Relief India Trust Clearing Some Fallacies and Misconceptions about NGOs

Introduction:

The Relief IndiaTrust is a renowned NGO in India with its operations in several parts of the country. They believe that there are a lot of fallacies and misconceptions about the operations and working of the NGOs which puts some added pressure on such organizations and affects their performance on both short and long term basis. The Relief India Trust finds it as their prime duty to clear all the misconceptions about their operations which are misleading a lot of individuals and groups such as their funders, government and the general public. 

The overhead cost:

The overhead cost of the projects associated by the NGOs is the main concern for many NGOs as they are questioned sometimes about this issue by their keen funders and sometimes by the government as well, especially when both the parties are working in collaboration for the social welfare work. Actually, if we have a good look at the different International NGOs (INGOs) then we will realize that all of them release an annual report about their finances including all their activities and the achievements earned during the year as well. Each project is broken down into its constituents. As an example, consider the Save the Children NGO and they showed in their 2013 annual report that 4.1percent they spent on administrative purposes, 11 percent on fundraising and about 85 percent on their programs. Now this is where the problem lies. The Save the Children NGO gives a very brief report about the financial transactions which doesn’t give any fine detail about their expenses. This is where the donors and other interested groups in an NGO raise their eyebrows and ask so many questions.

They are true at their place as the donors have all the rights in the world to know that where their money is spent. If the annual reports are not detailed, then the interested groups or anyone relevant to the NGO doesn’t have any idea, as where the money was spent by the NGO. The brief reports don’t have any information about the overhead cost or the cost incurred by damages and losses by the NGOs.

The best practice here is to release detailed annual reports which cover all types of cost incurred by different projects of the NGO. The administrative, damage and the overhead cost should be considered with the highest priority as that is what most of the donors are looking for in such annual reports.

The Employees in NGOs are overpaid:

It is again a very big and a common misconception about the NGOs. The staff at the NGOs is paid according to their experience and the value they have for the organization. The quality NGOs require the services of top management and administrative personnel. For this purpose, it is true that sometimes the top professionals are given extremely lucrative salary packages. Further, the expenses of the ReliefIndia Trust are very transparent as they produce very detailed annual reports with full break up of all the cost incurred.