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Sunday, March 11, 2012

Kony 2012: part 2 of 3... this is where it gets awkward for everyone


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.  

Where is all the money going?  I cannot donate to Invisible Children.

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