Can (water) charity organizations be trusted?

Research shows the sector has a long way to go in terms of public awareness of the regulator, says Joe Saxton of nfpSynergy

Less than half of respondents to a new poll have heard of the Charity Commission, according to a new survey.
The poll of more than 1,000 people, carried out by the consultancy nfpSynergy in November and December, found that 43 per cent were probably or definitely aware of the regulator and 38 per cent were probably or definitely unaware of it. Nineteen per cent were not sure.

=========================================================

My comments:

Public trust indeed is key; in The Netherlands we have similar issues with charities. Especially charities that work in developing projects are becoming more and more suspect; they work far away and can easily manipulate. They can have a nice brochure, flashy website, celebrities or big names to support them, etc. Of course, development work is not easy and there are often unforeseen problems, but it’s all about maintaining the right balance and transparency.

In The Netherlands we have a similar organization for charity registration, but not as effective as your organization. Therefore many NGOs are not registered there because they receive little service and contribution is relatively high.

An issue for charity registration is also, that registration gives the public a kind of guarantee that the charity is doing a good job. Unfortunately, this is absolutely not the case. For instance in the water sector, there are many charities that do more harm than good. Sometimes even without being aware of it, because it seems such a nice idea for instance, to give a water pump to a community. But if the water pump cannot be maintained by the community, the people are frustrated in the end, while the charity is already making another good impression on its donors by doing the same disaster in another community. Follow up and sustainability is often missing, especially in water projects. Very sad....

The good news is that the public is very forgiving and is always prepared to donate to help people. The flipside is that many water charities can in fact do whatever they want with the funding, because they are accountable to nobody about the poor results.

Better results from water projects often means that the water charity has to spend more funding to get things right. Although they often have millions on the bank, in practice we often see that water charities are penny wise & pound foolish. They go for cheap solutions that only work for a while, and are becoming amazingly capable in cover up failures and sweet talk about what they do.

It’s a complex issue, and not an easy one to speak about; charity is often not to be discussed, because its all for the good. Is it really?? As long as fundraising brings in such huge amounts of money for such charities, where many people have well paid jobs and enjoy the respect of the public because they do “so incredibly well” for the poor in Africa, change for better results is not likely.

In the meantime, millions of people in Africa are still waiting to get real and sustainable help. The water problem is real, statistics are hard to beat. Already 40 to 70% of previous installed charity donated handpumps don’t work anymore. But most charities just go on as before, completely ignoring the problems they pretend to solve and that they create themselves.

The latter is even worse and probably the real problem to solve. Fundraising business looks like what Mark 11:15-19 described, will we ever learn?

We hope that the Charity Commission also has an open view in this and will be a bit more pro-active than it’s sister organization in the Netherlands. Charity is a good emotion, but it can easily be misused by many pretending, unprofessional “good-doers”, and that is not the intention. The public already start to ask for more transparency and that is good.

Hope they pick up the idea.

...