What a Year of a Small CBO Actually Costs

Most charity budgets are built around the part of the work that photographs well. A food parcel, a wheelchair, a mattress, a term of school fees. Underneath each of those sits a second set of costs that got it there, and almost nobody wants to fund those.

This article names them. It does not put figures against them. Our accounts have not been audited, so what follows is a list of categories rather than a budget. When there are checked figures to show, they will appear here.

The costs that do not photograph

Transport. Reaching a household means getting there and getting back. Fare for the people going, hired transport when supplies have to move, fuel when a vehicle is available. Getting there is the difference between a donation and a delivery.

Airtime. Almost everything is arranged by phone first. Checking a family will be home. Confirming with a centre before a visit. Calling a county office again about an entitlement a household is owed. Advocacy is mostly calling back, and every call costs.

Printing and stationery. Registration obliges us to keep records, so they must exist on paper and not only in somebody's memory. Forms, receipts, visit notes, written consent before a child appears in anything we publish.

Bank and transaction charges. Money does not move for free. Something is deducted at almost every step between the giver and the household, whether or not anyone budgeted for it.

Somebody's time. The diary, the returns, the follow-up calls, the person who remembers which family was promised what. It is the cost left out most often, usually because a volunteer is absorbing it quietly.

What the certificate actually requires

We are a Community Based Organisation registered with the County Government of Kiambu, Ruiru Sub County, under certificate RSC/3811/CBO/2024. Registration is not something that happened once and was finished with.

It renews every year. There is a renewal to pay and a process to go through, and the process costs somebody a day as well as the fee. Letting it lapse puts the standing of the organisation in question.

The certificate also requires a diary of activities and quarterly statistical returns to the county. That is why the stationery line exists, and why somebody sits down with the records every quarter, busy or not.

None of it is optional. It is the price of being an organisation that can be checked rather than a group of well meaning individuals, and being checkable is the basis on which we ask anybody to trust us.

Why this money is the hardest to raise

Giving is easier when it has a face and a shape. A named person, a named item, a photograph afterwards. That instinct is a good one, and we are not going to criticise it.

It does leave a gap. A donor will fund the wheelchair and rarely the trips it took to work out who needed it, fit it, and check later that it was still in use. The item is fundable. The journey that made it useful is not.

That is a blind spot in how giving is organised rather than a fault in givers. Everybody is behaving reasonably, a necessary category of cost still goes unfunded, and organisations end up finding quieter ways to cover it.

The organisation that claims no running costs

You will sometimes see it advertised that everything given reaches the beneficiary and nothing goes on running the organisation. It is worth a moment more thought than it usually gets.

There are only two ways it can be true. Either the running costs are real and somebody is paying them invisibly out of their own pocket, or the work that would generate them is not happening.

The first is common, and it looks like generosity until you see what it is. An official paying fare out of household money is subsidising a donor. It holds until that person runs out, and then the work stops without warning.

The second should worry a giver more. An organisation with no transport cost is not reaching households. One with no airtime cost is not following anything up. Those absences show up as a clean budget and mean close to the opposite of efficiency.

Why we would rather say it out loud

The usual fix is to fold these costs into a project budget, so that a delivery quietly carries the fare that made it possible. Almost everyone does it, and it makes the real cost of the work impossible to see from outside.

We would rather name the categories. Transport, airtime, annual renewal, bank charges, printing and stationery, somebody's time. Naming them is the only way a giver can decide, with open eyes, to fund the unglamorous half instead of assuming it funds itself.

What we are not doing is attaching amounts. We will not publish a figure until it has been counted and checked, and that applies to our costs as much as to our impact. A category we can stand behind beats a total we would have to defend by guessing.

If you give regularly and without conditions, this is the half you are funding, and it is the half that decides whether anything else arrives. Details are on the donate page, and if you would rather ask what a particular cost covers first, ask us.