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Friday, 16 November 2007

Celebrating Searchers (Responding to feedback)


Reader 1:


Reader 2:



My view on these comments is as follows:




All ideas are welcome no matter how contrarian.


  1. Cho,

    I think I may be able to help shed some light on the issue of US contact addresses for Zambian charities. In the course of my daily life, I am somewhat of a pest when it comes to interrogating my corporate friends as to how much of their charity and investment gets oriented to Africa. One of the things that I have learned is that most major transnational corps have matching donor programs for their employees' charitable giving, so I of course push the Zambian ones every chance I get. The problem comes in with the rules on the matching donor programs, which are limited to a pre-approved list of eligible charities. It is not overly difficult in most cases to get a charity added to the list, as long as at least one employee wants to donate to it on a regular basis, and it is registered in the United States. The unfortunate side effect is that it becomes impossible to persuade employees of these companies to donate off the list, since it effectively cuts their ability to contribute anywhere in half.

    West Coast software and media companies are particularly generous in this regard, but are wary of anti-terror provisions of the Patriot Act, and so avoid any charity without a US address. Most likely Mr Musonda has made American friends over the course of developing his charity who have helped him to establish an officially sanctioned contact point in San Francisco, thereby opening up lucrative avenues of donor funding otherwise unavailable to an NGO confined to Lusaka.

  2. Yakima,

    Many thanks for this contribution.

    The explanation seems perfectly logical.

    It seems to me that Hope International are well within their rights to use the address that would maximise their source of funding!

    The question is whether Hope International are crowding out other source of funding by engaging in meaningless charity work. That remains a unknown among other unknowns!


