While television pundits will use colorful language such as how Afghanistan is on the precipice of disaster, or on the verge of complete economic and infrastructural collapse, the fact of the matter is that the disaster, collapse, or whatever other adjective you may use to describe it, is already here.
Nearly 43 years of perpetual conflict, natural disasters, freezing of international funding, the COVID-19 pandemic, the list of woes faced by Afghanistan is as endless as the list of war crimes against its population are long. With the advent of winter, there is acute cold, lack of insulated shelters, warm clothing, and fuel for heating. More children than ever today are at the risk of acute malnutrition, disease, and death in Afghanistan, by some estimates over 5 million of them.
Various NGOS, aid agencies, and services are risking tremendously to provide essential services on the ground, including healthcare, nutrition, and loans. A question often posed is, if someone from outside of Afghanistan were to donate to groups that claim to help people inside of Afghanistan, what percentage of their money actually goes towards benefiting the citizens of this beleaguered nation?
How to determine which organization to donate ultimately comes down to researching their overheads. Generally speaking, there are three broad categories of overheads.
Organizations with low overheads spend less than about 10% of their revenue on administrative and upkeep, with roughly 90% or more of the money you donate on actual goods and services that support their missions. A good example is Doctors without borders, which is at the cutoff for this metric, with 89% of the total revenue goes towards on-ground efforts.
Medium overheads account for 20-30% going towards overheads, and this will likely be the vast majority of known charities, NGOs and aid agencies operating today inside Afghanistan. Examples include the World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Meanwhile, the high overhead category includes charities that spend more than 30% of their revenue on administrative, salary, and upkeep costs.
Ultimately research is critical when determining which organization to donate to. Aggregate websites such as CharityWatch, GuideStar, and GiveWell keep updated information on various charities across the world (but particularly in America), and may serve as a good starting point.
In addition, there are many questions that you should ask before you commit your money to a charity that claims to help those on ground in Afghanistan. For example, do your research, see what work they have done in the past, if any news coverage has highlighted them. A red flag is complaints against the organizations, allegations of corruption or embezzlement. A key element to look for is their marketing material and whether it is solution focused. A lot of charities will drone on and on about the problems being faced without a word on how they p0lan to solve said problems. This is a major red flag as well. Finally, write or call the organization directly ask what percentage of the donations actually go to help people on the ground, and ask for website documentation of this statistic. If the responses are cagey, that in of itself will be evidence enough.
The point here is that there is no easy answer to “who should I donate to”. This is because you may be more interested in nutrition, or healthcare, or winter management, or financial stability, and the area where you are keen will determine which charity you should focus on. Second, this is your hard-earned money, you should leverage it well, and the only responsible way to do that is to gather all possible information on the charity you are about to donate to, before you donate to it.
The author serves as a Research Fellow at the Center for Research and Security Studies, Islamabad, is a freelance journalist. He can be reached via zeeshan.salahuddin@gmail.com and tweets @zeesalahuddin.
