Author: Binu S. Thomas
Publication: Vijay Times (Bangalore)
Date: June 7, 2003
"So much good grows from sponsorship.
For a child - health, hope, friendship and confidence. For a sponsor -
joy, satisfaction and pride. Nothing can replace the importance of your
role as a sponsor! As you get to know your sponsored child through cards
and letters, you'll bring (and receive) such joy." -- Christian Childrens
Fund.
"For just 50p a day, you'll make
a real impact on the life of a child and their community. Your monthly
gifts will help local people plan and complete projects such as wells,
health centres, irrigation schemes and schools. And you'll be able to see
exactly what your support has achieved through regular updates from overseas."
-- ActionAid
As the above quotes from websites
of leading international charities show, when it comes to raising resources,
nothing is easier for a charity/NGO than to use children -- poor, deprived
of their basic human rights and preferably abused. Hundreds of Western
NGOs use children -- their images, stories and statistics -- from developing
countries like India to raise billions of dollars. A lot of this is through
a mechanism called child sponsorship where a Western sponsor gives an NGO
a certain sum of money (usually monthly) for sponsoring a child in a developing
country and in return gets photos and letters from the child at regular
intervals.
Some of this is money well spent.
Institutional care projects such as orphanages, run-away care centres,
homes for the mentally challenged, etc do tend to have a good track record
in terms of spending money on the child in whose name it is raised.
But the same is not the case with
community development projects. With the dawn of the development era in
the 1960s, a number of international organisations began using child sponsorship
to fund community development projects -- from tangible ones like digging
wells, roads, etc to increasingly intangible projects like group organisation,
empowerment of women, building rights awareness, etc. In doing so they
corrupted what was a wonderful mechanism originally designed to provide
direct relief to individual children in special circumstances.
The justification for such corruption
is often couched in some fine and eminently believable rhetoric. As the
Save the Children promotion for child sponsorship argues: "Almost 70 years
of experience has taught us that direct handouts are the least effective
way of helping children; your contributions are instead combined with those
of other sponsors and caring individuals so that many children and their
families in the community can benefit from our programs."
Why do international NGOs raise
money in the name of children, if they spend it on the broader community?
Why don't they just raise money in the name of the community in the first
place? The fact is that several have tried and failed miserably. In the
early 1980s, World Vision, one of the major international child sponsorship
organisations, launched an appeal called "Life Sharing" where they requested
donors to sponsor a community. Ken Waters then public relations director
of World Vision recalls (in an article in "Christianity Today") that "people
just did not respond. They wanted the one-to-one relationship with a kid.
So it was with a bit of reluctance that World Vision went back to child
sponsorship and tried to re-tool it to be a bit more up-front in what you
would expect and what was really happening."
In India several large international
NGOs raise funds through child sponsorship. These include Christian Children's
Fund, World Vision, Plan International and ActionAid -- all of which collectively
raise over Rs 300 crores every year through using images and stories of
Indian children. The main advantage these organisations reap with child
sponsorship (as opposed to other forms of funding) is the long-term nature
of the relationship between the sponsor and the sponsored child. A sponsor
often supports a child for as long as 8-10 years during which period the
NGO would get a contribution exceeding one lakh rupees in the name of the
individual child. Considering that child sponsorships for most of the big
international NGOs operating in India number in the tens of thousands in
each case, the money involved is staggering.
Many international NGOs have recognised
the difficulties with child sponsorship even if they have not been prepared
to say so publicly for obvious reasons. In a memo to ActionAid's Board
of Trustees on 23rd June 1999, Salil Shetty, CEO of ActionAid, wrote: "Child
sponsorship, in the way that we are currently managing it, poses serious
problems. At the community end, it leads to a lack of transparency in terms
of the amount of money we raise and the way in which it is raised. At the
donor end there are still expectations from the donors of benefits going
to the individual child, which is not always the case. In addition it takes
up a huge amount of staff time with hidden costs."
Yet despite these brave words, three
years on, and with Shetty still at the helm, ActionAid (which has the largest
child sponsorship operation among international NGOs in India) continues
to have child sponsorship as its primary fund raising mechanism not just
in India but internationally. Clearly, the "luxury" afforded by this mechanism,
as Shetty puts it (see box: Calling A Spade A Spade), is not easy to give
up.
Indeed in late 1999, soon after
he took over as country director of ActionAid India, Harsh Mander, a former
Indian Administrative Service (the top echelon of the civil service) officer
and recipient of the prestigious Rajiv Gandhi Sadbhavana Award, set
ambitious targets for boosting ActionAid's child sponsorship programme
in India. In a memo entitled 'ActionAid India: Towards Change', Mr Mander
announcing his intention to open five new regional offices of ActionAid
India in the country (in addition to seven that already existed) wrote:
"If each region accomplishes overtime 10,000 case histories [ActionAid
speak for number of sponsored children] each, 12 regions would account
for 120,000 case histories, which would be roughly three times our existing
work. This would also justify staff growth over time." ActionAid India
is well on track to achieving this target having already opened seven new
regional offices instead of the additional five it had envisaged three
years ago.
This is shocking considering that
just a few months before Mander's memo, a Taking Stock Review (TSR) carried
out by a team of six international development experts (one American, two
Britons, two Africans and one Asian) had been highly critical of the manner
in which ActionAid India was pursuing growth at the cost of programme quality.
According to the TSR, "India feels it cannot be credible unless it adds
an 8th region -- the difficult northeast of the country. And while the
evidence of AAI being overstretched is abundant, it is proud it has gone
from 30 DAs [Development Areas or long-term projects] to 90 DAs in the
last five years. " Today with 14 regional offices, AAI has well and truly
ignored the TSR.
The TSR was equally critical of
the manner in which AAI was carrying out its child sponsorship programme.
According to the report, "The TSR team encountered several instances where
AA staff (or AA partner staff were dishonest in their explanations to families
about why their children's pictures were being taken. They would explain
it by saying the children were being tracked to know if they continued
in school, or because their nutritional status was to be followed up. Field
staff explained to us that they would not tell the whole truth to the families,
otherwise they would demand money from the sponsor."
The TSR report was given a quiet
burial in ActionAid, without even a proper internal discussion, as its
findings were found too hot for comfort. Even Harsh Mander, one of the
leading lights of the right to information campaign in the country, has
been quick to propose a quantum jump in AAI's child sponsorships without
first looking at the crying need to make AAI's child sponsorship programme
more transparent vis-à-vis the families of poor sponsored children.
Apart from transparency, child sponsorship
is also plagued by the problem of high costs. Getting a sponsor in a developed
country to sponsor a child in a developing country is an expensive proposition.
Advertisements in newspapers, telephone teams soliciting sponsorships,
the generation and mailing of child photos to potential sponsors are activities
that don't come cheap. But the cost for this is also borne by the poor
in terms of the lower amount of money that actually trickles down to them.
According to an article published in Christianity Today, of the $22 that
a sponsor gives monthly to the Arizona-based Food for the Hungry, a major
child sponsorship based Christian NGO in the US, only 62% goes to support
the child.
In the case of secular child sponsorship-driven
NGOs which spend their money on the community at large, the percentage
tends to be even lower. This is how the ActionAid website provides the
break up of how the NGO spends its revenues.
"How do we spend our funds? In 2001
80% was spent on direct charitable
expenditure including:
31% on development and emergency
expenditure in developing countries
24% on grants to partner organisations
in developing countries
16% on regional support (in Africa,
Asia and Latin America) to country offices
8% on influencing education and
research
2% on administration
20% was spent on generating funds
(fundraising 16% and trading operations 4%) "
It is simply incredible that ActionAid
should classify "regional support to country offices" "influencing education
and research" and "administration" as "direct charitable expenditure."
If these items along with the cost of generating funds is removed, it is
clear that at best ActionAid spends only 55% of its total income (68 million
pounds sterling or approximately Rs 475 crores in 2001) on the poor directly.
Even this figure is debateable as it does not account for the overheads
of local NGOs through which ActionAid funds are channeled.
To a large extent child sponsorship
NGOs keep their sponsors in the dark about the high cost of fundraising
and how little money actually gets to the poor. According to Daniel Borochoff,
President of the American Institute of Philanthropy, if donors were fully
informed of the money spent on raising child sponsorship funding they would
be less inclined to support it. Many NGOs also report their fundraising
costs in ways that become difficult for the average sponsor to make sense
of.
But perhaps the biggest form of
deception that child sponsorship agencies resort to vis-à-vis their
sponsors is with the child letters that the sponsored children supposedly
write to their sponsors, often twice a year. Very often the letter the
sponsor gets is not written by the sponsored child. ActionAid India's sponsorship
administration unit in its newsletter "Sauce" recounts one case of a sponsor
complaining about the letter she receives supposedly from her sponsored
child. Lynne Berry of the UK wrote to ActionAid saying, "I have sponsored
Suman for many years..but can't help wondering why Suman has not progressed
artistically by the age of 13 years. The last painting I received, supposedly
painted by her, was to my mind that of a young child of say 3 or 4 years
old. I would have hoped that Suman would have progressed to drawings more
fitting for her age group." As a remedy, the newsletter shockingly advises
ActionAid India's local NGO partners to "ensure drawings/messages are age
appropriate."
Despite these serious problems,
many NGOs are reluctant to let go off child sponsorship. According to Ken
Waters, formerly with World Vision, if a child sponsorship NGO was to reposition
itself in favour of other forms of funding it could "expect as much as
50% loss of income over a two or three year period." Clearly most international
NGOs that have been fed on an easy diet of long term child sponsorship
funds are reluctant to let the ethics of the issue dictate their fundraising
decisions.
[box:]
Calling A Spade A Spade
But before going public on child
sponsorship issue, this author did try to raise the issue within AAI with
little response.
Excerpt from memo written to Shankar
Venkateswaran, Acting Country Director of AAI on 26/8/99.
"I was initially tempted to believe
that the drastic recommendations [of the TSR] made with regard to doing
away with the sponsorship mechanism was a case of throwing the baby out
with the bathwater. But having chewed on the issue for a while, I now feel
that on grounds of both dependency and inefficiency this is perhaps one
baby that needs to go with the bathwater. The TSR team was generous in
suggesting that 63% (and not 70% as we claim) is spent on development work
in the DA where the sponsored children are. I wonder what they would have
said had they known there is a further 20% chargeout AAI resorts to from
the money that goes to DAs. There is a serious ethical isue in what we
tell sponsors on how we spend their money and what we do. It is time we
recognise a fundamental incompatability inherent in the child sponsorship
mechanism between our obligations to our sponsors and to the communities
we work with. As TSR says: "Too much is being driven by sponsorship and
not enough by strategic considerations of what is right for development."
A plan to phase out sponsorship funding should be part of the reform agenda."
Excerpt from an e-mail sent to Salil
Shetty, international CEO of ActionAid in the UK on 20/11/99.
" On child sponsorship I think
we need to recognise that what is good for ActionAid is not necessarily
good for the poor we work with. The 'luxury of planning for long-term interventions'
which you see as an advantage is also what breeds dependency and poor programming.
Project after project believes there is a guaranteed stream of money for
years at end and does little to help communities stand on their own feet..There
is also the serious ethical problem inherent in child sponsorship of what
we tell, and more correctly what we don't tell, the community. I am not
optimistic that your suggestion we develop a disclosure/information policy
will work. While I reluctantly agree with you that stopping child sponsorship
during the next five years is a non-option, I think getting it down to
25% by 2008, as you suggest, virtually guarantees that little will be done
about reducing dependency on it during the lifetime of the current strategy.
The targets we set will determine the marketing options we pursue. And
comfort levels with child sponsorship are too high, as you well know, to
pursue other options when we are working with a 10-year target in mind.
Most people currently in positions of authority will not be around then
to say why the 25% target was not met."
