How a Small Donation Is Actually Spent

Most people who give to a small organisation never find out what happened to the money. They are told it changed a life, which tells them nothing. This is an attempt to say plainly where a small gift to us goes, what it cannot avoid paying for, and how you can check.

Lift A Life Foundation is a Community Based Organisation registered with the County Government of Kiambu, certificate RSC/3811/CBO/2024, issued on 22 February 2024, in Ruiru Sub County, Gitothua Ward. We are registered for three activities: caring for orphans and vulnerable children, the elderly and persons with disabilities; advocacy; and networking and community building. We are small, and small changes what money is spent on.

What the money is spent on

Fares come first. Almost everything we do starts with somebody physically reaching a household. A person we look after is not in an office. They are in a house some distance away, and getting there and back costs a fare each time. Regular contact, which is the most useful thing we do, is mostly a transport cost repeated week after week.

School requirements are the next category. A child is in school until a specific thing is missing: a uniform item, a book, an examination fee, something the school has asked for and the household cannot produce. The gift that keeps a child in class is usually a small, specific purchase against a specific demand, not a general contribution to education.

Repairs and replacements. A phone that stops working cuts a person off from everyone who might check on them. A walking aid or a spectacle frame that breaks takes away independence until it is fixed. These are small jobs with a large effect.

Then the costs of existing at all. A bank account carries charges. Money sent by mobile carries a transaction cost. A receipt book has to be bought. The registration certificate has to be renewed every year, and renewal has a fee. None of this reaches a child directly. All of it is required for an organisation that can be held to account to exist.

Why we do not promise every shilling reaches a child

It is a common promise and it is almost never true. Any organisation that says it has decided to call transport, paperwork and bank charges something other than spending. We would rather say it straight: some of what you give is consumed by the act of delivering the rest.

The alternative is worse. An organisation with no receipt book cannot show you what it bought. One that does not renew its registration stops being an organisation. One that never pays a fare never visits anyone. The overhead is not a leak in the pipe. It is the pipe.

What we can promise is that the categories above are the whole list. Nobody draws a salary from donations. There is no office rent. When we cannot say how much went where in a given period, it is because the amounts are too small to have been added up yet, and we would rather publish nothing than publish something we cannot stand behind. That is also why we publish no impact numbers yet.

Who signs

We have three registered officials: Eunice Wangari Muthoni as Chairperson, Judith Muthoni Wangari as Secretary and Peter Minja Macharia as Treasurer. Money leaves the bank account only when any two of the three sign. One person cannot move it alone.

The point of the rule is not suspicion of any of us. It is that a small organisation is run by a handful of people who trust each other, and trust is not an audit trail. Two signatures mean every payment was seen by a second person before it happened.

The diary and the quarterly return

The diary is the primary record. Each visit, each purchase and each fare is written down as it happens: who went where, what was bought, what it was for, and which receipt covers it. It is kept by hand and it is not elegant. Its value is that it is written at the time, not reconstructed later from memory.

The quarterly return is the diary summarised for the county. As a registered CBO we file returns every quarter with the County Government of Kiambu. The return draws on the diary and the bank record, and it is the document an outside body can compare against what we say publicly. Together with annual renewal, it means that somebody who is not us looks at our record four times a year.

The diary, the receipts, the bank statement and the quarterly return form a chain. Each link can be checked against the one before it. That chain is the whole basis on which we ask to be trusted.

What the paybill is and how to see the record

Donations by M-Pesa go to paybill 400200, account 1151353. The paybill number is the bank's collection channel and the account number identifies our account within it. Money sent that way lands in the organisation's bank account, not in anyone's personal phone, and it appears on the same statement that the two signatories control. That is why we ask people to use it rather than send money to any individual.

If you have given and want to know what happened to it, ask. We will show you the diary entries and receipts for the period in which your gift was spent, and the corresponding lines on the bank record. We will not show you another donor's details, and we will not name a child or a household in a way that identifies them. Within those limits, the record is open to anyone who has contributed and asks to see it.

We would rather be asked than assumed honest. If you want to give knowing what you have read here, you can donate, and if you would like to see the record first, contact us and we will arrange it.