Please note: The numbers in this blog posts are estimates, trying to illustrate a point. I am very willing to be corrected if I missed information or misused the Invisible Children financial report. I just wanted to give you a picture of my thoughts on their financial practices. Please let me know if I am seriously wrong on any of these points. I will make amends if I have missed something.
So where to next? Let’s go
to where most of you readers really want to go…
“Noelle,
you live in Uganda… what do you think of Invisible Children?“
In all honesty, I am not a fan.
I’ve met a few people who work with them, and they are nice human beings
who have hearts to help people… but the organization, not a fan. Why?
[Side note: Considering the
work that IC says they are doing, I have actually seen very little of them
around Kampala. I have only ever met 4
people in total who are working in any affiliation with IC, and I have never
seen their cars or anything around Kampala.
Maybe I am just in the wrong place and the wrong time for my Invisible
Children spotting… or maybe they are invisible.
Sorry, I just had to say it]
When you live here, you hear a lot of things. One of the things I have heard/been told by
several people is that Invisible Children is somewhat of a suitcase NGO…
meaning that there is a lot of cash being carried around and passed out, photos
being taken, videos shot…but that the work being done is not being done to the
extent it is claimed to be. Basically
the money is not all going in the right pots.
I did some research for someone who asked me about Invisible
Children before Kony 2012. When I looked
at their website and did a bit of digging I was shocked by one thing…. The
AMOUNTS of money. Before Kony 2012, the
Invisible Children web site was all about how much money they were raising to
rehabilitate schools and such… but the numbers didn’t make sense to me, who
lives here in Uganda for almost 2 years.
Something to keep in mind is that Uganda is, on different levels
of society, corrupt. There is a saying
(which Ugandans say regularly) that
Uganda is 85% Christian and 90% corrupt… no those are not real stats, but the
saying is to make a point. NGOs are
often taken advantage of, the quality of work is often very poor,
and materials
for building and other work can be taken for “other projects”, if you get
me.
[Note: Here is an article
by Michael Deibert about the current, political status of Uganda, in response
to Kony 2012: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-deibert/how-invisible-childrens-k_b_1334410.html?ref=world&ir=World … worth a read to get some information about
the political system and oppression here.
Let’s remember, things all over the world are NEVER simple. ]
In the halls of politics, bribes are a way to get things done. Once you start paying bribes, it is hard to
stop. It is easier just to pay someone
off to do something faster than to go through the right channels, and wait a
long time for things to get through the bureaucracy. The problem is that these are a few of the
channels down which Invisible Children’s money could well be going. (I
never said was, I said could)
Another thing to note is that in their financial report, they do
not list how salaries for their employees are listed… are they included in
administration? General? Or in the program costs? I am all for development practitioners
making a good, living wage. But there
seems to be enough money floating around Invisible Children for significantly
higher than a good, living wage to be earned.
Out of the kindness of my heart (haha), I have now downloaded the
2011 Invisible Children Financial statement… and took a good long look. (http://c2052482.r82.cf0.rackcdn.com/images/895/original/AR11_small_final2.pdf?1325722694)
First, a comment on their financial report. It is the sexiest financial report ever
written.
Photos, testimonies,
quotes, and histories decorate the 40 page, 7 MB document. As far as I can see, there are only about 3
pages of actual financial information… and they don’t even line up.
Let me crunch some numbers with you… we are only going to look at
a few of these, but I hope you get the picture.
(Note: The report lists
income and expense. However, one of the
problems is that there is a serious discripency in how much is coming in verses
how much they are spending on the program which the money was raised for. For example… the School 4 School revenue was
1.17 million USD… the expenditure was 696,000… where did the rest go? We’ll look at that one in a minute. )
Let’s look
at the Legacy Scholarship program:
According to the Invisible Children Critiques page (http://www.invisiblechildren.com/critiques.html)
they
have the following numbers of young people being supported by this
initiative.
Stats as of
December 2011:
- University students: 250
- Secondary students: 590 (currently recruiting additional students
The amount of
money, according to their fancy multicolor graphs, allocated for this project
in 2011 was 1,185,000 USD (rounded up)
Math time!
One year of University tuition, room, board, books, life expenses
for a student… can be about, for upper level courses, 6 million UGX per
year. That is a HIGH estimate… I would
say that in actuality it is more like 4-5 million… but let’s say 6 million ugx
per student, for one year.
250x6,000,000=1.5 billion UGX… is 625,000 USD (used the rate of
2400 UGX to 1 USD, which was roughly what it was most of the year 2011)
Now…secondary
school. The best, boarding secondary
schools in Uganda cost 1.8 million UGX per year (source: http://observer.ug/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12590%3Asecondary-school-teachers-decry-low-pay&catid=85%3Aeducation&Itemid=106
)
However,
in the North of Uganda is costs less than 1 million shillings per student, per
year. So we are going to be nice again,
and say that every student they are sponsoring is getting 1 million shillings
towards their education. (I did some
basic price and fact checking with some Ugandan friends, they agree with these
estimates)
590x1,000,000= 590,000,000 UGX…. Is 246,000 (rounded up, used the
rate of 2400 UGX to 1 USD, which was roughly what it was most of the year 2011)
TOTAL… for all their students to be living the good life, using
more money on their education than the many Ugandans… this project is spending
… wait for it…
871,000 US Dollars.
Wait. What? Sorry, that is an extra 314,00 USD… where is
it?
If they use that extra money on staff… they could pay 10 staff
members, 30,000 USD a year to work on this project… which only helps 840 people.
Let’s do another one, shall we?
School 4 School…. First off
they have 2 different numbers listed for these projects. Under the restricted revenue it’s list as
1,175,000 USD raised for this project(pg 34).
But in their nice multicolored grafts, they only list the expenditure amount
for the program at $696,000 (rounded down, pg 35).
But wait! On page 14, in
the sexy outline of the school 4 school program, the financial report of
Invisible children claims: “1,162
partner schools raise $1,144,174 for the 11 Ugandan Sister schools…” (the page next to it says it was 2,000
schools which helped…. I am so confused!!)
So we have 3 amounts… all distinctly different, which are supposed
to be designated for this program.
Let’s crunch these numbers….
According to Invisible Children they are using this money to help
11 schools in Uganda, both with rebuilding physical structures, latrines,
increase access to water, as well as teacher training and scholastic
materials. Great. Sounds good…
We are going to use the number 1,000,000 USD… because of the
conflict in numbers for the crunch.
GO! 1,000,000/ 11 schools =
$90,909 per school…. 218,181,600 UGX
(2400/1usd)
An important
note on this… these would not be private schools. They are already existing schools, which
Invisible Children are partnering with to rehabilitate. This means that the teacher’s salaries and
other administrative expenses would be covered by the attending children’s
yearly school fees as well as government salaries. Please
note that it never says that this program sponsors all the children to attend
school without paying fees… these children still have to pay to go to school. The report s simply says that this program is
“serving” 9,000 children.
So, they are not paying salaries, or for food or lodging for
students. And there is 218 MILLION shillings per school… per year.
They are building buildings… ok.
With decent builders, you should be able to build a school block (class rooms, or dorms) for 10,000-15,000 USD
(This is one point where I could be very wrong, but this is what I have
understood from collogues I have worked with… but this is for a BLOCK, not an individual classroom…a normal class
room could not cost more than 3-5,000 to build.).
So, they say they have built 36 new classrooms…. If it were
classroom blocks (more than 1) it would be 360,000-540,000 USD. But they say 36 classrooms. Singular classrooms?? If these are the Ritz Carlton of classrooms
in Northern Uganda… it should cost something like 180,000 USD for 36 normal
classrooms.
Refurbished Classrooms?
Let’s be super generous and say 1,000 USD per class room. How in the world paint, labor, desks, windows,
chalk boards and all that can come to 1,000 USD for a normal class room is
beyond me… perhaps they have smart boards.
But for math’s sake, we are
giving these classrooms 1,000 USD to be refurbished beautifully…
That’s only 17,000 USD.
Don’t get me started on how cheap teacher training, latrines,
boreholes (waterholes) and scholastic materials are… we’ll be generous again and say that they
could have spent up to 500,000 USD on those projects (this would mean that
every kids has super nice books, a ton of pencils, scissors, glue, a libraray, maybe
the teachers are going to a resort in Kenya for training and they would be some
extra nice latrines...) That would be 45,000 dollars, per school… yeah… No way.
[Side story: I once took a
trip to a very very rural school… in the middle of the bush of the far reaches
of Western Uganda. Their latrines were
falling apart. We discussed how much
money would be needed to build a latrine with a cement slab which had proper
drainage. They said it would cost
100,000 UGX, total. That is less than 50
USD. They are just as remote as Northern
Uganda, with equally as little access to roads and supplies. 50 dollars for a decent pit latrine for all
the kids at the school]
Sorry, back to the math…
200,000 USD (we’re being generous) for new classrooms
17,000 USD for beautiful new refurbished buildings
(haha) 500,000 USD for all
the things which cannot actually cost that much…
TOTAL SPENT: 717,000 USD.
We were working on the idea of them having 1,000,000 USD for this
program.. that’s another 283,000 USD.
Now, if the amount from the financial report on page 35 is
correct, 696,000… then it’s possible that it was all used for this
program. But in all honesty, these have
to be the nicest and best trained schools in all of Africa (exaggeration... but you get my point).
$500,000 USD on training, latrines, boreholes and materials would be
basically impossible to spend… and it
doesn’t even sponsor the student’s tuition!
So yes. All of these are very
rough estimates. But I guess what I am getting is at is that I
don’t find Invisible Children to be very forth coming with their financial
information. They seem to not worry too much about penny
pinching. .. money seems to just be flowing.
I guess it is somehow stimulating the Ugandan… maybe that is good?
This next
part is important…
If you look at the actual numbers of how many people they are
helping with the large amounts of money, it’s
actually not that many. For example, the “Mend” program boasts that
it supports 17 seamstresses… 17. It supports them? If they are seamstresses they should be making a sustainable income for
themselves after training… and there is 268,000 USD (rounded down) for this program (pg 35, financial
report). EXCUSE ME!?! That is 643 MILLION UGX. For 17 women?
Who now have a way of making money?
That is 37 million UGX, per woman… 15,000 USD a year. I don’t even make that.
Then if you look closely, IC is spending 30,000 USD on “Awareness
Products” for this specific project, MEND.
Are they buying these products and then giving them away? I don’t get this…
The other, real numbers,
of how many people they are assisting with their programs seem equally
disproportionate to me. The amount of
money we are talking here is very large.
If you work hard at it, things here don’t need to be expense. But that’s the thing, you have to be willing
to live with integrity, work hard to find good builders and contractors who are
trust worthy, and be willing to take the time it takes to get through the
systems. I think Invisible Children
wants quick results and beautiful photos… no matter how much it costs their
donors.
When you donate to an organization, it is important that you ask
questions. Know what they are doing with
your money… because it’s your money, and it should do good.
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