Child-Sponsorship Programs -- Idea Of Saving One Child Is Marketing Myth

THE AGENCIES, which defend their use of individual children's faces to drive the fund-raising engine, say donors understand that money does not go to benefit individual children, but to the broader community in which the children live.

In Mali, a major children's charity accepted thousands of dollars from donors to sponsor children who were dead.

In Brazil, a child-sponsorship agency spent more money on dance lessons and computers in one project area than it did on food and health care for children.

In Haiti, a charity denied malaria medicine to a sponsored child, saying it does not provide free care or medicine lest it promote "dependency."

Americans are most familiar with child sponsorship through nightly TV fund-raising appeals that promise miraculous results for a donation of less than a dollar a day.

What potential donors hear

Potential donors are told they can transform the life of a poor child from one ravaged by disease and despair to one filled with health and hope merely by becoming sponsors.

But a yearlong Chicago Tribune inquiry into four of the leading child-sponsorship organizations - Save the Children Federation, Childreach, Children International and the Christian Children's Fund - found this promise of an affordable miracle to be hollow. Sponsored youngsters often received few or no benefits and, in the worst cases, children had been dead for years while unwitting donors continued to sponsor them.

The Tribune found that the notion of individual child sponsorship exists primarily as a marketing myth. Costly, time-consuming and hampered by the logistical difficulties posed by some of the poorest and most remote places on Earth, child sponsorship succeeds far better as a fund-raising engine than it does as a vehicle for providing benefits to the children whose faces sustain it.

Child-sponsorship agencies vigorously defend their approach, maintaining that their donors clearly understand that money does not go to benefit individual children, but to the broader community in which the children live.

"They know it is going for things like schools and water and clinics and village health workers," said Charles MacCormack, president of Save the Children Federation. But, he argues that SCF's emphasis on individual children in emotional TV commercials, such as those featuring former actress Sally Struthers, is necessary. "An awful lot of people who sign on to a personal human being will not sign on to a well."

Competition is noted

James Gibson, a Childreach official in Haiti, agreed. "In America . . . there are more organizations competing, and the American public is more inclined to respond to emotional rather than intellectual appeals."

Overall, the Tribune reported on 12 children sponsored through four agencies starting in the spring of 1995. The journalists made the donations under their own names, without any reference to the Tribune.

All received photos of their sponsored children, dossiers detailing their lives and a stream of mailings from the organizations, often including pleas for additional contributions.

Then, in May 1997, without alerting any of the organizations, reporters traveled to Africa, Asia, South and North America to track down the children they had sponsored.

In one instance, a Tribune reporter sponsored a young Malian girl through Save the Children.

But when the reporter arrived in the child's remote village, it was only to discover that the little girl, Korotoumou Kone, had been dead for nearly two years.

The charity had accepted $480, or two years' worth of sponsorship money, on behalf of Korotoumou Kone, who had died less than three months after her sponsorship began.

At first, SCF executives at the charity's Westport, Conn., headquarters called the case unprecedented and an aberration.

But a subsequent SCF investigation in Mali uncovered 22 other cases in which sponsored children had been dead for varying periods of time before sponsors were notified. In four instances, the sponsors were never notified.

The Tribune's inquiry already has sparked a number of changes at Save the Children, including newly instituted annual on-site reviews of all field offices; strengthened internal oversight of sponsorship programs and staff; and an overhaul of the agency's beleaguered database, which is plagued by error in the identity and location of sponsored children.

Other sponsorship agencies are reviewing their operations and practices as a result of the Tribune examination. In Washington, InterAction, a coalition of 160 private relief and development agencies, has created an advisory panel of outside experts to review child-sponsorship practices, improve accountability to sponsors and consider setting up an oversight mechanism that may include an accreditation system for sponsorship organizations.

The panel was set up at the request of child-sponsorship members of InterAction, including Save the Children, Childreach, Christian Children's Fund, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, Food for the Hungry and World Vision.

Where programs succeed

The Tribune found that child-sponsorship agencies succeed best in implementing broad-brush health, education, sanitation and agricultural programs that benefit communities around the world.

But the child-sponsorship organizations also consistently failed to deliver on the basic promise made in their appeals: to make a positive and lasting change in the life of the sponsored child.

At Save the Children, that failure found its most extreme expression in the 24 cases of children whose deaths were ignored or long overlooked because of bureaucratic sloppiness, staff negligence and inadequate supervision.

The agency also said it never tracks a sponsor's contribution because it pools all of its resources into a common fund. SCF officials said the organization doesn't monitor whether the donor's money reaches the sponsored child or even the youngster's village.

Subsequent to the Tribune's inquiry, Save the Children issued reprimands to three Mali staff members for failing to report the deaths of children in a timely manner. A fourth worker received a reprimand for fabricating letters from a dead child to his sponsors.

In light of evidence of falsified correspondence between Malian children and their sponsors, SCF ordered a global review of correspondence procedures.

A major problem the Tribune encountered in child sponsorship involved promises the charities made but found all but impossible to keep.

In Haiti, for example, Rhode Island-based Childreach promised a Tribune reporter that it would tend to the medical, educational and nutritional needs of Pierre Richard Etienne in return for a pledge of $264, the standard annual contribution for Childreach.

After Pierre Richard got malaria, though, Childreach refused to help when his mother went to a clinic sponsored by the organization. It also didn't pay his full private-school tuition of $44 so he could stay in school. His family came up $9 short, and he was forced to leave school. He eventually had to repeat the grade, even though he was the smartest child in his class.

Differences in the organizations examined by the Tribune often reflected the variations in their operations and philosophy.

Children International, a Kansas City based organization, touts itself as the low-cost leader of child sponsorship. It focuses on providing benefits directly to children rather than engaging in large-scale community development programs.

Tribune reporters found that Children International attracts donors by charging a monthly sponsorship fee of only $12. But once donors sign on as sponsors for children, though, Children International routinely solicits extra money.

The Tribune found that providing inappropriate, useless or unwanted benefits was common.

In Brazil, for example, little Cleidiane da Silva was offered dancing lessons under her sponsorship through Richmond, Va.-based Christian Children's Fund (CCF). What the 8-year-old girl desperately needed, however, was medicine and food, as a Tribune reporter discovered when he found the child in a slum outside a beach resort town.

The CCF 1997 budget for its outpost in Cleidiane's neighborhood provided more than $10,000 for computers and dancing instruction, almost twice what it spent on food and medical care.

There is little independent regulation of the charities. The National Charities Information Bureau (NCIB), the Better Business Bureau's Philanthropic Advisory Service and the smaller American Institute of Philanthropy are the three principal private-sector watchdogs.

These groups, which have no legal authority, admit they lack the resources to evaluate the operations of child-sponsorship organizations.

Unlike some European countries, the U.S. has no federal agency charged with regulating sponsorship groups and other non-profit charities. State agencies respond to some complaints often by simply referring donors to watchdog agencies, such as the Better Business Bureau.

What IRS requires

The IRS requires charities to file an annual Form 990 in which the organizations must report how much of their income is spent on programs, overhead and fund-raising. Form 990 was intended to serve as an informational tool for donors, and under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights passed by Congress last year charities must provide their current Form 990 to anyone who requests it.

The NCIB reviews about 300 charities once every three years and publishes a Wise Giving Guide.

James Bausch, president of the NCIB, said he welcomed the idea of an independent board such as the one proposed by InterAction.

Chicago Tribune correspondents Michael Tackett, Mike Dorning, Graeme Zielinski and John Crewdson contributed to this report.