Multifunding domain

A new funding paradigm ensures greater transparency and accountability among donor NGOs.

The Asian elephant may not be as threatened as the tiger, but it is as much a victim of the depredations of human civilisation on a rampage. Sadly, most of the funds and attention of the government, media and NGOs are concentrated on saving the tiger.

Elephantfamily, the London-based charity run by elephant expert Mark Shand, is probably the only NGO anywhere that focuses solely on the Asian elephant.

In India, Elephantfamily helps around 100 captive elephants in Jaipur that ferry tourists, through donations from its patrons (among them celebrities like Goldie Hawn and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild), and the proceeds of cutesy services like "ele-dating" (a single date costs £30) that it runs through its website.

But lately, Elephantfamily has got into more serious stuff. It has come up with its Multifund to tap the purses of elephant-lovers in the West. By making the latter aware of reliable local NGOs working in this area, Multifund seeks to break the monopoly of "branded" NGOs that control the flow of funds from the West to Asian NGOs.

In applying the fund-of-fund principle of asset management to donations, it offers donors a portfolio of NGOs to spread their monies among. This portfolio was decided on the basis of an independent audit by Paul Jepson of the Oxford University Centre for Environment.

"During a nine-month period (September 2002-June 2003), we conducted two comparative benchmarking assessments...of the capacity of 21 NGOs [five of them Indian] to have an impact in their chosen area of elephant conservation," says Jepson.

"We devised two scorecards drawing on the principles of business performance measurement, consumer reports and systems theory...We applied these through a combination of review of documentation and more than 100 key-informant interviews with project staff and country experts."

Interestingly, two of the three NGOs that came upto scratch are Indian "" Friends of Doon, and Wildlife Protection Society of India.

A pachyderm-ophile may chose to spread his donations among these three. In return, he can he sure that his money will really be used to make a difference on the ground. And he'll get reports from Elephantfamily to show what "returns" his "investment" is bringing in.

In India, of course, questions of "risk" and "return" do not concern donors, especially individuals, although at the institutional level "accountability" is slowly becoming important.

This last is important given that thousands of crores (Rs 5,045 crore, according to a 2002 Johns Hopkins estimate) come into the voluntary sector. It was in response to this conjunction of issues that Credibility Alliance was formed in 2004 by a number of Indian NGOs. But membership, despite a low annual fee of Rs 500, has barely crept up to 315.

Says Ranjan Rao Yerdoor, executive director, "Among Indian NGOs, the general feeling is, 'Where is the requirement?' There is an FCRA form that needs to be filled in by all bodies who want to get foreign funding. But of the 30,000 NGOs registered, barely 16,000 have filed it."

The two Indian recipients of Multifund bounty, of course, have all their papers in order. After all, they are recipients of large institutional donors.

Friends of Doon gets backing for the seven or eight projects it runs to protect the ecology of the Doon Valley and the nearby Rajaji National Park (which is where Elephantfamily comes in) from the Fish & Wildlife Foundation, Asha Foundation, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and so on. Belinda Wright of WPSI reports that her organisation maintains complete project-based accounts, with yearly and even monthly audits.

"We have been able to keep our overheads at 15-17 per cent. But with a total of 38 people on the payroll, we're very small. Large NGOs find it far more difficult to keep a similar check." Clearly, in the case of NGO accountability, small is beautiful.