President Nelson Mandela’s high-profile Children’s Fund has netted more than R12- million since its inception last year, with a further R24-million pledged to it, while humbler NGOs are battling for money. Marion Edmunds reports
Non-government organisations are frightened that President Nelson Mandela’s midas touch is proving so successful that it is threatening their own ability to raise funds to care for South Africa’s poor and homeless children.
These NGOs, many of which have lost foreign funders in post-apartheid South Africa, are desperate for larger donations from big business to help disadvantaged children, and are eyeing the millions in Mandela’s fund with envy and reservations.
Mandela’s Children’s Fund has received R12- million, with a further R24-million pledged to it over the next five years. There are now 28 members in the President’s Club –individuals, businesses and foreign governments that have matched Mandela’s donation to the fund and whose members are giving R150 000 or more over five years. The club includes US actor Denzil Washington, the Norwegian government, Barlows, Coca-Cola, Pierre Cardin and M-Net.
The marketing director of the South African National Council for Child and Family Welfare, Hennie Oosthuizen, said this week: “I believe that the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund has the potential to take donors away from child welfare organisations because it can offer exposure to donors, and all we can offer is accountability. We need some of that money in our organisation and we could use it
The chief executive trustee of the Fund, Jeremy Ractliffe, responded by saying, “I do not know of any of our donors who have given to the Mandela’s Children Fund through not funding some other NGO in the field we concentrate on … I would welcome discussions with NGOs who feel that they have lost out to the Fund.”
It cannot be disputed that Mandela’s name sanctifies his Children’s Fund, giving it a political and emotional appeal of international standing. (Those who become part of the President’s Club receive a certificate signed by Mandela, as well as a photograph of the donor with Mandela.)
Smaller, humbler NGOs — which have worked for decades in South Africa’s forgotten communities — are throwing up their hands in despair, saying that they just cannot compete with the Mandela name. This is ironic, given the fact that these NGOs were the unofficial conduit for foreign funds during apartheid years, funds which, in many instances, helped prepare South Africa and the African National Congress for the transition to democracy.
Chairperson of the Save the Children Fund, Mary Hanna, said this week that it was becoming increasingly difficult to raise money and that high-profile funds were attracting donations which had previously gone to Save the Children.
“The demands are increasing and the funds are not … we have had to severely curtail our nutrition programmes in places like the Northern Province, for example, and as far as we know there is no other organisation working there to take our place.”
Johannesburg Child Welfare has retrenched 22 social workers this year to cope with the drop in funding, according to Anne Bown, manager of funding and public relations.
Bown said people were much less generous than they used to be and that they were struggling to find donors, especially needed as the state had cut its subsidy by R1-million, and foreign governments were giving to the Reconstruction and Development Programme.
The funding and development manager of the Child Welfare Society in Cape Town, Jetty Botes, said that the society’s 1996 to 1997 budget was short by more than a million rand and that it would have to cut projects unless saved by a windfall.
“Corporations provide 15 to 20 percent of our funding currently — this is less than it used to be,” she said.
Ractliffe said this week that information and application forms were freely available and that he had distributed R3 500 brochures about the Fund.
He said the Fund focused on organisations that were on the coal-face of development work and working directly with communities. The fund’s brochure states that it assists organisations working with disadvantaged children, with a particular emphasis on children in detention, children who have had no formal education, who are handicapped, and homeless children.
Ractliffe said 92 grants had already been made, many to projects involving street children. Altogether R1,5-million had been disbursed and more than R5-million would be paid out in 1996, he said. The Fund intended to allocate not less than 75 percent of the interest from its capital base and 25 percent of its annual opening capital to projects every year, he said.
The Mandela Children’s Fund has, in conjunction with other NGOs, helped to fund a Youth Development Centre at Leeuwkop Prison in Gauteng, a similar centre at Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal, and has donated R38 000 to the NGO Streetwise. The decisions about which NGOs and organisations to fund would be made at quarterly meetings by a committee of 14 managing trustees.
While the NGOs’ official line is one of regret and restraint, their off-the-record comments tend to be resentful and, at time, vicious. “Nobody wants to say anything because it is politically incorrect to criticise the Mandela fund,” said the source.
But Ractliffe is not exempt from criticism. He has been accused of trying to turn the Mandela fund into a personal empire, and of eluding telephone calls by NGOs attempting to establish information about the fund.
“Ractliffe is the fund,” said a source. “You can’t get past him.”
Ractliffe said, “I have no desire to create a personal empire. All the information about the Fund is freely available. People who want to talk to me should keep trying, because I am always here.”