… would percentage would actually be spent on food/shelter/hygiene stuff? Thanks for any help on this.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/ offers a lot of information on American charities - obviously, the financial running of every individual charity is different.
However, I think you’re being misguided to expect a large chunk of the money to be spent on the tangible items you mention. Any of us could go and buy a huge stack of tents and medical supplies and bottles of water. But we’d then have to find a way to get them to Darfur. That’s the most expensive bit - it’s not as if there’s aircraft sitting around waiting to be used free-of-charge, nor do lawyers waive their fees if the client is a charity, and so on.
Well, yeah, often they do. It’s called working pro bono, and many lawyers volunteer a great deal of time to it. I have a vague idea that a certain amount of it might be required in some areas. As mercenary as many lawyers may be, they -are- people, and there’s many that volunteer their time for charitable organizations and pet causes.
Except for that very minor detail I agree with your post. I would guess that, like most businesses, the greatest expense is employees. Even with volunteers helping out, most charities maintain a full-time staff, and need it.
Oxfam, one of the biggest charities working in Sudan, claims that only 3% of their charitable expenditure goes to management and administration. (PDF file; see page 23.) I find that hard to believe, myself–I work in the fundraising field, and our sector would consider a 12.5% overhead to be pretty good. I think that some overhead might also fall into their “programme development, management, and support” category. Nevertheless, I’ve known a lot of people who have volunteered their time for Oxfam, and–truth be told–they don’t pay their salaried employees very well, so their overhead may well be lower than our target. As a wild guess, I’d say that their overhead would be about 10%. As for how much of your pound goes into food, hygiene and other aid–well, I’d say it’s somewhere between 90p (subtracting just overhead) and 67p (subtracting Oxfam’s stated administrative and programmatical costs).
My old friend Alan from Oxford is in Sudan now, I believe–he is a retired engineer who has worked on water projects for Oxfam in Rwanda and Botswana in the past. I won’t see him again 'till next year at the earliest…if I remember this thread, I’ll ask him.