In Mali, a major children’s charity accepted thousands of dollars from donors to sponsor children who were dead.
In Africa, a charity worker fabricated letters to a donor on behalf of a child who had been dead for nearly four years.
In Brazil, a child sponsorship agency spent more money on dance lessons and computers in one project area than it did on food and health care for children.
In Haiti, a charity denied malaria medicine to a sponsored child, explaining that it does not provide free care or medicine lest it promote “dependency.”
Americans are most familiar with child sponsorship through nightly television fundraising appeals that promise miraculous results for a donation of less than a dollar a day.
Potential donors are told they can transform the life of a desperately poor child from one ravaged by disease and despair to one filled with health and hope merely by becoming sponsors.
But a yearlong Tribune inquiry into four of the leading child sponsorship organizations–Save the Children Federation Inc., Childreach, Children International and the Christian Children’s Fund–found this promise of an affordable miracle to be achingly hollow. Sponsored youngsters often received few or no benefits, and in the worst cases children had been dead for years while unwitting donors continued to sponsor them.
The Tribune found that the notion of individual child sponsorship exists primarily as a marketing myth. Costly, time-consuming and hampered by the logistical difficulties posed by some of the poorest and most remote places on Earth, child sponsorship succeeds far better as a fundraising engine than it does as a vehicle for providing benefits to the children whose faces sustain it.
Child sponsorship agencies vigorously defend their approach, maintaining that their donors clearly understand that money does not go to benefit individual children, but to the broader community in which the children live.
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“They know it is going for things like schools and water and clinics and village health workers,” said Charles MacCormack, president of Save the Children Federation Inc. But he argues that SCF’s emphasis on individual children in emotional television commercials, such as those featuring actress Sally Struthers, is necessary. “An awful lot of people who sign on to a personal human being will not sign on to a well.”
James Gibson, a Childreach official in Haiti, agreed. “In America . . . there are more organizations competing, and the American public is more inclined to respond to emotional rather than intellectual appeals.”
Overall, the Tribune reported on 12 children sponsored through four agencies starting in the spring of 1995. The journalists made the donations under their own names, without any reference to the Tribune.
Some reporters sponsored children for a year, some for longer. Some wrote to the children, others didn’t. Some let their sponsorships lapse. Others lapsed, then asked for reinstatement–all done in an effort to duplicate a variety of sponsorship experiences.
All received photos of their sponsored children, dossiers detailing their lives and a continuous stream of mailings from the organizations, often including pleas for additional contributions.
Then, in May 1997, without alerting any of the sponsorship organizations, reporters traveled to Africa, Asia, South and North America to track down the children they had sponsored and to find out what difference their donations had made in those children’s lives.
The results of the Tribune inquiry appear as a 16-page special report in Section 2. A second special report will run on Sunday, March 22.
In one instance, a Tribune reporter sponsored a young Malian girl through Save the Children, one of the nation’s best-known child sponsorship groups.
When the reporter arrived in the child’s remote village, she discovered that the little girl, Korotoumou Kone, had been dead for nearly two years.
The charity had accepted $480, or two years worth of sponsorship money, on behalf of Korotoumou Kone, who had died less than three months after her sponsorship began.
At first, federation executives at the charity’s headquarters in Westport, Conn., called the case unprecedented and an aberration.
A subsequent federation investigation in Mali uncovered 22 other cases in which sponsored children had been dead for varying periods of time before sponsors were notified. Two youngsters had been dead for five years before their sponsors were informed. In four instances, the sponsors were never notified.
The Tribune’s inquiry already has sparked a number of changes at Save the Children, including newly instituted annual on-site reviews of all field offices; strengthened internal oversight of sponsorship programs and staff; and an overhaul of the agency’s beleaguered database, which is plagued by errors in the identity and location of sponsored children.
Other sponsorship agencies are reviewing their operations and practices as a result of the Tribune examination. In Washington, InterAction, a coalition of 160 private relief and development agencies, has created an advisory panel of outside experts to review child sponsorship practices, improve accountability to sponsors and consider setting up an oversight mechanism that may include an accreditation system for sponsorship organizations.
“We’re significantly concerned about some of the issues the Tribune raised,” said Michael Kiernan, spokesman for InterAction. “We need to put some objective criteria in place, with maybe some spot checks, so we can convince the public and the media that they (sponsorship groups) are on the up and up,” he said.
“Right now, people have better and more objective information to buy and invest in a refrigerator than (in) a charity.”
The panel was set up at the request of child sponsorship members of InterAction, including Save the Children, Childreach, Christian Children’s Fund, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, Food for the Hungry and World Vision.
The Tribune found that child sponsorship agencies succeed best in implementing broad-brush health, education, sanitation and agricultural programs that benefit communities around the world. Many a well, school or clinic would not exist were it not for help extended by organizations such as Save the Children.
But the child sponsorship organizations also consistently failed to deliver on the basic promise made in their appeals: To make a positive and lasting change in the life of the sponsored child.
At Save the Children, that failure found its most extreme expression in the 24 cases of children whose deaths were ignored or long overlooked because of bureaucratic sloppiness, staff negligence and inadequate supervision.
The agency also said it never tracks a sponsor’s contribution because it pools all of its resources into a common fund. Federation officials said the organization doesn’t monitor whether the donor’s money reaches the sponsored child or even the youngster’s village.
After the Tribune’s inquiry, Save the Children issued reprimands to three Mali staff members for failing to report the deaths of children in a timely manner. A fourth worker received a reprimand for fabricating letters from a dead child to his sponsors.
In the 10 cases where Malian children were dead for more than a year before sponsors were notified, the federation contacted those sponsors to offer refunds or credit toward future sponsorships.
In light of evidence of falsified correspondence between Malian children and their sponsors, the federation ordered a global review of correspondence procedures “to safeguard the agency and our sponsors from what occurred in Mali.” In a memo to all field offices, Save the Children said such falsifications were “an intolerable breach of sponsor trust and we must make sure it never happens again.”
A major recurrent problem the Tribune encountered in child sponsorship involved promises the charities made but found hard to keep.
In Haiti, for example, Rhode Island-based Childreach promised a Tribune reporter that it would tend to the medical, educational and nutritional needs of Pierre Richard Etienne in return for a pledge of $264, the standard annual contribution for Childreach.
After Pierre Richard was struck with malaria, though, Childreach refused to help when his mother went to a clinic sponsored by the organization. It also didn’t pay his full private school tuition of $44 so he could stay in school. His family came up $9 short, and he was forced to leave school. He eventually had to repeat the grade, even though he was the smartest kid in his class.
Differences in the organizations examined by the Tribune often reflected the variations in their operations and philosophy.
Children International, an organization based in Kansas City, Mo., touts itself as the low-cost leader of child sponsorship.
It focuses on providing benefits directly to children rather than engaging in the large-scale community development programs some of its competitors prefer.
Tribune reporters found that Children International’s expertise in marketing often overshadowed its skills in child sponsorship. The organization attracts donors by charging a monthly sponsorship fee of only $12, the lowest in the industry. Once donors become sponsors for children, though, Children International routinely solicits extra money for Christmas, Easter, the child’s birthday and International Special Hug Day, a holiday the organization invented to generate additional income.
One of the charity’s former marketing experts said the extra contributions often generated more money for the “low cost” Children International than donors paid to its higher-priced competitors.
The Tribune found that providing inappropriate, useless or unwanted benefits was common among sponsorship agencies, ranging from outsize clothing to non-functioning water pumps.
In Brazil, for example, little Maria Cleidiane da Silva was offered dancing lessons under her sponsorship through Richmond, Va.-based Christian Children’s Fund. What the 8-year-old girl desperately needed, however, was medicine and food, as a Tribune reporter discovered when he found the child in a slum outside a beach resort town.
Despite the $144 donated on the girl’s behalf and the fund’s pledge to provide her with “food, clothing, education and medical care,” Cleidiane suffered from severe skin infections. Later a doctor told the Tribune reporter that the child bordered on second-degree malnutrition.
The fund actually had closed its medical clinic three years earlier and its tiny dispensary was not equipped to fill prescriptions for the kind of anti-bacterial medicine Cleidiane needed. Moreover, the fund does not provide food, but “nutritional advice,” a local fund worker explained.
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The Christian Children’s Fund’s 1997 budget for its outpost in Cleidiane’s neighborhood provided more than $10,000 for computers for teenagers and dancing instruction, almost twice what it spent on food and medical care.
In most cases, officials in the charities had the best of intentions. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, Childreach tried to convert a direct aid program to one designed to provide loans to poor people. But neighborhood residents rebelled at the thought of borrowing money to pay for building materials they used to get for free.
At one point, they denounced the charity as greedy and exploitive and tried to stone the charity’s officials. Childreach eventually transferred operation of the program to another agency.
There is little independent regulation of the charities. The National Charities Information Bureau, the Better Business Bureau’s Philanthropic Advisory Service and the smaller American Institute of Philanthropy are the three principal private-sector watchdogs.
These groups, which have no legal authority, admit they lack the resources to evaluate the child sponsorship organizations operating throughout the world.
Unlike some European countries, the U.S. has no federal agency charged with regulating sponsorship groups and other non-profit charities.
State agencies respond to some complaints, but often by simply referring donors to watchdog agencies, such as the Better Business Bureau.
“One of the big misconceptions out there is that the non-profits are really regulated closely,” said Mark Pacella, a senior deputy in the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office, whose charities division is known as among the nation’s most aggressive. “Government just doesn’t have the resources. No one does.”
The Internal Revenue Service requires charities to annually file a Form 990 in which the organizations must report how much of their income is spent on programs, overhead and fundraising. Form 990 was intended to serve as an informational tool for donors and under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights passed by Congress last year charities must provide their current Form 990 to anyone who requests it. However, the form is complex and provides few details of where the money actually goes.
James Bausch, president of the National Charities Information Bureau, said he welcomed the idea of an independent board such as the one created by InterAction, which will be chaired by Carol Lancaster, a professor at Georgetown University and a former deputy director of the State Department’s Agency for International Development.
But Bausch disagreed with Kiernan, the InterAction official who said consumers shopping for a refrigerator get more information than that provided on child sponsorship agencies.
“I guess I’m surprised that Mr. Kiernan doesn’t have a lemon for a refrigerator if he believes that. What Consumer Reports does for refrigerators, we do for charities,” said Bausch, who is a former president of Save the Children.
“I think there are organizations like NCIB that can give a great deal of credibility to charities, overall. We do evaluate InterAction, and Mr. Kiernan is not part of the evaluation process or he wouldn’t have said this,” Bausch said.
The charities information bureau reviews some 300 charities once every three years and publishes a score card-like Wise Giving Guide that NCIB describes as “evaluating” charities rather than “approving” them.
Over the course of the Tribune’s inquiry, top executives at Save the Children, Christian Children’s Fund and Childreach made themselves and staff members available for interviews, providing documents, financial information and researching questions in response to Tribune requests.
Officials at one organization, Children International, declined to provide detailed information about their operation.
James Cook, the chief executive officer of Children International, accused Tribune reporters of numerous instances of misconduct, including misrepresenting themselves as employees of Children International to get information. Joseph Gripkey, the organization’s executive chairman, which is an emeritus position, did speak with Tribune reporters in a phone interview.
Rhode Island-based Childreach leveled similar allegations but on Friday declined to provide detailed accounts of the alleged incidents and said it considered the allegations a “non-issue,” according to Steve Sookikian, a spokesman for the organization.
Tribune editors said that they examined the allegations and found them to be baseless.
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About this special report
Between 1992 and 1996, Americans donated more than $850 million to four of the largest and best-known child sponsorship organizations: Save the Children, the Christian Children’s Fund, Children International and Childreach. That money was sent on faith that it would reach an African village, a Pacific island or a Latin American slum and, in the language of the Christian Children’s Fund, “work a miracle” in the life of the little girl or boy whose photographs and letters are the sponsor’s only evidence of the child’s existence. To determine whether such faith is warranted, in 1995 Tribune reporters and editors began sponsoring these 12 children through four organizations without any mention of their Tribune affiliation. Last May, with no assistance from the four sponsorship organizations, Tribune reporters set out to learn how the lives of the sponsored children had been affected. Part One of this special report recounts what the Tribune learned about two of those organizations, Save the Children and Childreach. Part Two, which appears next week, examines Children International and the Christian Children’s Fund.
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: The complete Special Report, with interactive portraits of some of the Tribune sponsorships. Read the promises and assurances made to the Tribune sponsors, then learn what Tribune reporters discovered when they went in search of the sponsored children. chicago.tribune.com/go/children