keep the changes coming as well. It's a difficult pair of messages: "express yourself" and "respond to the market" are old opposites.

Kate dislikes anything like cultural imperialism, and that partly explains the seriousness with which she suggests: "I'm thinking of having a T-shirt printed which says, 'I'm not a bloody missionary'", and then quickly remembers to add that there's nothing wrong with missionaries. Something profound moves mature people to volunteer and something of the missionary desire to self-abnegate must surely come into it. Elles was recruited through VSO's Dutch offshoot (Canada and Portugal are also good sources for recruits). She, too, eschews any religious metaphor when she seeks to explain why she should give up working with prostitutes in Holland in order to work with GROs (Guest Relations Officers, or sex workers) in Davao, the second city of the Philippines. "It's like there's this little empty space that you want to fill up", she says simply, "It's as though I have found the last missing piece of my life". The volunteers all insist that self-denial is not the point, but resist, too, the idea that they are on an ego-trip. And they can get into a muddle about the value of what they offer. If they can't teach or help, why bother? If they can: how to avoid the charge of arrogance?

Kate says she has found "power" in the Philippines: she is influencing the work of thousands, and reckons it would be cowardly not to admit to enjoying it. Elles makes almost the opposite case. She admits that most people at her stage in life - the late 40s -would be working on a larger scale, perhaps as a policy-maker amongst her colleagues at home. "Let them do it", she says. "This is how I want to work".

According to Fiona Lewis, VSO's head of placements, "We send volunteers in health, community development, lawyers, graphic designers, but over the last two years there's been a demand for people who are qualified and experienced. Years ago, say within education, volunteers could go overseas who weren't qualified teachers. Now, as a broad generalisation, we provide skills which cannot be found in-country. So we don't just send foresters but forestry lecturers, not just nurses but nurse tutors, and increasingly in specialised disciplines: neo-natal nurses, say."

These new needs make finding volunteers more difficult. VSO needs people who are in mid-career, at the very stage in their lives when they are likely to be engaged with the greasy pole, or with making their own families. The average age of volunteers is 34, but there are surprisingly few 34 year olds amongst them: older and younger people predominate. Perhaps if more firms made it clear that they value VSO time on a candidate's or employee's CV that could begin usefully to change.

VSO workers need to develop skills which would most likely be useful in commercial management. Beyond being able to work unsupervised for longish periods of time, they especially need to deal in skills-transfer and motivation. After all, they work with their partner NGOs for only two years: in that time they need to build something which will outlive their stay. "I'm working with the Philippines Rural Reconstruction Movement", Simon says. "I have a local colleague who's been working with me and can carry on". The most hippy of the four, he might recoil the most from the assertion that he is doing what the white person does best. But it's true for all that.

Along with the introduction of micro-machines which use streams to generate electricity or to grind rice, he is a professional attendant to the birth of a new sort of leadership amongst the peasants. If he does not transfer the right habits and enthusiasm to others, the machines he leaves behind are bound to break and rust through neglect, as does most of the kit the rich world has ever given to the poor.

"It's leadership that counts", says Stewart Green, as he seeks to explain why one small village on one tiny island in the South China Sea became minded to halt over-exploitation of its coastal seas by its own inhabitants and marauders from further afield. A local man, better educated than most, and a lawyer fed up with city life, combined to energise the fishermen's co-operative. They found support in a local mayor who'd been a policeman and doesn't like lawlessness on his patch. The men conducted a war on illegal fishing and the catches are slowly returning. "We wanted someone like Simon: he's white, and technically advanced, and people listen to him", says one of the village leaders. The good sense and effectiveness of the local leaders is powerfully confirmed in the eyes of their sceptical fellows by Simon's endorsement of their work.

Decency is being spread. VSO instinctively proclaims that its workers must respect the values of the communities in which it works. Actually, it's usually the absence of anything usefully communal which is the trouble in poor places. And it is the emergence of a few impatient busy-bodies which begins the recovery of societies whose old glue of shame - the oldest of the social disciplines - has recently weakened.

Some wider sense of enlightened self-interest has to be put in place in poor and developing countries. It is coming most clearly in the emergence of a new cut-price middle class - a micro-middle class. In the rice terraces, it's a local preacher who turns up when others flag in helping Simon build a rice mill. It's a teacher who owns a tiny hotel who, with his pupils, planted the trees which may help save the mountainside watershed whose recent desiccation threatens the rice terraces below. The teacher's wife is planning to take over as village mayor and press the laggards around her into action.

So the interesting thing about VSO people is that the product of their work is not merely a basket, or a mill or a fish, or even a prostitute free of sexually-transmitted disease. It's a strengthened local institution which counts. Each VSO worker is asked for and half paid for by a local non-government organisation. The local NGO knows it hasn't got these people for long and must make them redundant.

NGOs are the cement of the emerging informal democracy in the poor world. They are the chief vehicle of the new middle class. Civil society, Burke's "little battalions", makes and is the product of this class, entry to which is getting easier as education, radio and the press become more available, and often more free. In poor countries, the micro-middle class and their clubs, activism and complaints will often arrive and thrive long before multi-party democracy.

This is the work the VSO people are really about.

Oddly, they might be argued to be fostering a process which Empire, where it was benign, did not quite dare to declare as an aim. And where Empire was less virtuous, it did not fancy empowering the locals.

VSO workers might resist the idea, but they are often revisiting the old Empire, and planting the ideal of the European middle class, and arguably its best exemplar, the British middle class, amongst people who might otherwise make the mistake of thinking life was just about making money and insulating oneself from the nastiness about. Victor Meldrew would probably approve: his is a battle against the getting and spending, and the littering, Yahoos he sees about him.

Under his carapace, there might even be a VSO type. If there is, he could be very useful. Do-gooders of whatever motivation, please step forward: do-gooders just like you in the Third World need a helping hand.