Its about the charity gravytrain. Not women and girls.
I'm just looking at their financials on the Charity Commision.
On the surface their numbers look like your donations are well spend with 73% of donations going to the Charitable Causes on their Charities Commision homepage. Great, thats a good percentage.
However I do not like it when you get such a broad definition of Charitable causes, so I decided to have a bit of a closer look using their annual report which can also be found on the Charity Commissions Website.
apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/CharityWithPartB.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=274467&SubsidiaryNumber=0
Lets start with how much income they have. The last available figures relate to the year ending 31st Dec 2018.
Income: £49,600,000
Voluntary £39.17m
Trading to raise funds £3.05m
Investment £0.05
Charitable activities £7.33
Other £0.00
Assets, liabilities & people: £-3.35m
(they employ 170 and have 37 volunteers)
Spending: £46,605,000
Generating voluntary income £0
Trading to raise funds £0
Investment management £0
Charitable activities £36.29m
Governance £0.54m
Other £0
Total £46.61m
Nope I've not missed anything from this section in the Charity Commission website. There is a missing amount.
It appears in the section below this one.
Income generation and goverance £10.3m 21%
Charitable spending £36.29m 73%
Retained for future use £2.99m 6%
The charitable spending figure of 73% is the key one that makes the charity look good.
But what IS that charitable spending on?
This is actually the crucial piece of information.
Their 2018 Annual Report is 42 pages long. On the front of it, is a woman.
It starts off as follows:
Our vision
A world without poverty and injustice in which every person enjoys their right to a life of dignity.
Our mission
To work with poor and excluded people to eradicate poverty and injustice.
Our approach
^Our human rights-based approach aims to ensure that people are drivers of their own change and able to claim the rights they are entitled to. We focus on women and girls because the denial of their rights is a grave injustice and one of the underlying causes of poverty
worldwide. By working directly with communities, women’s movements, groups and networks, social movements and other allies, we aim to tackle the structural causes and consequences of poverty and injustice.^
ActionAid also fights for a fairer world by galvanising the public to challenge the national and global policies and practices that keep people poor. This includes holding governments accountable to ensure public funds are spent effectively and where they are needed the most.
So they say first that they focus on women and girls and then say they are fighting for a fairer world...
We then are treated to something from the Chair and Chief Executive. It talks about MeToo, Ireland's abortion ban, the number of female candidates in the US midterms AND THEN goes on to talk about poor conditions in the rest of the world.
There are then some graphics about what they have done. The first is about Action Aid responding to 22 new emergencies in 2018 and how they have supported more than 750,000 people. It then mentions Bangladesh and then Indonesia.
At this point I start to raise my eyebrows. The next thing is about how they had 8000 people protesting Trump's visit to the UK. Followed by how they had a campaign about stories of defiance which reached 75,000 people on twitter. And then how they and other charities supported the organisers of the women's march to bring together 250,000 people to celebrate women's rights. This is feel good UK based political activism which reinforces identity politics and doesn't actually DO anything meaningful on the ground.
It then says that ActionAid Uk is a member of the ActionAid Internation Federation. The charity gave £29.3m to the ActionAid IF which was 67% of their total expenditure. At this point there should be alarms ringing about how accurate it is that 73% of spending is going direct to charity. We have a sizeable portion being siphoned off to another charitiable organisation outside the site and remit of the Charities Commission - which will almost certainly have running costs of its own, which will be taken out of this money.
From what I see later in the report ActionAid UK don't actually do very much overseas - they gather funds and outsource to the larger parent organisation.
It then says
While most of ActionAid UK’s funds go towards supporting the Federation’s humanitarian and development work overseas, this isn’t the whole story. We also campaign in the UK in solidarity with people affected by poverty, for example to ask the British Government to consider the impact of its trade policies on women and girls.
So it is a political campaign group on UK soil as well as an organisation for helping around the rest of the world.
We get some stuff about their strategic goals and their work in the developing world and then on page 28 we get to the celebrity supporter pages.
Listed are: Andrea Riseborough, Emma Thompson, Paloma Faith, Samantha Bond, James Purefoy, Miriam Margolyes, Gemma Chan, Robin Ince, Alt-J, Wolf Alice, Sleeper, Alesha Dixon and Jodie Whittaker.
The next section is what they have planned for the year ahead. It says:
^The year 2018 is the first full year of ActionAid UK’s new strategy:
Together, with Women and Girls.^
The denial of women and girls’ rights is one of the biggest causes of poverty worldwide and a grave injustice. We are shifting our focus because no community can truly prosper when half its citizens are denied the rights enjoyed by the other half. Our work will also benefit men and boys living in poverty and our child sponsorship programme supports whole communities, but we will put the rights of women and girls at the centre of all that we do.
With a focus on the rights of women and girls, our programmes around the world will work to:
• significantly reduce the risk of violence against women and girls
• fight for women’s equal rights to economic opportunities
• prioritise women and girls’ rights and their leadership in humanitarian crises.
The safeguarding part is interesting. It has a report on how many complaints against the behaviour of members of staff its had. In 2017 it had hardly any. In 2018 there was a marked increase. Its hard to work out what it actually means and what these complaints were about.
I've attached a rather key graphic which splits up its Charitable Spending into four sections
Charitable Activities:
Grants to AAI and Federation Members £28.2m (£33.7 in 2017)
Emergency and Humanitaran Response £2.9m (£10.6m in 2017)
Campaigning and policy influencing £2.2m (£4.9m in 2017)
Education Work £3.0m (£2.6m in 2017)
Total £36.3m (51.8m in 2017)
So make that £5.2m being used political influencing and education. More than they spend on Emergency and Humanitarian response.
(As your reference point, Stonewall's entire charitiable spending for their last set of available accounts is £7.22m - ActionAid's Education and Lobbying spending dwarfs Stonewall's)
More importantly I think the shift in spending is worth commenting on:
78% to Parent Organisation (65% in 2017)
8% to Emergency Response (20% in 2017)
6% to Policy Influencing (9% in 2017)
8% to Education (5% in 2017)
There was a marked shift from directly running aid schemes and instead a huge increase in sending it to the parent organisation.
There is no comment on how the parent organisation spends its money, it just links to the parent organisation: actionaid.org/
They talk about how employees are paid, simply that they maintain a ration between the highest and lowest paid of under 5:1 whilst being a living wage employer. (Hidden away later it says they have 5 on between £60k and £70k, 3 on £70k to £80k, 1 on £90k to £100k and 1 on £100k to £110k - a total of 10). The gross wage and salary bill for 2018 was £6.7m (remember they spend £2.9m directly on emergency humanitarian response). This does not include social security and pension costs either (another £1.1m)
I've tried to have a look for the finances for the parent organisation. They have a whole section on how they get funding, but there is nothing about how they then spend that money.
It is hidden away on the site in the form of another Annual Report (latest again from 2018). What this reveals is that 64% of the parent organisation's income is spend on charitable causes.
So to recap, thats 64% of the original 73% (£29.3m) which was sent to the parent organisation. I make that £18.7m or just 40.12% of ActionAid UK's total spending if my maths is correct. The rest has been swallowed up by the running of the charity.
There isn't a further breakdown of what 'the programme' involves - and whether this goes on lobbying, education or direct projects. It is divided into individual schemes across numerous countries. How much actually reaches the front line of helping individuals in the developing world is anyone's guess but they are more of an afterthought and getting the left overs, whilst the main operation in the UK now seems to be political lobbying and education programmes.
It certainly looks like the primary beneficaries of ActionAid are ActionAid. It looks like ActionAid UK is primarily a left wing lobbying organisation that is a front for a larger charity to siphon off money for its internal running costs.
If you knew how ActionAid UK operated and how the larger organisation was set up to use the Charities Commission Front Page to make their contributions to charitable causes look substantially better than they really are, would you still want to donate to them REGARDLESS of what their position on women and girls is?
I personally think having looked all through this, that this is a form of exploitation by charities for financial and political gain in Western Democracy rather than the interests of women and girls in the developing world really being its primary focus. We knew that anyway because of their whole shitshow about saying biological sex doesn't matter, but spelling it out in economic terms really does reinforce the point. The whole thing needs a massive overhaul as the transparency on this is appalling and frankly its little more than a scam IMHO.
I know that this has been shown up in many other charities and seems to be a growing problem. It is an issue that people are growing in awareness about, but its really not got enough traction as a political issue yet. Yet.
I suspect it is probably one of the upcoming political trends which we will see explode as a story over the next couple of years. We've seen the first wave of it break with NGO's sexually abusing women, but this story has a long way to go yet. We will hear a lot more about this, as its a good way for the right to undermine the left by exposing its gross hypocrisy. I find it incredibly depressing that there is little to no criticism of this gross capitalism and exploitation coming from within the left tbh.
The whole sector needs a massive magnifying glass cast over it. There is a massive industry in generating money for the charity industry. Those in need merely get the crumbs off the table.
The lesson here is, if you want to donate substantially to a charity, check out their charity commission page AND THEN read their annual report to see EXACTLY how they are spending and distributing their money, rather than looking at their cause and taking at face value.
Who is benefitting from them most? - It is hidden in the detail but its not always easy to track and trace it.