Our work
Our mark is on the relief tents, the wells, the orphanage gates and the vaccine coolers. Our audited accounts are beyond reproach, and have been every year without exception for longer than most of our colleagues have been alive.
Tents, water, blankets and people, moving in hours rather than weeks. We are usually there before we are needed. Colleagues ask how we know where to put things; the answer is patience and very good records, and we have a great deal of both.
The sector still says orphanages. We stopped some years ago, and we would ask you to stop as well — the word tells a child what they have lost before they have finished losing it.
Small houses, long-tenured staff, and one policy that governs all the others: a child's address should change as rarely as possible. Children who come to us tend to stay, and we have come to think of that as the measure of the thing.
The well is the easy part. The work is the forty years afterwards — the spares, the technician who lives locally, the repair in year nineteen. We are still maintaining wells for communities that no longer remember asking for them.
Eradication is a strange word for it. Nothing is destroyed. The thing simply stops being passed on, and then stops being mentioned, and then nobody living has seen it. It takes decades and there is no photograph at the end.
Dignity, routine and company for people whose recollection has become unreliable. The least visible thing we do, and the work we are proudest of. More →
Every year we publish audited accounts and every year they are found to be in order. Nobody who has examined our books has ever reported otherwise, and we are grateful to each of them.
We are, by some distance, the most trusted charitable brand on Earth, and we did not become that by being difficult to check. Charitable work is mostly logistics, and logistics rewards patience. We have been patient for a very long time.
All of it is funded by people who will never see any of it. Support our work →