In November 2019, I traveled to Malawi on a verification trip, to assure the program is working as intended. It is hard to imagine anyone taking your donations from the hands of needy students, but nevertheless we operate with the assumption that our money will be targeted and we work to remove and verify against all risks.
One of the main risks we have identified is whether we are reaching the truly needy students. We gather a lot of in depth information on their backgrounds, what their homes are made of, if their parents are alive, what they do for a living and more. Is that information correct or are we being tricked into funding a better off student? We have rigorous processes to verify that is not the case. We take a random square root sample of all our current students in school and we visit their homes. We cross check the situation we find with the information we have on file and confirm the students really are those in need. This is hard and time intensive work and we have found over the years that many other organisations do not invest in this level of assurance rigor.
So with 73 scholarships funded, we set off to visit the homes of 8 students currently in school, and visited the home village of a further alumni who has already graduated and is working as a teacher. We used 2 different techniques, on one occasion collecting the students from school and travelling with them to their homes, and on another, navigating ourselves to their homes using the contact information we have in our databases.
It was with mixed emotions that we found in all cases our students come from extremely needy backgrounds. On the one hand we were satisfied to find that our processes are working, we are targeting the most needy of students. On the other hand, it was difficult to experience and understand the challenges our scholars and their families face.
In all cases the scholars came from remote rural areas, living in homes made from mud bricks and mostly grass roofs. I did not have the remotest doubt that without our help our scholars would not be able to afford to go to school. Yet they were all bright young boys and girls, full of potential, and many of them have grades and character that fills you with belief about what their future holds.
In one case, we could not leave without doing something about the situation we found. Clara´s mum lives alone in a derelict mud hut with no roof and a sack for a door. Vulnerable to local men, no land to grow food, she frequently goes to sleep on an empty stomach. In this case we had to act and paid for a roof and secure door to be constructed before we left.
So this trip left me with a heavy heart on the one hand, but on the other, pride and confidence that our systems and processes our working and your donations are reaching those truly in need.
