New Rules for Child-Sponsorship Programs Aim to Curb Abusive Practices

New ethical standards that took effect this month are intended to curb misleading and abusive practices among non-profit groups that focus on poor children.

ALSO SEE:

The full text of the guidelines on child sponsorship

The standards govern the marketing and program operations conducted by charities that rely on child sponsorship — a method that links donors in developed countries with needy children in poor countries. The standards were approved by InterAction, a coalition of some 160 humanitarian charities that operate overseas, and replace weaker provisions drafted in 1990.

Unlike many voluntary standards by which charities agree to abide, these eventually are to be enforced by an independent accreditation group.

Only a handful of InterAction members engage in child-sponsorship programs, but they include such prominent organizations as Childreach, the Christian Children’s Fund, Save the Children, and World Vision. Donors to such programs agree to give a certain amount each month (typically between $20 and $25) to the charity to sponsor a child; in turn, they may receive the child’s photograph, artwork, and occasional letters and reports on his or her progress.

Childreach and Save the Children have used child sponsorship for some 60 years. Attaching a name and face to hunger and need in foreign countries has enabled those and other organizations to enlist and retain thousands of loyal donors. Today, an estimated 400,000 Americans are child sponsors, donating more than $400-million a year through such programs.

Critics charge that much of that money goes astray. Some never reaches the intended beneficiaries at all, they say, while some is pooled with other gifts for development projects that may benefit sponsored children only marginally. What’s more, information in marketing materials is often outdated, incomplete, or otherwise misleading about the children and their situations, critics allege.

“The standards are designed to hold us to our own rhetoric, to insure that we allocate the resources and implement the systems necessary to meet our promises,” says Samuel A. Worthington, executive director of Childreach, the U.S. affiliate of PLAN International, and a moving force behind the InterAction standards. “They are based on what we see as the best practices among our collective organizations.”

He adds: “As institutions involved in helping children and their families overseas, we’re dependent on public trust in our institutions. That trust needs to be bolstered by having an external body looking at us.”

Among other things, the new standards require child-sponsorship organizations:

* To regularly update the status of each sponsored child and report to the sponsor any significant changes that affect the child’s participation in the program.

* To insure that sponsored children and their families benefit in identifiable ways from sponsors’ contributions.

* To insure, in cases where sponsorship gifts are pooled to support community-development projects, that children in sponsored families are among the projects’ principal beneficiaries.

* To refrain from enrolling in a sponsorship program a child or family already enrolled by another charity, or from seeking more than one sponsor for a child without clearly informing the sponsors.

* To integrate a child-sponsorship program with a charity’s overall mission, rather than using it only as a fund-raising tool.

* To protect the privacy and dignity of sponsored children and their families.

* To protect donors from inappropriate solicitations by sponsored children and their families.

* To be accurate and current in the ways in which all marketing materials portray children and their families.

The standards, which have been under development for several years, are seen as especially important in light of negative press coverage in the past year or two about several prominent charities. Save the Children, for example, fired one staff member and reprimanded three others last March following revelations that it was still collecting money from the sponsors of two children in West Africa who had been dead for more than a year.

In a statement issued after the standards were published, Save the Children said that its long experience “has shown us firsthand that a successful child-sponsorship program requires incredible levels of diligence, oversight, and monitoring, and that even then, despite our best efforts, there will be some unexpected problems.”

Other groups have been accused of soliciting sponsors using photographs and biographical information that are years out of date, or of sending children only a few toys, books, or articles of clothing.

The accreditation process should help groups that comply with the standards distinguish themselves from organizations that run far looser operations, wide open to abuse.

Some prominent child-sponsorship organizations — including Compassion International and Children International — are not InterAction members and would not automatically be bound by the standards. But such charities can seek certification as complying with the standards even without joining InterAction, Mr. Worthington says.

InterAction this month intends to solicit proposals from organizations that could perform the independent evaluations necessary for accreditation. The task will be neither simple nor cheap: Child-sponsorship charities work in dozens of the world’s poorest countries, and evaluating their far-flung operations is expected to cost several hundred thousand dollars.

The push for standards that affect only a small subset of InterAction members reflects in part a fear that negative publicity will sour the public about all types of child sponsorships. About 2 per cent of Childreach sponsors canceled their gifts following critical stories last year, for example.

“Our greatest concern is that the image of sponsorship, painted with a broad brush, may become one that’s not as positive as it could be,” Mr. Worthington declares, “because this is one of the most effective ways to help children that exists.”

Copies of “Child Sponsorship Standards” are available from InterAction, 1717 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Suite 801, Washington 20036; (202) 667-8227.