Showing posts with label NP/ NGO news and opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NP/ NGO news and opinion. Show all posts
JWOC believes in volunteering. At any one time we have over 70 local volunteers working with us to make our projects successful. However, as this article from Al Jazeera English explains there can be a sadder side to volunteering. If you are thinking about volunteering in Cambodia please do research the company you travel with and the organisation you are placed with.
Cambodia's Orphanage Business
Susan Rosas is a young American social worker based in Cambodia. When I met her at the Harvard University Global Mental Health Program last year she told me about a surprising phenomenon: in spite of the fact that Cambodia had managed to overcome decades of conflict, famine and an AIDS epidemic, the number of orphanages around the country had doubled over the past decade. This, she said, was not based on the needs of the children but the growth of the global volunteering industry, which was hungry for placements.
Over 70% of the Cambodian "orphans" have at least one living parent, Susan said, but families were lured into giving up their children by the promise of Western education.
I started to research. "Voluntourism" has been described as the fastest growing sector of one of the fastest growing industries in the world. According to David Clemmons, founder of www.voluntourism.org, an estimated 11 million people traveled to volunteer in 2011 alone, proving that voluntourism has become a "multi-billion dollar expression of travelers' desires to find meaning and to make the world a better place."
Five months later I met Susan again. I had come to Cambodia with a colleague to investigate a darker side of voluntourism for Al Jazeera's People & Power current affairs programme. One of the first people we met was an Australian called Demi Giakoumis who has volunteered in Cambodian orphanages with three of the largest global commercial volunteering companies and grown increasingly disillusioned with the experience. From her we heard that commercial organizations, such as the UK based Projects Abroad, were charging volunteers up to $3,000.00 dollars a month whilst her orphanage director told her he only received $9.00 per volunteer, per week. Demi also claimed that orphanages were keeping children in deliberate poverty to attract more donations.
At Lighthouse Orphanage, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, we first encountered 'orphanage tourism' in action. We met a group of young Canadian high school students who had spent a week in the orphanage painting beds and digging up the vegetable garden until they got sunstroke. On their last day we witnessed how busy Cambodian orphans can get entertaining foreign visitors: after a traditional dance performance for the Canadians, lunch was scheduled with a group from South Korea and a group from Hong Kong was rotated through later in the day.
Whilst specialized voluntourism operators based outside Cambodia may make large profits through arranging visits, it soon became clear that there is plenty of money for the local orphanages, too. One of the Canadian teachers told us that thousands of dollars had been sent to the orphanage prior to the students' arrival to buy building material and other goods. The students told us they had raised yet more money through bake-sales and fund-raisers. Frequently volunteers become so attached to the children that they continue to send money long after they have departed.
Unsurprisingly, accountability of Cambodian orphanages is a thorny issue. No qualifications are needed to set up care homes for children and during our stay we met orphanage directors who had been a bodyguard, an actress and a business woman. Worse still, out of an estimated 500 orphanages in Cambodia, only half are registered with the government.
It was when we met the investigative NGO SISHA that things began to look much more serious. SISHA had been contacted by volunteers who were concerned about the way the Children's Umbrella Centre Organization (CUCO) was run. The volunteers complained about the living and sleeping facilities for the children, including an open sewer right in the centre of the compound, the director's constant request for inflated donations and worst of all -- his offer to give up children for adoption. (Adoption is illegal in Cambodia). After sending in their own undercover investigator, SISHA alerted the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation, which carried out two inspections and found that on both occasions the orphanage was failing to comply with their minimum standards.
So my colleague and I decided to go undercover. Equipped with hidden cameras we went to CUCO hoping that things had changed -- but found the conditions the same. On our arrival director Sineth Sok explained CUCO's financial difficulties and asked for a donation so we bought some food for the children. Without ever asking for any identification he put us in front of a class of children to teach. At times we were completely abandoned with more than twenty children and nobody to translate. We -- and the children -- were left to our own devices.
When we returned to follow up on the most serious allegation -- that some children had gone missing -- we found a new volunteer, a young Dutchman, at CUCO. To our surprise he told us he had been sent by Projects Abroad, the organization whose volunteers had first raised alarm bells about what was going on at the orphanage and whose complaints had triggered SISHA's and the government's inspections. Yet Projects Abroad was still sending people on placements at CUCO.
To test how serious the director Sineth was about looking after his children we asked him if we could take some of them out of the orphanage. We had brought a Cambodian social worker with us, but told Sineth she was a friend and interpreter. He lined the children up against a wall for us to pick our favorites -- and a few minutes later we were allowed to drive off with four of them. Never once had we been asked for identification, never once had our credentials been checked. It was deeply shocking, not least because Cambodia is one of the world's sex offender's hotspots and children are especially at risk.
Back in the UK we checked the most recent Projects Abroad company accounts and found them to have an annual turnover of $24 million for 2010 with $3 million profits. When we contacted them they pointed out that CUCO receives $50 per volunteer per month and that they believe it is better to have volunteers in orphanages than leaving them unmonitored. They also explained to us that the Dutch volunteer (who was in his twenties) had not been asked for a background check because this was only required for volunteers over thirty, whereas young volunteers could bring school or other references instead.
David Clemmons predicts that as voluntourism matures as an industry it will receive greater scrutiny. The hope is that as a result commercial volunteering companies will become more rigorous in implementing some basic standards such as conducting criminal background checks and sending young volunteers into orphanages where they are supervised by qualified staff.
But for many that is not enough. They question the very idea of traveling volunteers working with vulnerable children -- after all -- it is something few of us would accept in our own countries ...
"Cambodia's Orphan Business" was produced by Matt Haan and reported by Juliana Ruhfus for Al Jazeera English.
To learn more about responsible voluntourism you can take a look here- http://www.concertcambodia.org/ and here- http://www.childsafe-international.org/index.asp .
To read JWOC Child Protection Policy and Code of Conduct take a look here- http://www.journeyswithinourcommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/JWOC-Child-Protection-Policy.pdf and here- http://www.journeyswithinourcommunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/Child-Protection-Code-of-Conduct-May-2012.pdf
This recent New York Times article is a great explanation of why just installing wells isn't enough. Alongside installing wells JWOC teaches villagers how to repair wells and also does repair and strengthening work on existing wells, whoever first installed them.
Read the article below or go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/keeping-the-water-flowing-in-rural-villages/?emc=eta1 to see complete with picture and links!
December 8, 2011, 9:30 PM
Keeping the Water Flowing in Rural Villages
By TINA ROSENBERG
Keeping projects in business for the long term has been a constant theme of the Fixes column, and if sustainability has a poster child, it would be a water pump. Travel anywhere in Africa or South Asia or Central America, and you will find a landscape dotted with the rusting skeletons of dead water pumps or wells..
In most developing countries, these water points are installed with great fanfare by the government or a charitable group. They greatly improve the lives of villagers. Having a water point in or near the village means that women don’t have to spend 6,8, even 12 hours a day on perilous journeys to fetch water from rivers or lakes. The pumps allow girls to go to school instead of staying home to help their mothers fetch water or take care of siblings. They allow villagers to drink reasonably clean water instead of risking their health with every sip.
Then something breaks on the pump — a huge catastrophe like an underground pipe bursting, or a small one, like the loss of a bolt or a washer. And it never works again.
Early death is shockingly widespread for water pumps. Perhaps the biggest study of this ever was carried out in 21 African countries by an organization called Sustainable Water Services at Scale. It found that 36 percent of pumps were not working. “This level of failure represents a waste of between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion in investments in 20 years,” said the organization.
In Tanzania, mapping of water points showed that nationally, less than half the existing rural water points were working. Of water points that were less than two years old, a quarter had already stopped functioning.
Why, when communities benefit so obviously from water, do so many water points fall out of use? The short answer is that keeping the pumps running usually falls to the community or local government. But it requires specialized skills, spare parts, tools and funds. None of these are found in rural villages.
One group taking a hard look at how to solve the problem is the British-based charity WaterAid. When the organization analyzed why water points failed in Tanzania, it found something interesting: the most sustainable were those maintained by private contractors. This is not a ready-made solution; it won’t work everywhere — really poor areas won’t be able to pay. And in some regions, problems like price gouging were associated with private operators. But WaterAid felt it might be able to solve these problems. So in the north of India, it came up with an ingenious way to do just that.
Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in India — it is also one of the poorest and most drought-prone. The government has been aggressively installing new water pumps, but they quickly fall into disuse. In the Mahoba district, south of the state capital of Lucknow, there are about 12,500 community water pumps, said. K.J. Rajeev, WaterAid’s general manager for the northern region of India. “But 40 percent of them are usually down, especially in summer,” he said. And when they break, they stay broken — three-quarters of the repairs take at least a month, and many are never repaired at all.
Now things are different in Mahoba. In May, Lisa Millman, WaterAid America’s director of development and communications, was visiting a town called Charkhari. She was sitting in a small storefront office, a shop lined with shelves of hand pump parts, when a cellphone rang. The call was from the village of Kotedar, where the main hand pump had broken. A master mechanic took the call and asked some questions. This was apparently going to be a big job — five mechanics piled onto two motorbikes, along with the 10-year-old son of one of the men. They reached the village 20 minutes later. As a throng of villagers watched, they took out huge wrenches. They disassembled the pump and began pulling up heavy segments of pipe. At the tenth segment they found a hole and patched it. Two and a half hours after they arrived, the pump was reassembled and working. They got on their bikes and rode off into the sunset.
Millman, who had followed in a car, had asked the 10-year-old if he wanted to be a mechanic like his dad. “He was smirking and laughing,” she said. “But after he watched his dad repair the pump, he was in awe.”
WaterAid and its local partners have set up four workshops, called Community Participation Centers, in the Mahoba district, and the project is now expanding into the neighboring state of Bihar. A call to the workshop reaches a master mechanic. He or she can choose the appropriate mechanics in the group, depending on location and skills, to send to address the problem. Each is is equipped with a cellphone, tool kit and a bike, moped or motorbike. Including mechanics-in-training and several who work part time, the centers have 27 female mechanics.
Many of the women were landless agricultural laborers before they learned hand pump repair, and many were members of the Dalit, or Untouchable, caste — the most downtrodden in Indian society. In a very traditional region, where women cover their faces and do not speak in public, it was at first hard to find women who wanted the job. Even some who completed the training didn’t want to go out to villages and work in public, said Rajeev. Now, however, wherever they go, village men accept them and women embrace them. Seeing a mechanic in yellow hardhat and sari has opened up the spectrum of possibilities for village women.
In 14 months of work, the center mechanics have repaired more than 1,100 pumps in Mahoba. Ninety-three percent of the repairs were made within 24 hours of the phone call, and only 3 percent took more than two days. A simple repair costs a village 100 rupees — roughly $2.00 — with more complex repairs costing up to $6. Water quality testing costs $1.20. The mechanics guarantee all work.
Rajeev said that the four Mahoba workshops cost WaterAid about $40,000 to set up — to train mechanics, buy parts and tools, provide bikes and cellphones and visit village councils to promote the new service. But now WaterAid is tapering off financial support to the workshops, which are all operating sustainably and on the verge of meeting their profitability goals. “We will be providing only technical assistance and hand-holding,” he said. To keep the workshops running, the mechanic keeps 70 to 90 percent of the repair fee and deposits the rest in the workshop’s account.
This isn’t the first time WaterAid tried to train mechanics in the area. In 2004, its local partner recruited men and women and trained them to do preventive maintenance and minor repairs in their own villages. It didn’t last. The trainees learned only the most basic repairs and often had to leave work incomplete. They also earned very little money. So WaterAid then decided it needed to create a real business, using high standards of training, aggressive outreach to village governments and attractive practices like guaranteed work.
Why couldn’t the market take care of this problem? There are hand pump mechanics in Mahoba, after all. But they tend to live in major market cities. Rajeev said they demanded very high fees to go out to remote villages — often too high for villages to pay. There are also information disconnects – they do no outreach to villages, so some village councils don’t know about these mechanics or how to call them.
The market also can’t finance major repairs — most villagers are too poor. The center program can work because the government has a fund that village councils can use to pay for hand pump maintenance. The fund can take 45 days to pay — too long for most traditional mechanics. Center mechanics, however, don’t mind. (Very minor repairs can usually be paid on the spot.) And now four villages have signed maintenance contracts with center workshops, paying directly from the government’s fund.
What’s happening in Mahoba is promising. But the key to this process is that the Indian government pays the bills. In the places where this problem is most serious, government is AWOL. On Wednesday I’ll look at why it has been so difficult to keep water points running, mistakes that water groups have made and what poor villages might do to keep the water flowing.
Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes.
READ MORE
Read the article below or go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/keeping-the-water-flowing-in-rural-villages/?emc=eta1 to see complete with picture and links!
December 8, 2011, 9:30 PM
Keeping the Water Flowing in Rural Villages
By TINA ROSENBERG
Keeping projects in business for the long term has been a constant theme of the Fixes column, and if sustainability has a poster child, it would be a water pump. Travel anywhere in Africa or South Asia or Central America, and you will find a landscape dotted with the rusting skeletons of dead water pumps or wells..
In most developing countries, these water points are installed with great fanfare by the government or a charitable group. They greatly improve the lives of villagers. Having a water point in or near the village means that women don’t have to spend 6,8, even 12 hours a day on perilous journeys to fetch water from rivers or lakes. The pumps allow girls to go to school instead of staying home to help their mothers fetch water or take care of siblings. They allow villagers to drink reasonably clean water instead of risking their health with every sip.
Then something breaks on the pump — a huge catastrophe like an underground pipe bursting, or a small one, like the loss of a bolt or a washer. And it never works again.
Early death is shockingly widespread for water pumps. Perhaps the biggest study of this ever was carried out in 21 African countries by an organization called Sustainable Water Services at Scale. It found that 36 percent of pumps were not working. “This level of failure represents a waste of between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion in investments in 20 years,” said the organization.
In Tanzania, mapping of water points showed that nationally, less than half the existing rural water points were working. Of water points that were less than two years old, a quarter had already stopped functioning.
Why, when communities benefit so obviously from water, do so many water points fall out of use? The short answer is that keeping the pumps running usually falls to the community or local government. But it requires specialized skills, spare parts, tools and funds. None of these are found in rural villages.
One group taking a hard look at how to solve the problem is the British-based charity WaterAid. When the organization analyzed why water points failed in Tanzania, it found something interesting: the most sustainable were those maintained by private contractors. This is not a ready-made solution; it won’t work everywhere — really poor areas won’t be able to pay. And in some regions, problems like price gouging were associated with private operators. But WaterAid felt it might be able to solve these problems. So in the north of India, it came up with an ingenious way to do just that.
Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in India — it is also one of the poorest and most drought-prone. The government has been aggressively installing new water pumps, but they quickly fall into disuse. In the Mahoba district, south of the state capital of Lucknow, there are about 12,500 community water pumps, said. K.J. Rajeev, WaterAid’s general manager for the northern region of India. “But 40 percent of them are usually down, especially in summer,” he said. And when they break, they stay broken — three-quarters of the repairs take at least a month, and many are never repaired at all.
Now things are different in Mahoba. In May, Lisa Millman, WaterAid America’s director of development and communications, was visiting a town called Charkhari. She was sitting in a small storefront office, a shop lined with shelves of hand pump parts, when a cellphone rang. The call was from the village of Kotedar, where the main hand pump had broken. A master mechanic took the call and asked some questions. This was apparently going to be a big job — five mechanics piled onto two motorbikes, along with the 10-year-old son of one of the men. They reached the village 20 minutes later. As a throng of villagers watched, they took out huge wrenches. They disassembled the pump and began pulling up heavy segments of pipe. At the tenth segment they found a hole and patched it. Two and a half hours after they arrived, the pump was reassembled and working. They got on their bikes and rode off into the sunset.
Millman, who had followed in a car, had asked the 10-year-old if he wanted to be a mechanic like his dad. “He was smirking and laughing,” she said. “But after he watched his dad repair the pump, he was in awe.”
WaterAid and its local partners have set up four workshops, called Community Participation Centers, in the Mahoba district, and the project is now expanding into the neighboring state of Bihar. A call to the workshop reaches a master mechanic. He or she can choose the appropriate mechanics in the group, depending on location and skills, to send to address the problem. Each is is equipped with a cellphone, tool kit and a bike, moped or motorbike. Including mechanics-in-training and several who work part time, the centers have 27 female mechanics.
Many of the women were landless agricultural laborers before they learned hand pump repair, and many were members of the Dalit, or Untouchable, caste — the most downtrodden in Indian society. In a very traditional region, where women cover their faces and do not speak in public, it was at first hard to find women who wanted the job. Even some who completed the training didn’t want to go out to villages and work in public, said Rajeev. Now, however, wherever they go, village men accept them and women embrace them. Seeing a mechanic in yellow hardhat and sari has opened up the spectrum of possibilities for village women.
In 14 months of work, the center mechanics have repaired more than 1,100 pumps in Mahoba. Ninety-three percent of the repairs were made within 24 hours of the phone call, and only 3 percent took more than two days. A simple repair costs a village 100 rupees — roughly $2.00 — with more complex repairs costing up to $6. Water quality testing costs $1.20. The mechanics guarantee all work.
Rajeev said that the four Mahoba workshops cost WaterAid about $40,000 to set up — to train mechanics, buy parts and tools, provide bikes and cellphones and visit village councils to promote the new service. But now WaterAid is tapering off financial support to the workshops, which are all operating sustainably and on the verge of meeting their profitability goals. “We will be providing only technical assistance and hand-holding,” he said. To keep the workshops running, the mechanic keeps 70 to 90 percent of the repair fee and deposits the rest in the workshop’s account.
This isn’t the first time WaterAid tried to train mechanics in the area. In 2004, its local partner recruited men and women and trained them to do preventive maintenance and minor repairs in their own villages. It didn’t last. The trainees learned only the most basic repairs and often had to leave work incomplete. They also earned very little money. So WaterAid then decided it needed to create a real business, using high standards of training, aggressive outreach to village governments and attractive practices like guaranteed work.
Why couldn’t the market take care of this problem? There are hand pump mechanics in Mahoba, after all. But they tend to live in major market cities. Rajeev said they demanded very high fees to go out to remote villages — often too high for villages to pay. There are also information disconnects – they do no outreach to villages, so some village councils don’t know about these mechanics or how to call them.
The market also can’t finance major repairs — most villagers are too poor. The center program can work because the government has a fund that village councils can use to pay for hand pump maintenance. The fund can take 45 days to pay — too long for most traditional mechanics. Center mechanics, however, don’t mind. (Very minor repairs can usually be paid on the spot.) And now four villages have signed maintenance contracts with center workshops, paying directly from the government’s fund.
What’s happening in Mahoba is promising. But the key to this process is that the Indian government pays the bills. In the places where this problem is most serious, government is AWOL. On Wednesday I’ll look at why it has been so difficult to keep water points running, mistakes that water groups have made and what poor villages might do to keep the water flowing.
Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes.
Last month Guidestar published the news that 275,000 Non-profits in the US had repeatedly failed to submit financial details and were therefore losing their 501(c)3 status. You'll be pleased to know JWOC wasn't one of these! We submit our independently reviewed financial reports each year, meaning all our spending and income is transparent for all to see and we can keep our 501(c)3 status- making your donations tax-deductible.
The story is copied below for more information.
GuideStar, the leading resource of nonprofit information, announced today that the IRS has published the first Automatic Revocation of Exemption List, thereby revoking the tax-exempt status of approximately 275,000 nonprofits and fundamentally changing the scope of the nonprofit industry. As the nation's premier source of nonprofit data, GuideStar is working to incorporate this information into its database and products.
"More than a quarter of a million nonprofits have had their tax exemptions revoked because they failed to file an annual return with the IRS in compliance with the Pension Protection Act of 2006," said Bob Ottenhoff, GuideStar's president and CEO. "This event will have a tremendous short-term impact on the nonprofit sector and those who support and rely on it. The true impact, however, will be long-term. Over time, knowing which organizations are in good standing with the IRS will increase public confidence in the sector as a whole, which in turn will increase support for the nonprofits it comprises."
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 requires the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of any organization required to file an annual return (Form 990, 990-N, 990-EZ, or 990-PF) that fails to do so for three consecutive years. Revocations are automatic and mandatory under the law. The Automatic Revocation of Exemption List published yesterday represents the first time this provision of the Pension Protection Act has been put into effect.
GuideStar is in the process of incorporating automatic revocation data and other information about nonprofits' standing with the IRS into the GuideStar database and GuideStar products.
"In a recent survey that GuideStar conducted with Hope Consulting, 87 percent of 5,000-plus donors said that nonprofit legitimacy is a key factor in their giving decisions," Ottenhoff stated. "GuideStar users and customers can continue to rely on the information we provide, knowing that it remains the most up-to-date and accurate nonprofit information available."
http://www2.guidestar.org/rxa/news/news-releases/2011/irs-revokes-exemptions-of-275000-nonprofits.aspx
READ MORE
The story is copied below for more information.
GuideStar, the leading resource of nonprofit information, announced today that the IRS has published the first Automatic Revocation of Exemption List, thereby revoking the tax-exempt status of approximately 275,000 nonprofits and fundamentally changing the scope of the nonprofit industry. As the nation's premier source of nonprofit data, GuideStar is working to incorporate this information into its database and products.
"More than a quarter of a million nonprofits have had their tax exemptions revoked because they failed to file an annual return with the IRS in compliance with the Pension Protection Act of 2006," said Bob Ottenhoff, GuideStar's president and CEO. "This event will have a tremendous short-term impact on the nonprofit sector and those who support and rely on it. The true impact, however, will be long-term. Over time, knowing which organizations are in good standing with the IRS will increase public confidence in the sector as a whole, which in turn will increase support for the nonprofits it comprises."
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 requires the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of any organization required to file an annual return (Form 990, 990-N, 990-EZ, or 990-PF) that fails to do so for three consecutive years. Revocations are automatic and mandatory under the law. The Automatic Revocation of Exemption List published yesterday represents the first time this provision of the Pension Protection Act has been put into effect.
GuideStar is in the process of incorporating automatic revocation data and other information about nonprofits' standing with the IRS into the GuideStar database and GuideStar products.
"In a recent survey that GuideStar conducted with Hope Consulting, 87 percent of 5,000-plus donors said that nonprofit legitimacy is a key factor in their giving decisions," Ottenhoff stated. "GuideStar users and customers can continue to rely on the information we provide, knowing that it remains the most up-to-date and accurate nonprofit information available."
http://www2.guidestar.org/rxa/news/news-releases/2011/irs-revokes-exemptions-of-275000-nonprofits.aspx
